Vox has been great but I've found a new home for my research blog, a place where anyone can leave comments. You can now find me here.
I woke this morning to a segment on The Current about (Western) compassion for victims of war, famine, genocide, etc. Anna Maria Tremonti interviewed Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, who studied people's responses to information about tragedies: responses to statistics versus responses to information about just one victim. The conclusion was that people suffer from "compassion fatigue" when numbers come into play -- they're not affected by what they hear, they don't feel the tragedy when they're given data. As Slovic writes, they are "numbed by numbers." He therefore concluded that information about tragedy needs to insight compassion in order to be effective. And how do you do that? Well, the tsunami of 2004 broke records in terms of Canadians giving money for aid and relief. Perhaps this was due to the fact that we here in Canada were bombarded by images of the victims' suffering. Furthermore, acts of God seem to elicit more support than tragedies that result from human conflict or political wars. In other words, with things like genocide and war (like what's happening in Gaza right now), statistics about the number of dead just don't cut it -- we here in the West just aren't moved by that kind of information. It doesn't prompt us to do anything.
None of this is surprising to me. Photography's power to persuade has been capitalized on since its invention: missionaries started using images of suffering individuals to solicit support for their work over one hundred years ago and now foreign aid NGO's like World Vision are following in their footsteps: Adopt a child! Change his/her life! See her poor, dirty, fly-covered face? She needs your help! It works. It affects people -- even my heart breaks, me who is jaded against this (ab)use of imagery of non-Western children. But I think it's interesting that someone has bothered to study this phenomenon and put it down on paper. Will Slovic's study change the way the media goes about reporting tragedies? Will it encourage more exploitation of innocent and misfortunate individuals? I surely hope not...yet I wouldn't doubt it.
It's been a long, long time since I've posted here but now that I'm kicking my research back into gear, I feel it's time that I do the same with this blog. Besides, the interviews I did yesterday have got me thinking and I should put those thinkings down somewhere.
I started interviewing my subjects this summer -- my grandfather, two couples and a nurse who worked with him (and my grandmother) in India, my mom and her brother -- but didn't get much farther than asking preliminary questions to get the groundwork of their life-stories in India. The interviews were interesting and informative but didn't give me too much to work with in terms of my actual dissertation topic: their relationship to photography and their India photographs both while they were in India and now that they've been away for years. This time around things were a bit different. We looked at slides together and they told me stories about the pictures. It was an easy interview in ways although I feel like I maybe should have asked more questions, been more of an investigator rather than just a tourist of their pictures. Perhaps I'll have to revisit some of the pictures with them later? I don't know. I can't help but feel a lot of doubt about my methodology (if I can even say I have one) because I'm so new to all of this. I feel like I'm stumbling around in the dark looking for a light switch or even a match. I don't exactly know what I'm looking for, what I want from them. I want them to reveal it to me and yet I fear that might be naive or a misguided approach. I'm just very afraid of over determining their response to the photos by asking really directed questions. I also am afraid of finding nothing, of being underwhelmed.
One thing that's becoming clear to me is that being so close to this history (it's mine too) makes it difficult for me to see what's "interesting" about what they're telling me. It's all so familiar that it feels unremarkable to me and therefore not anything worth writing about. I need to find a way to take myself out of my own head long enough to listen to these stories with ears that aren't part of this tight-knit group. This isn't commonplace, this isn't normal, this isn't your average 1950/60s family story. But it's difficult. Maybe listening to the interviews again when I'm back in Montreal and removed from my family will help.
- the photos were taken largely in their first term when these things were exotic (I'd need confirmation on that);
- they were taken more for use in slide shows for their deputational work back in Canada (when they were on furlough) and therefore appealed to the arm-chair (Christian) traveller's desire for exoticism;
- they were part of the missionaries' acculturation to India -- the process of photographing these things was a kind of ownership, making these sights familiar by photographing them (which is the exact opposite of what tourists do: maintaining and highlighting the exoticism by photographing).
I'm terribly exhausted and a bit too mentally dull to be writing this but I'm going to anyway. I'm in Nova Scotia now, have been here for a few days. I came here the day classes finished because I needed to photograph my grandparents' house before it's too late. My grandmother is still in hospital and we've known for a while that she will never leave. My grandfather moved out of their house of 30 years and into a two room apartment in an assisted living complex. That happened over the Easter weekend. Since then, my sisters has been readying my grandparents' house for sale but I wanted to document it before it changed too much. It was now or never.
I've been trying to psychologically prepare myself for seeing my grandparents' house now that they are no longer living there, for seeing my grandfather living in this little apartment, and seeing my grandmother now who's state of being has drastically worsened since I saw her last. But nothing could really prepare me. It's been an emotional last 48 hours. When I arrived at the house, I was shocked. It felt empty -- empty of them even though not that much was actually missing from the place itself. Yet my sister is now living there and so it felt inhabited (she's doing the renos). It was shocking. We tidied it up a bit, moving the paint supplies and garbage bags etc. out of view so I could photograph. The shooting (I think) went well and I really, really enjoyed the process -- it's been FAR too long -- but it was hard at times to swallow what I was seeing. It just looks so different. And yet the same. It just feels like a site of loss now. I have so many memories in that place but they already feel like they're slipping away. How can I capture them before they're gone?
After my shoot we went over to my grandfather's new place. It's cozy and comfortable and the little livingroom is pleasant and welcoming but it's difficult for me to accept that he'll spend the remainder of his days there. Alone. It's heart breaking, actually. I was interested to notice what he chose to take with him. Everything decorative is from India. All of the things on the walls, all of the trinkets and nick-nacks are from India. He has a few family photos up but otherwise it's all India stuff. Now I think those things remind him of home -- his home that he built and that he and my grandmother made together. But no more. He now eats his meals with virtual strangers and spends his mornings reading the paper by himself and his evenings watching tv alone. In the afternoon he visits my grandmother in the hospital although he's reliant on friends to drive him to and fro.
My grandmother is not well. She's no where near the person she was at Christmas even though that person too was a far-cry from who she was a few years ago. She's basically stopped eating and so she's now just skin and bones. She's so thin that her false teeth no longer fit her so she has trouble talking and eating. She's vacant mentally too. I don't know if she knew who I was. I think maybe but it's so hard to tell. She smiled at me but with a face that seemed to be trying to remember who I was. She's so unhappy although always glad to see us. It hurts me to see her like this. I wish she would just let go. None of us knows why she's still hanging on. I think it's probably in part because my grandfather doesn't seem to be ready to let her go. He keeps wanting her to try to get better and yet it's clear that there's no where but down from here. It was funny though: while we were visiting my sister recounted a story to her that she remembered my grandmother telling her when we were girls. Apparently my grandmother was once invited to visit a hospital in India. Unbeknownst to her, they wanted her to give a speech or something but my grandmother, knowing nothing about medicine, was not prepared. Being the smart and quick thinker she was, she recited a parable in Telugu -- "A pill in my hand is like a gift from heaven" (or something to that effect). As my sister told her this and my grandfather chimed in along with the Telugu words, so did my grandmother -- she remembered them! When we asked her what it means she got the first part and then, with much effort, remembered the entire translation. I was flabbergasted. How can a woman who can barely remember her own family remember a language she hasn't really spoken in over 30 years? I don't think she could even remember why she knows this language or where she spoke it. So bizarre. And yet so meaningful that she could still do that. I wish I could have recorded it.
That evening my sister and I put a second coat of paint on my grandparents' former bedroom. Although I know why they need to try to sell the house soon, I can't help but feel upset that we're changing their house. It's still hard for me to understand that they're not coming home. My sister and parents have had over a month with these big changes but I've had just 48 hours to get used to this. It's a lot to swallow all at once. I just can't believe that it's all past now. There will be no more memory-making in that house, no more gardening with my grandparents, no more family dinners around that table, no more curry feasts, no more sitting around after dinner reminiscing about India. No more. The next family gathering will be at my grandmother's funeral. And it probably will be sooner rather than later.
I just spent half an hour looking up the "proper" spelling of the word I knew as chepalu (flip flops). I grew up with a number of what I now know are Telugu words like cheps (which I thought was a proper English word until I was about 15) and boozulu (dust bunnies or cobwebs) and others I can't call to mind. But now that I actually have to put these words to page, it's creating new problems. Which of these words are adaptations on original Telugu words -- words my mother's memory has adapted or that the family adapted while in India -- and which are true words? I'm pretty sure that cheps is an adaptation although really I have no idea. Anyhow, in searching for the "proper" spelling of chepalu (cheppulu), I came across this site and then this one too (much more extensive) which provide Telugu-English translations (in English, phonetic spellings). And now I'm looking up all of those odd words from my childhood. Maybe someday I'll actually learn the language...
Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, sought to uncover the "essence" of photography. He spends half the book considering a single photograph of his mother in her youth: the Winter Garder photograph, or so he calls it. For Barthes, this Winter Garden photograph is an image that communicates the essence of his mother; it is a just image of her. Although he doesn't reproduce this photograph for the reader, it is crucial to his discoveries. Through this one photograph he finds the truth of photography: "that-has-been." Further to this, Barthes writes that a photograph is a kind of flat death, it suggests that the subject is already dead; it looks toward the eventual day when this photograph will be all that remains of the person(s) pictured (it's worth mentioning that he had just lost his mother). Whether or not we are aware of this when we look at our photographs, I think it's fair to say that every photographs marks the death of a moment, a past which cannot be reclaimed. Forever lost yet captured in 2D.
This picture (below) is of my mother. I have a framed and enlarged version hanging over my desk. It was taken when she was 14 or 15, outside of the mission bungalow in Elamanchili, India. My grandfather snapped the photo as the family was preparing to go to local village for a Sunday service. My mother didn't wear saris very often, rather, skirts and blouses were her normal attire. But it wouldn't have been appropriate for a "mature woman" like my mother to be seen in Western dress in an Indian village. And so she dressed-up for church in one of her mother's saris. It was blue.
In this way, this photograph is perhaps like many others -- a snapshot of a daughter dressed in her Sunday best. The backdrop of trees and grass indicate nothing of the exotic setting of this image. And the bumper of the family car (a Jeep station wagon) is equally commonplace. No, it's only the sari that ruptures this photographic cliché, the ordinariness of this snapshot. Her dress shifts this photograph from commonplace to curious and refutes the "boring" quality of most snapshots (or at least they're boring to those who have no relationship to the people/person pictured). Even still, my mother's act of "dress-up" is not seamless. Under her sari, she wears a white blouse with loose sleeves not a true sari blouse (which has tight sleeves and normally a border that matches the sari). On her feet are her everyday rubber cheps (short for cheppulu -- sandals in Telugu). The sari-savvy might notice that her sari is not tied particularly well. Yet the "flaws," the excesses, of this image are as compelling to me as the rest. This is my Winter Garden photograph. This image like no other speaks to me of the essence of my mother. This photograph is not just an image, it is a just image of her.
I was surprised by the story my mother told me about this photograph. When she looks at this picture she sees a self-conscious and uncomfortable teenager who is reluctantly posing for her father's camera. Her head is down, she is not smiling brightly. She feels awkward in the sari because it's not her normal mode of dress. To me she looks at ease; to her she looks embarrassed. How can this be? How can one photograph communicate two completely different things? For me, this photograph speaks of my mother's hybrid identity -- neither Canadian nor Indian but a bit of both. It speaks of her desire to wear her Indianness on the outside yet there are cracks in the mirror: her blouse, her cheps, and her white skin. In my eyes, her putting on a sari is like putting on skin -- brown skin. In the space of this photograph, even with all its "flaws," my mother's dual identity exists in one space. Although the image is not seamless, her identity is seamless in this image. Or this is what I see.
But for my mother, this image is a memory. Looking at this photograph sends her back to that moment standing there, feeling awkward and self-conscious:
"But I think I was feeling self-conscious also because I don’t think the sari was put on particularly well and I’m wearing a blouse, not a sari blouse. It was all sort-of make shift. And because I didn’t wear saris a lot I wasn’t really comfortable in the sari. But I also felt honoured to be wearing a sari. One, because it meant that I was a mature woman – otherwise I wouldn’t be wearing a sari, because you weren’t allowed to wear saris unless you were mature – but also because I was honouring the culture that I lived in, and was being respectful to the people that I lived with."
She again enters that moment, that person she was for just a moment even though that moment is gone. For me that moment, is irretrievable, dead. For her that moment is alive still in her memory. So this photograph not only represents the duality of meaning, but the duality of time. This photograph speaks to me of now -- what she has lost, what is only in her past, inaccessible to me (and arguably to her) -- but to her it speaks of then -- what she felt in that moment, that memory. I speak of this photograph in the present and she speaks of it in the past. Barthes is correct: that-has-been is the essence of the photograph. But what-has-been is different for both me and my mother. As I child of post-memory, I invest this image with who I know my mother to be today and even, I suspect, with my feelings about India. I have inherited the emotional residue of my family's complex history with that country and culture. I am connected by an umbilical chord to a past that is not mine. But my own relationship with India is perhaps even more complex. I want to feel a personal tie to India and yet I don't know if I do. I can't separate-out the two Indias: now and then. Inversely, my mother invests this image with her memories of who she was in India, with nostalgia. It was only with a certain amount of prodding on my part that she began to see this photograph through her present-day eyes, for what it signifies to her now. Even still, this picture clearly doesn't have the same significance to her as it does to me. It's doesn't "sum-up" a past now gone, a past that is survived only by traces. Like photographs.
I'm right now working on a final paper for a course. My commitment to the class is a bit so-so but I'm pretty into the paper. The paper is basically a dry-run of a chapter (or parts thereof) of my dissertation. Anyhow, I'm doing all of this reading in order to flesh-out my theoretical framework which is largely postcolonial tossed up with some Roland Barthes. The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha is on the hot seat right now. I've read parts of it before but never in one lot like this. Although it's interesting, I really don't know how to make it relevant. He writes so abstractly that there's little I feel I can really sink my teeth into. I also find it concerning because he really makes no effort to define the "colonial subject" or the Other (for example). In other words, these "identities" are just as abstract as the ideas he's postulating. And because I'm somewhat aiming to subvert these categories, I'm a bit anxious about using Bhabha here. How exactly do I apply this kind of theoretical mumbo-jumbo (or so it feels right now)? Or maybe I'm just dumb and can't really get something unless the author provides examples. Eeesh.
I think many of the heavy-hitting scholars are similarly difficult to apply. I've read lots of Spivak and find her equally obtuse (yet interesting) although I do feel as if her theories/ideas are more applicable than Bhabha's. Spivak, herself, makes efforts to apply her theories to specific and local situations. In fact, she's all about that -- local knowledge, local examples. Bhabha? I'm not so sure about that. I dunno. Maybe I just haven't really gotten Bhabha yet. Maybe I haven't really gotten into his text, immersed myself enough to really hear him. I know it took me a while to really get Michael Taussig when I read Mimesis and Alterity (LOVE that book!). But Taussig is poetic whereas Bhabha is just...well...Bhabha. Esoteric? Yes. Unnecessarily verbose? Perhaps. I can't say I care for his writing style. This book is largely a work of literary criticism, however, which is very different than an historical, anthropological or art historical approach. Maybe that's what I'm reacting to. He does a very poor job, however, of explaining the texts he's referring to or criticizing. I think he assumes we've read them all (another point for 'esoteric'). Or maybe I'm just being a woose (sp?). Either way, Bhabha really isn't doing it for me. I think I'm going to have to go elsewhere to get my Hybridity and Mimicry kicks. I just don't know what to do with Homi.
Dot Timpany, my grandparents' colleague in India and their close friend, died on Sunday. She was a key member of the India family. In many ways, Dot was ahead of her time, possessing great determination, strength and authority and achieving things that many women of her generation only dreamed of. The more I learned about her, the more I admired her. I had planned to include her in my project and may still but now her photographs must speak for themselves. I am saddened by her death and for the void she has left in our family. I will miss her.
This, from her obituary:
TIMPANY, Dorothy Elizabeth - 95, CM MD FRCS(C), formerly of Windsor and Falmouth, passed away February 3, 2008, in Windsor Elms Senior Citizen's Home. Born March 6, 1912, in Peddapuram, Andhra Pradesh, India, she was the oldest daughter of missionaries, Dr. Clarke L. and Elizabeth Wright Timpany from Aylmer, Ont. Known as "Dot" to her friends and colleagues, she served as a physician/surgeon in India for 44 years. Her capacity to adapt to new ideas, her personal magnetism, and professional skill greatly benefited the young doctors she worked with and the patients under her care. The title of her biography, Love Affair with India, sums up her career as a medical doctor, outstanding athlete, avid photographer, gardener, and energetic traveler and hiker. Dot began her education at High Clerc Boarding School, Kodaikanal, India, continued it in Aylmer, Ont., then Los Angeles, Calif., and graduated from Delta Collegiate in Hamilton, Ont., in 1931 and from the Medical School at Western Ontario University in 1937. In 1937, Dot and her sister Helen applied for missionary service in India with the Canadian Baptist Foreign Mission Board, she as a doctor and Helen as a nurse. Dorothy studied tropical medicine in England for a year, and arrived in Bombay in 1939. She resided with her parents in Ramachandrapuram, while she completed her studies in the Telugu language. She served in a succession of hospitals: Berhampur with the British Baptists, the Christian Medical Centre in Pithapuram, the Star of Hope Hospital in Akividu, before studying general surgery at the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Vellore. In 1955 while on leave in Canada, she studied surgery at the Montreal General Hospital, earning the status of a Surgical Specialist. In March 1955 she became the Medical Superintendent of Bethel Hospital in Vuyyuru, Andhra Pradesh. She transformed what had been a women and children's hospital into a general hospital, and added additional departments for surgery, leprosy, and orthopedics. She added chaplaincy services and built a hospital chapel. Dot and two Indian colleagues, Susheela and K. Janaki, studied surgery in Scotland during her furlough in 1964-65. Dot received many awards for her work, including a Fellowship with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, induction into the Order of Canada in October 1982, an honorary Doctor of Divinity from McMaster University in May 1987, and the Elfrid Berzins Award from the Woman's Athletic Association of Western Ontario University in 1990 for her contribution to Athletics at Western and her outstanding example for girls and women in her postgraduate years. After her retirement from India, Dot settled in Falmouth, where she served part-time in the Windsor Hospital. Later she responded to an invitation from Noel on the Fundy shore and established a rural clinic in the village, including pharmacy services. She was a faithful member of Windsor United Baptist Church, serving in various offices, including a term as deacon. Ever the missionary and ever the physician!
My grandmother is in the hospital. She's not doing so well. We don't know how much longer she'll last. I'm heart broken.
I just came across this passage in an article by Marianne Hirsch -- one of my favourite scholars on vernacular photography (I had the fortune of meeting and dining with her this fall! I was star struck!). This article, "Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile," (Poetics Today 17, no. 4) is specifically about the children of Holocaust survivors (Hirsch is one) and their experiences of living through and with traumatic family memories. She writes:
At the end of her essay she recounts her former fantasy of travelling to Czernowitz (her parents' homeland) with her parents -- a kind of family pilgrimage:“Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created. I have developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but I think it may usefully describe the second-generation memory of other cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences."
Although my mother's time in India was not framed by war, Hirsch's tale could be word-for-word mine, my imagined, ideal family trip to India. In my youth, I remember both my sister and I admitting that if we won the lottery, we'd take the whole family to India -- that was #1 on the list of things to do with the winnings. But unlike Hirsch, my dream came true; I had the fortune of taking this dream trip, bringing India-fantasyland into my reality, into my memory. So now I am shaped both by postmemory and my own memories of that country and culture -- memories that conflict in many ways.“I imagined my parents saying to each other; ‘No, you’re wrong, it was over there.’ Somewhat like Christa Wolf and her family in Patterns of Childhood (1976), we could discuss our impressions and share our reminiscences. My parents would show me their old apartments, the schools they attended, the houses of many friends and neighbors. They would retrace their steps, tell me where they met and where they used to spend time together. They would relive the prewar and also the war and they would relive the departure. Together, we would try to make the place come alive, investing it with memories of old, and memories created in the present, memories transmitted across generations.”
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mcco12 said:
i love that: the reasons they took photos vs. the way tourists take photos. it's also like "proof" that they've... read more
on It's been a long time... -
Cutiemom said:
Interesting, I was thinking there was something different about her dress- first thing I noticed was the hairstyle. So used... read more
on My "Winter Garden photograph"
Thanks! I took this just before my grandmother passed away. This is her dresser and that's a picture of my... read more
on memory mirror