Stories, Power-Strctures and Such

Since this year I don't have to teach,I do have the luxury of waking up in the morning, making myself a cup of tea,writing, reading, writing some more, reading. And of course, pontificating. So, I have been thinking a lot about the generation of stories. What makes it possible for us to tell interesting stories in our novels, poems, memoirs etc. But even before one puts down a story in a form/genre, one needs to have a story, isn't it? This gnawing feeling that I have something to tell? For the last couple of years, whenever I have taught the First-Year Rhetoric and Composition class, I have made it mandatory for my students to do an auto-ethnography exercise. Partly because to convince my students that they have a story to tell. That is,one doesn't always need to experience the "catastrophic" or the "spectacular" in order to tell a story about oneself, one's world. Rather, successful storytelling is all about examining one's everyday.One can also say, it's all about finding the stories within our everyday.

For that, I believe, one needs to develop a sociological eye. To realize that the everyday is constituted by many small acts of power. As it is by our individual and collective efforts to thwart those structures of power. Successful storytelling, then, to a large extent, depends on to what extent a writer/storyteller/filmmaker etc. can locate the complicated modes of power and resistance within our everyday and transform those incidences into form.

Interestingly enough, what I began to realize after a while that the most interesting auto-ethnographies in my classes were written by students who came from historically marginalized groups-- people of color, working-class folks, women,non-heterosexual. The middle-class white students,although often times possessors of grammatical error free and "better" English, didn't have interesting stories to say. Their stories told stories of conformity, often times, and even when they ended up writing about rebellion in family and in their own lives, those rebellions assumed the most predictable forms. I had, for a while now, joked about how the white, male,compulsively heterosexual, affluent Euro-America has lost its capacity t produce great stories. It was kind of scary and fascinating to see that process being replicated within the micro-cosm of the classes I taught.

Now, if I have to be truly honest here, I should say, that some of the auto-ethnographies written by my white, male, affluent, hetero students did end up being interesting. But they were interesting precisely because they realized, after going through some of their classmates' works, that their narratives of, say being introduced to Mexican food through their Mexican nanny, is directly brushing up against one of their classmates' story that she never received motherly care in the form of home-cooked meals, precisely because her mother was working elsewhere as a domestic maid. So, there is a need to examine the easy multi-culti celebratory narrative he was writing about his eclectic tastes in food.

So, yes, I would say, apart from being ever-attentive to the structures of power, successful generation of interesting stories also depend on an ability to examine one's own privilege. The ways in which one is implicated within the said power-structures. In other words, making oneself uncomfortable. Aka, moving beyond one's comfort-zone. And that challenging of one's comfort-zone does not need one to move to another country, another place, although sometimes it might also be a necessary step.It can happen right here, right within the space within which one has grown up and/or has learnt to call itself one's own.