Historical memory work

At the outset of my study, my intention was to build on the narrative ethnographic approach I had adopted in my master’s degree, which explored the life story of an activist mother whose son was institutionalized. That project was grounded in feminist and phenomenological theories of narrative enquiry that privilege the memories and interpretations of participants, and at the same time recognize the researcher’s role in a dialogic process of co-creation – bringing memories, relationships, experiences, actions into being through relational and material processes over time. Narrative enquiry

acknowledges that stories do not come forth fully formed, and are not “extracted” by the researcher, but are generated through dialogue and in response to specific contexts where existing discourses, historical narratives, social processes, and power relations come into play (Chase 2005; Cruikshank 1998; 1990; Denzin 2001; French and Swain 2006;

Historical Memory Commission (Colombia) and University of British Columbia 2013; Jackson 2002).

However, in the case of relatives of people buried in the Woodlands cemetery, the contemporary discursive context related to participants’ experience could at best be characterized as “a force field of silence” (McAllister, SFU event, 2016), at worst as organized erasure. Memory theorists and oral historians have argued that specific

cultural, historical and political contexts determine which memories are possible and how they are shaped (Connerton 1989; Kuhn 1995; 2007; Kuhn and McAllister 2006; Portelli 2003). And any act of remembrance necessarily emerges within complex cultural

processes which impart cues about what is “memorable” and what is “forgettable” and unimportant (Fivush 2008). This is a necessary process – memory requires the

interpretive work of editing, sifting, sorting, and often displacing, in order to take shape and make sense. But as Elizabeth Jelin (2003) has shown, when significant experiences have not been publicly acknowledged as a part of collective memory – when they have been deliberately suppressed and subjected to “organized forgetting,” it may be very difficult for subjects to create coherent accounts of the past, for there is no shared

symbolic system, no familiar and accepted interpretive language with which to represent them. A narrative scaffolding for such “unwanted” stories is not part of the cultural milieu (Cruikshank 1990; Fivush 2008; Jelin 2003). I anticipated, therefore, that I might have some difficulty in generating stories with participants who had few cultural

guideposts to draw upon.

Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that most participants had only recently discovered their relative and/or had very little in the way of memories or information about their relative to start with. Hence the emphasis in the work shifted away from “memory work” toward searching for historical traces – anecdotes, archival records, artefacts, and so on – and constructing narratives from interpretations of those traces. As a result I became an ethnographic facilitator of “historical memory work” – a process of developing stories by integrating personal, familial memories and reflections, responses to the WMG site, and public records (Historical Memory Commission (Colombia) and University of British Columbia 2013).

Jelin (2003) has argued that, even if narrators are able to construct their stories, listeners/audiences may be hampered by the lack of a common framework (or at least only very limited shared frameworks) through which to interpret and understand the stories. There are, of course, deeply embedded cultural and narrative frameworks for understanding dis/ability as stigma and tragedy (narratives of defect, imperfection, degeneration, menace, threat, etc.), which have justified actions such as

institutionalization and the erasure that took place at the Woodlands cemetery. But my hope was that in this study, participants and I might find a way to generate more inclusive narratives and affective repertoires (while avoiding the equally ableist “positive” trope characterized by dis/ability activists as the “supercrip” narrative24) that would challenge accepted tropes regarding dis/ability and its place in society. As Lehrer and Milton suggest in their discussion of curating artworks that address “difficult knowledge,” the goal of curation is not to settle, but rather to unsettle established meanings of past events (Lehrer, Milton, and Patterson 2011, 4). I wanted to take care to privilege the agency and perspectives of the storytellers, to honour each participant’s interpretive journey, and yet avoid reproducing the tropes of tragedy and shame that might elicit responses of pity or aversion rather than empathy and identification. I believed this would be achievable, as participants who chose to be a part of this research were highly motivated by a sense of injustice about the cemetery’s history and by an ethical imperative to restore the

subjectivity and three-dimensionality of their relative who had been erased. Nonetheless, given the long-term memory deficit created by erasure, I was uncertain whether there would be sufficient documentary and anecdotal material available to participants to enable meaningful interpretation and story construction.

24 _{While interpreted in various ways, the trope of supercrip generally refers to perceptions and}

representations of people with dis/abilities as heroic and inspirational in “overcoming their disability” to achieve “the impossible” – often things that would not necessarily be perceived as exceptional for typical people, but that defy disability stereotypes of incapacity, for example blind person graduates from law school, young woman with Down syndrome marries, man who uses a wheelchair is elected to public office (also referred to as “inspirational porn” – see S. Young 2012). Annaham at Bitch Magazine summarizes the supercrip as the person with dis/abilities represented as “sunny, kind, overachieving, possesses a ‘can-do’ attitude, and does AMAZING! and INSPIRING! things” (cited in S. E. Smith 2011), obscuring the social barriers that make many achievements difficult for people with disabilities (see Brylla 2018). See also Schalk 2016 for further discussion of the concept’s treatment in CDS.

While I gave careful consideration to how these issues might affect participants during the fieldwork process, what I did not anticipate was how they might present challenges for me in writing about the research. While participants engaged in dialogue with me about their experiences and their family member without any particular concern for performing a coherent narrative, I struggled mightily to find a structure for “writing up” these stories. The process involved producing several drafts as my ideas coalesced gradually, identifying issues emerging within each story, determining what challenges participants faced and strategies they drew upon in negotiating their discoveries,

articulating the ethical dilemmas arising for both me and participants, and finding ways to incorporate all these elements into a “story.”