Multilingual Discourses Vol

55 Multilingual Discourses Vol. 1.1 Fall 2012 Alexandra Popescu I Don’t Live Here – But I Will Tell the Story: A Cultural Poetic Approach to I Live Here by Mia Kirshner n 2001, Mia Kirshner, actress and writer turned journalist, embarks on a seven year quest to compile stories (read I experiences) from areas of conflict. I Live Here, a 2008 publication, is an anthology of little narratives, some fiction, others non-fiction. Following the cultural poetic approach, this article illustrates that the nature of anthology I Live Here asks for an analysis that puts the personal in the foreground, as each segment – be it fiction or non-fiction – was inspired by a direct contact with the issue discussed. The project is capturing a glimpse of the Western mentality mirrored in the stories told in the anthology. The arrays of voices, those that belong to the Western world, are extracted as a result. Introduction 2001 is a year that will forever occupy an important place in history; more specifically, 9/11―the date that put terror on the map. I remember visiting with a friend, I was fifteen at that time, and all of a sudden, her mother came into the room and changed the channel to CNN. She had received a call from a friend, telling her that a tragedy had just happened. For the following days, CNN devoted their airtime to following up on any updates on the victims of the tragedy, those who were in the aircrafts that hit the World Trade Center, the people inside the Twin Towers, but their families also. Mia Kirshner, well-known Show Time actress, says in an interview that the event triggered a wave of harsh feelings in her, that she was “shocked by her own ignorance [and that] [she] had had enough” (Caldwell 123). 9/11 forced her to see a different world than what she Alexandra Popescu 56 knew before, one that needed help. Between 2001 and 2008, Kirshner researched and wrote a four-part anthology, focusing on four different areas of conflict. Thus, Kirshner travels to Ingushetia, to visit the Chechen refugee camps, to Burma, to interview the displaced Karen women in the brothels on the Thailand-Burma border, to Juárez, Mexico, to speak to the families of some of the four hundred murdered maquiladora workers, and to Malawi, to meet the children displaced either by disease or being unjustly incarcerated. Kirshner collaborates with various artists to create this piece, notably with the writer J.B. McKinnon, and artists Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons. Kirshner is interested in having the paper documentary focus on the survivors of the various conflicts in the above stated areas. The reason behind this premise is that her own grandparents, who are Holocaust survivors that lost many of the members of their family, were not able to have their stories heard, hence the subtitle “There are too many untold stories.” Elizabeth Goldberg and Alexandra Moore assert that the genre of the anthology, namely a paper documentary, “raises a specter of cinematic conventions” (Goldberg and Moore 235). The point of view is ambiguous, who is filming and who is being filmed, they ask. Kirshner wants to “remove” herself from the story, she does not want sympathy, she tells Catherine Caldwell in an interview. However, this is not a direct claim to objectivity. The type of journalism that Kirshner engages in, demands a testimonio—a witness testimony, which she communicates in both fictional and non-fictional manners. Goldberg and Moore also point out that this renders the classification ambiguous, as I live here can be considered a “reportage, a memoir, a testimonio, a story, witness literature, a metatext” (Goldberg and Moore 234), all of which are generic, traditional classifications. The content and form combined form a 57 Multilingual Discourses Vol. 1.1 Fall 2012 collage of mixed emotions and styles of writing. Kirshner and her associates combine journaling with poetry and news reports, police documents, short stories and folktales, all of which are juxtaposed with equally varied media – photographs, painting, drawing, fabric art, collage and graphic novel. This type of juxtapositions creates a discrepancy. Consequently, the intended readership is also ambiguous. The format says “young readers,” while the content disagrees. The only characteristic of the reader that we do know, is that they are part of the North American society. The lack of page numbers and the “faux-hand-writing font,” says journalist Matthew Behrens, are confusing, and the constant shifts in voice make it hard to follow the faux-story line. Behrens continues by stating that I live here seems like “the print version of a World Vision infomercial.” However, it is my belief that this represents the very nature of this type of writing, that is, the transcription of raw thoughts and feelings of individuals with little or no education. The subjects of Kirshner’s study cannot speak for themselves, let alone in a “proper” manner. They share their information with her, allowing her to weave it together in a style that is consistent, given that the style is hers alone. As Matthew Behrens points out, this causes their voices to blend together, but, in my opinion, their perspectives do not. That said, I propose a Cultural Poetic analysis of I live here, since it is my belief that this anthology demands an approach that is, first of all, sensitive to a first-person account, and secondly, sensitive to cultural difference with a minimal political content. As Judy Battaglia and Erica Solomon—heads of the I live here Projects— state, I live here focuses on providing the tools that motivate improvement instead of imposing Western ideologies. I plan to show that this piece in itself subscribes to a Cultural Poetic ‘mentality’ with the ultimate goal of catching a glimpse at the North American Alexandra Popescu 58 society. Thus, I will use Kirshner’s narrative as a mirror into her own society. In describing an alien culture, a tension between the rhetoric and the subject is only natural: the imagery juxtaposing a refugee’s story might seem too ‘professional’. For example, the language of a child might seem significantly ornate for their age. I will use this tension to piece together elements of the dominant ideology under which Kirshner and her associates are working. I will open my study with an overview of the approach employed, with focus on arguments pertaining to this topic, as I will be applying these principles later on in the analysis. I would like to devote some space to comparing New Historicism with its British counterpart, Cultural Materialism, as it is pertinent to my choice of approach. The main source of information regarding these methodologies is John Brannigan’s New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. New Historicism Traditionally, historicism recounted events in a linear fashion, creating a story of elements causally related to each other. Historians put their trust in binaries, generally favouring one side, the privileged one. In reaction to this claim of objectivity, New Historicism deconstructs the binary of fact and fiction to achieve a panoramic view of an event. New Historicism focuses on the stories not yet told, the minority perspectives that have been ignored. Aram Geertz proposes the strategy of thick description―paying attention to the details, elements of the personal realm that underline the very characteristic that New Historicism brings to the foreground―subjectivity. New Historicism describes any account, real or fictional, as a representation of experience. In this context, Lois Tyson points out that critics must always position themselves in 59 Multilingual Discourses Vol. 1.1 Fall 2012 relation to the subject, a process that she calls self-positioning. This is an important step in the process, as the biases of the critic influence the analysis. New Historicism recognizes that the individual and the milieu are mutually influential and, therefore, influenced. At play in the milieu is the governing ideology, a Marxist influence, which helps produce the culture we live in. Critics generally complain that a New Historical approach “confirm[s] dominant ideologies rather than confront them” (Parker 248). However, Gordon Wood asserts that “history will cause change […] not in a ways Post-Marxist and deconstruction critics intended it to” (104). Furthermore, John Brannigan tells us, the term ideology, although having a negative reputation, does not imply a negative situation. Associated with ideology is power, an elusive term borrowed from Michel Foucault. In Foucauldian fashion, New Historicism sees power as “hover[ing] between oppressive and productive” (Brannigan 15). Power is not static and “it does not originate at the top” (Tyson 284). New Historicism evaluates these power relations to surface the limitations via which the dominant ideology operates by pointing out the contradictions and discrepancies in a text. “New Historical methods are useful ways of constructing exchanges between diverse texts in a given historical period” (Brannigan 11). Shift to Cultural Poetics Various critics identify Stephen Greenblatt as the “core” of New Historicism. Greenblatt’s work focuses on the Renaissance period, specifically on William Shakespeare, asserting that the individual and the milieu shape each other. Greenblatt refuses to accept the postulation that literature is a passive reflection of history, but he Alexandra Popescu 60 also refuses to have a political agenda, which Kiernan Ryan sees as a deficit in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism altogether, Brannigan informs us. This mentality is what spurred a general disagreement with New Historicism in the New Historicist community. Louise Montrose “attributes the success and appropriation of New Historicism with its own ‘eclectic and empiricist tendencies’” (Brannigan 86). Consequently, in the late 1980’s, Greenblatt declares a shift to Cultural Poetics, drawing away from the label New Historicism, which implies a “replacement of the old” (Brannigan 91).

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