Draft 1, Chunk 4 (Identity)

[This was first written on 12 September 2011]

Introduction

So far I have focused on the keywords POWER and MEMORY. Now I want to look at two more, IDENTITY and MATERIALITY. My account of IDENTITY is likely to be very sketchy but I want to start thinking about it and put something in place that can form the basis for further discussion.

Identity

In all the strands of the project we have, I think, assumed the importance of IDENTITY. I shall define this very informally as ‘one’s sense of who one is’. Straight away I think it is necessary to modify – or complicate – this definition in recognition of the fact that identities are not stable and straightforward.

First, an individual’s identity has many components. A particular person can simultaneously be a woman, a mother, a teacher, a British citizen, a person with cultural and personal connections to another country, and so forth. Different aspects of an individual’s identity may be at the forefront in different moments and some may even conflict. During the session at Bank Street, Will and Irna wrote up a pair of terms: ‘British’ and ‘Pakistani’, the implication being, as I understand it, that both these terms might be reasonable self-descriptions for one individual. Thus, the negotiation of that individual’s identity will take place in relation to these two terms and each may be more or less relevant at different times and in different contexts.

Second, a person’s ‘sense of who he or she is’ interacts with how others see him or her, both in an ‘official’ sense and in everyday life. Writing about POWER, I noted that the texts which emerge from government agencies and other institutions frequently CLASSIFY people according to certain categories of IDENTITY and this process will have an important impact on the way in which one forms and maintains a sense of self. This takes us back to DOCUMENTS like the passport Will and Irna have been working on and to Kate’s work on school and home literacy, where the lack of ‘fit’ between the identity categories projected by institutions and the individual’s own experience cause problems and may effectively function to silence the individual. However, it is not only government and institutions that produce this effect. The racism experienced by several of the participants in the project is realised within the community itself and represents a refusal to see any part of a person’s IDENTITY except one and that one in a crudely simplistic way.

The connections between IDENTITY and POWER are already emerging here and there is also an important relationship between IDENTITY and MEMORY because IDENTITY is formed in relation to the past and one’s sense of one’s own past is significant in determining who one now is.

Identity, Power, and Writing

We have already touched upon the way in which ‘OFFICIAL’ writing, whether produced by an institution or written by an independent person under external pressure, tends to push the writer into some particular category of IDENTITY. Once again, writing on the census form is the extreme example of this process. And the corollary is that writing can be used as a way to articulate an IDENTITY counter to that projected by government, by institutions or – indeed – by one’s own neighbours. Because of my experience reading critical material within the discipline of English Literature, I want to be careful about this idea of producing ‘OPPOSITIONAL’ texts. Sometimes the writing of an OPPOSITIONAL work has been characterised as a powerful act of resistance. But the question arises of how powerful an act can be if it is not witnessed. A book that remains unread is not, presumably, ‘POWERFUL’ in the normal sense of producing tangible effects in the real world. To recognise this problem, we may need to develop a more complex vocabulary for talking about ‘OPPOSITIONAL’ writing. (Or perhaps there already is one and I need, with everyone else’s help, to find it.) Here are a few thoughts as a starting point.

(1) Writing an IDENTITY for oneself may constitute a kind of CONSOLATION. Keeping a diary that no one else reads may not have much impact on the external world but may be a means of reminding yourself of the truth of your situation as you see it.

(2) Writing may be a way to remain in touch with aspects of your IDENTITY that it is important to PRESERVE or RETAIN. I’m thinking of the importance of textiles and sewing for some of Kate’s participants. Kate: does that seem an appropriate way to talk about this?

(3) Writing may also be a way to form COMMUNITY with others whose situation is similar to one’s own – to be in touch and find support. Online communities may be important here and computer-mediated communication.

(4) And, finally, writing may enter the public domain in a fuller sense and speak in a more overtly OPPOSITIONAL way to others.

I am hoping that this brief list of different forms of OPPOSITIONAL writing might help to create a richer sense of how writing interacts with POWER and IDENTITY.

Identity, Memory, and Writing

Since the past is preserved and made sense of in part through writing, our relationship with writing is important for the way in which we negotiate IDENTITY in the present. It is important to emphasise that this is more than simply ‘reading off’ who one is from a historical document or, indeed, from something one wrote oneself in the past. Irna and Will’s work on the family FABLE is a good example here. The family’s sense of the past is formed partly in relation to an ARCHIVE of documents including passports containing the stamps that record specific stages of a history of mobility. But it also includes the materials of an ORAL TRADITION that may be in tension with the evidence of the DOCUMENTS in certain ways.

As a second example, I have a friend who has kept a diary throughout her life from – I think – early adolescence up to the present. I have talked to her about her experience of reading the diary and how what she reads relates to her sense of who she now is. The relationship is complex. As she tells it, there is a certain kind of pleasure in having such a rich document of her past life and she has talked to me about her delight at giving a speech at her father’s birthday party and being able to describe in detail what had happened on his birthday in previous years. But at the same time, she describes a kind of frustration at – and even dislike of – her adolescent self, whom she regards as ‘prissy’ and sometimes ‘smug’. For example, her diary describes an event when her younger sister was caught doing something transgressive (smoking? drinking?) and it does so in rather patronising terms, suggesting that the family need to be ‘thankful’ that she hasn’t done something ‘even more stupid’. This self-conscious ‘piety’ shocks her a little in retrospect and is perhaps an example of the complex way in which our past and present selves are connected in writing.