Tag: identity

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan

510: “A Community’s Emotional Lives” (Billy-Ray Belcourt)

                “I would write a book that reflected a community’s emotional lives rather than just my sensory experience of the present. […] In talking to those who came from where I came from, I also hoped light would be shed on the person I was or the person I might become.”
                -Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree), A Minor Chorus, p. 29-30

                I’ve been wanting to write a post on this quote since October or so. And I haven’t been able to. It’s funny: there are few books I’ve picked up and fallen in love with more deeply than Belcourt’s A Minor Chorus, and still, in the months since I started, I haven’t finished. I think that’s because I realized this book would be useful for my research, and that pushed me toward reading to finish it, and that’s not how I’d started reading. Not how I wanted to read. I wanted to respect it as what I first recognized it to be, which might be something like a meeting place.
                All this is on my mind tonight because I just ran over to my friend Vuyo’s apartment to drop off A Minor Chorus and Belcourt’s This Wound is a World. Vuyo’s thinking through some of her own writing, and these will join the conversations on her page. And all of a sudden this book—which stopped feeling alive to me when I wanted to take something from it; which I had gotten far away from, so even as it sat on my bedside table or my bed or my dresser or my kitchen table, I didn’t read it—this book feels really close. I want to read it, just as I’ve left it with my friend. I think it’s because the book’s enmeshed, again, for me, in a community of relationships. Mine. Billy-Ray’s. Vuyo’s. And more than why, there’s a poignant reminder in the nearness and farness, the wish to read at the moment when the book’s with a friend. Maybe some kinds of being apart weaving through some kinds of being together is part of understanding yourself through a living community. Maybe the emotional lives I’m thinking about unfold in the ways we both have and don’t have a touch of one another. Like a book I’ll fall in love with all over again when it comes back, after missing it, after enjoying the thought of it in my friend’s hands, talking with her.

by Azlan

482: “All The Water” of Us (Sayaka Murata)

                “‘[…] there’s a different air about you.’”
                […] Yukari was right I thought. After all, I absorbed the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too. When we last met a few years ago, most of the store workers were laid-back university students, so of course my way of speaking was different then.
                ‘I guess. Yes, I have probably changed,’ I said with a smile, not elaborating.” – Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman

                Earlier today my sister-in-law, Fa, and I ended up chatting over the different ways we see ourselves in our friends and family. She told me about meeting one of her roommate’s sisters: “Just wait,” the roommate said, “meeting my sister is going tell you so much about me.” And it did. In their mannerisms, their phrases, their playfulness, Fa recognized the sisters by seeing them together.
                I often feel that way. There’s a kind of American individualism that’s really attached to an inner, essential, solitary self, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that—but sitting here now, what I feel is the wash of water as different people fill me. My parents, of course, and my siblings. Even from thousands of miles away I was looking at a palm tree today, and the way I looked at it came in part from my dad. I said hello to someone who passed and my mom’s phrasing washed through me. And then there’s my spouse, my spouse’s siblings, my friends, the other people I meet. In the last few days I’ve met a lot of my partner’s cousins, uncles, and aunts, and already I hear new phrases on my tongue. I find myself making new jokes. It’s fun.
                I used to love jumping into puddles. The splash. The reflection. The game. I’d stand and watch the changing water, too, the rippling tree branches and the sky. Sitting here I splash and reflect and play, my own little puddle self. Smiling, just like Sayaka Murata’s character.

by Azlan