writing the self: to list or to convey

To my frequent disgruntlement, my dissertation committee is made of three historians and a demographer. I picked these folks, and they're first-rate, but I'm not one of these, nor do I aspire to be. I don't seem to think like a historian, whatever that means. There is something about the way these disciplines enforce knowledge, though, that I lust after. I trust that this pool of expertise won't let me miss anything. They're badgers. I'm more of a pig.


So I'm reading a stack of stat-loaded and biographical Canadian history. En route, I've learned that history is a creative exercise in selecting moments and suggesting meaning. Even the most simple approach to meaning-making, chronology, is a subjective practice. For example, I've read several pieces on the same topic that highlight remarkably different occurrences. Exciting! (Aside, it bewilders me that history writing can be so dull given its creative potential...)


I was thinking about event-ness in history writing when I had a flashback to Ann Cvetcovich's An Archive of Feelings (here she theorizes trauma as our experience of daily minutiae rather than the aftermath of some sort of objectively inhumane experience. I comment on it here). In the context of history writing, what makes events phenomenal? I suppose events that affect a large group and shift cultural sands (thanks Paul) are worthy of attention, but if we're writing autobiographically, why the impetus to trace cultural signifiers? If the aim is to suggest meaning, perhaps many of us are being dishonest in our selections. What meaning is lost?


I remember drawing my life course on horizontal foolscap in elementary school. Major trips, graduations, injuries... I remember envying my friend Crystal's broken arm 'cause I didn't have much to write between ages 6-10. This week my mother asked me to write my paragraph for the family Christmas letter. The notable peaks and valleys that come to mind since last December are good meals and breakups. I don't think I can write that. Maybe "nothing happened," but I think I'll look back on this year as one of the most course-changing in my life.


Today I'm submitting a grant application for which I was required to write a professional biography. It reads similarly, with major gaps where some other candidate might write about encountering war or difference as monumental. I wanted to write, "One time, on a Montenegrin bus, I had this idea to 'clean up' the DTES with a sponsored indie rock concert and large buckets of paint. I leaned over to inform my travel partner, who was more educated and sophisticated than I (and I admired him immensely and still do), and he unknowingly pointed me to feminist standpoint theory in one fell swoop with: 'what makes you think its residents want you to paint it?'


That sentence absolutely changed my life. In the moment, I was choked. I thought he was being a cynical jerk and I started crying silently to myself because like all important lessons, his words burst my bubble and it was frustrating. It fit that I was a sheltered white girl traipsing through the war-torn lands of former Yugoslavia, but the experience had nothing to do with encountering difference.


I didn't write about a 20-year-old's conversation in a Montenegrin bus. Instead I listed my credentials and explained why I'm excited about them. I hope I gain the confidence to stop doing this, because I think interesting writing involves more than a mere piling of culturally remarkable signifiers. By fluke, this morning I read "Making History Relevant" (2011) by Margaret Conrad. Using the chronological approach, she hangs together strands of her childhood to detail her approach to wisdom and agency in a world of power struggles and uncertain future. She writes in minutiae: "once my mother told me never depend on a man"; "she was an avid consumer of the CBC... but not so much the Texaco-sponsored opera that aired on Saturday afternoons"; "he parked his truck near the university to eat his lunch, hoping I'd pass by." How wonderful! I feel like I know her. She makes transparent her winding path into academia.


Off to make lists of things one doesn't usually list. Oh, lotus-eating rainy mornings.