| Biography – to write
a life
Autobiography – to write one’s own life
To make either of enduring interest to others requires
a level of examination and reflection, along with the telling
of stories. Through their stories, we can all weave our own
predilections, surprises, nods of agreement and consternations.
Renee Norman takes us on her journey, evoking through the
performatives of poetry, personal essay, journal entries,
memoirs and “theoropoetic ruminations,” her readers’
full analytic and emotional presence. In the same way that
Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner (2000) have done in Autoethnography,
Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject ,
Norman demonstrates the practice by writing in the genre
she is illuminating.
We journey with her, as she works towards self-knowledge
and reflects upon the potential for distortion.
She describes her multi-themed, intertextually woven strands
of theory and reflection as bricolage. I am struck
again by that word, the product of a Jack or Jill-of-all-trades,
the bricoleur, the handyone! It evokes memories from
my own past as a journeylevel carpenter, visiting Quebec,
and discovering a program sponsored by the Montreal YWCA.
They trained and kept a registry of tradeswomen to be sent
out to assist elderly, more housebound, people with their
home repairs. How we all struggled with that word! The French
language is so gendered, could bricoleur mean more than a
handyman? What would the feminine be? What exactly
is she tinkering with?1
Already I am drawn into her story, peopled as it is with the
stories of great writers and theorists, knowing that I am
entering the world as seen by a feminist, a teacher, a m(other),
a Jew and a scholar.
Threaded through the prose and poetry, theory and reflection
are Journal Entries, performed in a script typeface; suggesting
that we step aside and deeper for a moment, taking us into
her confidence. In these, Renee Norman begins and ends her
book with the notions of childhood secrets (pp. 32-33; 241-263),
and the ethics and practices of secrets; the concepts of
whose
story it is and what impact the character of the lens may
have on the threads that we see and hear. “Truth in
autobiography seems to be relative, or at least, relative
to what your relatives
might add. What strikes me most is how the same episode can
seem somehow dissimilar when the narrator changes. The
kaleidoscope
has been turned” (p.47).
Using the device of the mirror, she explores the potential
of both the story and the silence to teach us about the
lives
of those who use the craft of autobiography. As she analyzes
the contributions of such luminaries as bel hooks, Hélène
Cixous, Erica de Jong, Hannah Arendt and Doris Lessing,
we
become immersed in her own poems of autobiographic reflection.
“…And I know I will never quite capture all there
is” (p. 56).
There is a section in which the concepts of autobiography
and the mirror are both explored and challenged through
the
literature, leading to a poetic intertextual engagement with
Martha Quest, Doris Lessing’s autobiographically fictional
character in the “Children of Violence” series,
discovering and producing within herself “an eternal
subject-in-process of a text-in-progress” (p. 94).
As the poetic conversation continues, it is sometimes
difficult
to draw the lines between what is a reflection on Martha,
and the deeper queries into what Norman sees of her
own life.
“Is all autobiography educational research?”
(p. 134)
As the text moves back and forth between poetic autobiographical
representations, and reflections with the literature on the
truth and value of such representations, I felt I was reading
a justification for alternative forms of writing research
representations. Renee Norman reinforces this sense of justification
when she suggests that “Gunn offers us legitimacy as
well as urgency when she theorizes autobiography as worldly…”
(p. 147). Many of us on this experimental edge hope for such
legitimacy, and each note of the truths of lives lived demonstrates
the value of such a symphony as a tool for education.
I found a richness in the juxtaposition and discussion with
Neumann and Peterson (1997), considering research as relational;
with Janice Jipson (1995), regarding writing as a way of
knowing and an emotional letting go, with Carl Leggo (1994)
on the notion
of leaving a “final testimony,” and Janice Varner
Gunn’s (1982) notion that meanings we create for ourselves
are still/actually arising out of culturally constructed
knowledge
which we are interpreting: “As the reader of his or
her life, the autobiographer inhabits the hermeneutic universe
where all understanding takes place” (p.22).
This book pursues on so many levels the “educational”
value of autobiography. Using both poetry and prose, imagining
and reflecting, Norman takes us on the journey of immersing
herself in the life of Hannah Arendt as it was lived and written
about by Hannah herself and through collected letters between
heartfelt correspondents, analyzed and critiqued. Renee writes
over the grave to Hannah as one Jewish woman to another, writing
as a writer, a mother, a daughter and a feminist. I feel her
call to know and understand the forces that move their lives.
Was I, too, a conscious pariah (p.173)?
Her feminist analysis and reflection embody how, through
the forces in her life as a metonymic woman in birth and
death,
sex and nurturance, she was able to “break out of the
law of the father, the Lacanian and Freudian drama which
had
scripted [her] as dutiful, silent, not-writing wife and one-dimensional,
unambiguous, devoted mother” and become the woman who
“re-turns to herself through the autobiographical writing…in
the poetic [prize-winning] texts that are her life, her
breath,
her labour” (pp.194,195). This was a stunning synthesis
of the discoveries of her journey through the lives and work
of
the many autobiographies
she studied. That she was able to do this while living in
her family and growing through relationship with her husband
is a tribute to both of them.
Norman could take those lessons and use them, in her maternal
narrative and poetic space, to share the incredible
processes of helping schoolchildren write their ways to healing
their own lives; at the same time teaching about the ethics
of whose stories we are telling, and asking questions about
what is truth, and from whose perspective can the stories
be told. In the process, we, both adults and children, can
all learn a great deal more about how to write autobiography
with integrity, passion, reflection, and, as research.
Madeline Sonik’s insightful reflections, evoked by Norman’s
book, exemplify these themes with grit and elegance: evocative
stories, subjectivity lessons which lead to further conversation
based on intimate detail rather than abstracted facts (Carolyn
Ellis, 2000b). It
illustrates! This creates a space between (Braundy, 2002)
the author, the text and the reader where new knowledge can
be
created and/or integrated. Sonik’s prose and stories
are woven with Norman’s in a cornucopia of ‘theme,
story, response’ which is at the heart of Norman’s
ideas of autobiography as re/search, a tool for teaching:
about ourselves and our relation to our worlds.
Endnote
1
Larousse’s (1971) French-English dictionary defines
bricolage as tinkering, or puttering about, and a bricoleur
as a handyman.
References:
Braundy, M. (2002). Data as Evocation, Research Representation as Provocation:An
intervention approach to epistemic understanding. Paper presented at the Astonishing
Silences Conference, The Northwest Philosophy of Education Society. Vancouver:
UBC.
Ellis, C. (2000b). Writing Ethnography. Paper presented at the Faculty of Nursing
Spring Institute, UBC.
Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, Personal Narrative,Reflexivity:
Researcher as Subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook
of
qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. xx, 1065 , [1057]). Thousand Oaks, Calif.:
Sage.
Gunn, J. V. (1982). Autobiography : toward a poetics of experience. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Jipson, J. (1995). Repositioning feminism and education : perspectives on
educating
for social change. Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey.
Leggo, C. D. (1994). Growing up perpendicular on the side of a hill. St. John's,
Nfld.: Killick.
Neumann, A., & Peterson, P. L. (1997). Learning from our lives : women,
research,
and autobiography in education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Norman, R. (2001). House of Mirrors Performing Autobiograph(icall)y in Language/Education.
New York: Peter Lang. |
