“Stories of Change, Stories for Change: IABAA 2021” Special Cluster Introduction

“Change often conceals a deeper continuity.” This could be the conclusion we have achieved after two years of the unprecedented – at least for our generation – global pandemic. A swirling wave of facts has brought us to apprehend once again some basic aspects of our existence on the same planet, with similar bodies, and sometimes-similar cultures. COVID-19 did not spare any specific social or ethnic group, nor gender or identities, except perhaps that the comfortable logistics of some privileged groups during isolation unequivocally contrasted with those whose lives had to be paradoxically at risk every day to remain alive. We lived an entire chapter of humankind’s history in two and a half years: uncertainty, fear, misunderstanding, panic, loss, hope and, after what seemed like ages, some light at the end of the tunnel. Past the extreme measures and the more imminent danger, nothing has changed. Inequalities have never been erased from the lives of too many, injustices never corrected; the planet continues to be destroyed at an uncomprehending pace, and wars threaten to kill as many as the virus did. The balance of the experience could be neutral or negative if not for the little gestures of compassion and solidarity, the words of comfort and strength, and unexpected creativity in dealing with an invisible common enemy.

This special cluster gestures to one such moment of grace during the pandemic when scholars of life writing responded to a call put forth by a group of organizers, including Laura Beard, Ricia Chansky, Eva C. Karpinski, and Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, to convene the biennial International Auto/Biography Association of the Americas (IABAA) conference. Technology came to the rescue when we needed it the most, offering a way to unite us without risks; after all, Zoom meetings, Facetime calls, and many other digital platforms and resources have become our workplaces, classrooms, places of worship, living and dining rooms, and even our most intimate places where exchanges could happen with inspiration and joy. The IABAA 2021 was a one-day virtual event held on 1 October 2021, preceded in September by an online drawing workshop with the Canadian artist Martha Newbigging, whose cartoon adorns the cover of this issue. The conference adopted the theme “Stories of Change, Stories for Change,” based on the collaborative project of collecting stories of COVID-19, initiated at the University of Alberta, which also provided a hosting platform. More than fifty presenters took part in panels focused on such pertinent topics as illness, mortality, disability, and isolation; social justice and activism; bearing witness in crisis and trauma; community-based storytelling; grief, testimony, and archives, among others. In addition to individual panel presentations, participants could attend a plenary discussion with invited keynotes, partial transcripts of which are available in this cluster, and the IABA SNS Roundtable by students and new scholars who talked about the relationship between activism and life narrative practices in the field of auto/biography studies. Out of this rich offering, the editors of this cluster have selected a representative sample of papers addressing primarily the affective and aesthetic generativity of illness, around such practices as masking and grief, expressed in visual and narrative forms.

While in Japan in October 2019, I asked my host why so many Japanese people wore masks in public spaces, and she answered that it was an act of respect for others: “if we feel unwell and still have to work or commute, we wear masks.” We did not know that COVID-19 was just around the corner then. What we knew about masks was that their origins have long been linked to Greek and Roman theater signifying the boundary between theater and reality. As such, masks were invested in the semantic role of disguising the self. However, the face covered by a mask is itself a mask that can at once conceal the conscious intentions and reveal the unconscious emotional re/actions. This ambivalence was expanded further when, still without guidelines on how to stop the spread of coronavirus, masks became the only and most important measure to stay alive and to ensure the safety of others. In the meantime, we learned a new skill, to smile with our eyes and to recognize the emotion in the eyes of the other.

Photographs of masked faces have become the symbol of pandemic times. As sociability was slowly restored and allowed, the mask ironically functioned as both a barrier and a bridge between bodies. The ambiguous valence of masks as both a boundary and a bridge permeates the first essay included in this cluster, Sarah Brophy’s “Mask Aesthetics: Prophylaxix, Post-Digital Arts, and Reimagining Vulnerable Selves.” As she points out, “progressive politics cannot ignore or take for granted the complex, charged affectivity of masks.” Their complexity is far beyond their unquestionable utility as a prophylactic measure to prevent airborne viral transmission and their aesthetic potential is exemplified through artistic projects Brophy thoroughly examines.

Masks are signifiers and as such they indicate their representational status about subjectivities, circumstantial identities, or politics of identities. Before their resignification as aesthetic objects, masks held a paradoxical value for undermining the creed of “white immunity” while reminding us of the racial politics of masking. Masks served as the phenotypical markers used to label Asian bodies, among others, as the source of contagion. Masks were also avoided by those who denied the shreds of evidence and believed that the discourse of danger was a mediatic fad. Brophy offers a sensible overview of the ethical and political nature of masking as what she terms “relational and thoroughly multimodal practice.” From the understanding of COVID as an invisible enemy that has remained with us even after the horrific number of deaths decreased and the vaccines became available more broadly, the relational approach has certainly clarified or frustrated both the gloomiest predictions of life after COVID-19 and the risk of “misremembering” the pandemic as a fruitful time artistically speaking.

Brophy analyzes such forms of visual representation of masking as sculpture, performance, digital photography, social media, online visual diaries, and mutual aid projects. She organizes her reflection into a twofold configuration where the first, theoretical approach, is guided by the concept of “automedia” practice, as developed by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, while the second section is populated by the artists’ projects and occasional personal fragments of the author’s memories to reaffirm the relational nature of the practice of wearing a mask. Masks remind us that our bodies are not apart… they are close to our mouth and nose, they are interposed between our bodies and the air we share with other bodies… not always as an obstacle or a separator but as a bridge, a connection between bodies.

The second essay, by Sandra Pinasco Espinosa, poses a crucial question: In dealing with a traumatic event, could autobiographical narratives achieve the same result as expressive writing acting as a goal of the practice of “scriptotherapy,” as understood by Suzette Henke? Pinasco proposes to investigate whether grief memoirs can serve as an effective means of support in a mourning process. This question is the starting point of her essay “Ambiguous Loss in Grief Memoirs: Meaning Making in Auster and Giralt Torrente Patriographies,” which analyzes two memoirs dealing with loss. The inquiry is nuanced beyond the general notion of loss by focusing on an ambiguous loss. In the case of ambiguous losses, grief memoirs can be instrumental to resignifying the presence/absence of the lost one.

By exploring the notion of “ambiguous loss,” Pinasco proposes to approach a specific kind of loss, not one that is unexpected or necessarily unexplained, but the loss of an uncertain presence in a given moment or moments in one’s life. The psychologist Pauline Boss uses this concept to describe a unique type of loss that lacks a clear resolution or closure. In reading memoirs by Paul Auster and Marco Giralt Torrente, Pinasco draws on another concept, namely “patriography,” coined by G.T. Couser, to demonstrate the dual nature of such grief memoirs as at once an autobiographical account of the author but also a biography of their fathers. Such paternal narratives, as explained by John Eakin, indicate the relational nature of lives. Both authors studied in this essay deal with an ambiguous loss and, through their memoirs, manage to conciliate themselves with their lost ones. As important as it is to narrate the process of mourning the death of their fathers, both Auster’s and Giralt Torrente’s narratives shed light onto their fathers’ lives, as a process of reconnaissance of their dubious presence in the lives of their sons. Pinasco demonstrates that both authors have accomplished a narrative that explains and gives meaning to their losses through personal writing, albeit by different paths and methods.

In “Coaxing Narratives of Disorientation: Methodological Lessons from a Study of Lesbian and Queer Women’s Experiences within the Australian HIV Landscape,” Kate Manlik and Nicole Matthews’s analysis of research material as coaxed stories contributes valuably to methodologies available to work with such narratives. The accounts considered in this essay are also termed “narrative[s] of disorientation” due to their spatial configuration and identity self-assertion contexts, based on Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith’s explanation of elements or instances of coercion, coaxing, and coaching in everyday life when an individual is urged to give an account of their lives or personal experiences. Those coaxing instances, according to Watson and Smith, can be exemplified as social institutions such as political speeches, communal confessions, family gatherings, medical forms, or any kind of bureaucratic forms necessary to proceed with requests regarding public health, education, housing, etc. The authors examine the experiences of a given population concerning their response to queries or campaigns of the prevention and detection of HIV infection.

Manlik and Matthews explore the narratives considered to be halting, fragmentary, and episodic with the aid of the conceptual tool provided by Sarah Ahmed’s notion of disorientation: “a spatial metaphor that describes the way subjectivities are performed iteratively in particular environments.” The context of the production of these narratives, possibly involving constraint, pain, or fear, lends them a quality that might be absent from conventional narratives. Here, the context is constituted by “minor affects,” (Sianne Ngai) or the feelings of discomfort, displacement, or not belonging of queer and lesbian women faced with HIV and AIDS campaigns. The ambition of the essay, however, lies beyond this specific case study and has the goal of learning about the practical challenges and alternative ways to understand and make sense of narratives of disorientation in general. For instance, Manlik and Matthews’s study suggests that conventional narrative forms when applied to lived experiences of disability and illness appear to be insufficient because the socially sanctioned coherent accounts of this type of experience are neither possible nor relevant. The reason, among others, would be that people experiencing chronic pain lack the resources to build a coherent narrative about it and, consequently, the result would be fragmentary and sometimes chaotic.

The final essay of this cluster brings the confluence of the themes or images present in the previous texts. Marina Deller’s “Outside the Box: Reading Material Grief Memoir as Grief Archive” delves into the materiality and immateriality of concepts of archive and memory objects to arrive at what they call “material grief memoir” as a grief archive. They acknowledge the controversy around the concept of the alternative archive, which in this case means an abstract form of attributing archival value or use to abstract or non-tangible assets. By exploring three distinct memoirs, Deller proposes a productive connection between material grief memoirs through an interdisciplinary theoretical archive concept to deepen the discussions of loss, identity, and materiality.

As in Pinasco’s essay, grief narratives are once again endowed with the potential to make new meanings and to promote new understandings of life events such as losses. Here, Deller claims that the “stuff” with which we create grief memoirs is collected in personal archives, maintained consciously or unconsciously. Once completed, the grief memoir itself becomes another sort of grief archive, or, as Deller puts it, a material grief memoir. Material grief memoirs not only collect the “stuff” of memory but bring artifacts of loss into conversation with one another in generative ways, allowing for the creation of new meanings in the process of constructing an account of grief. In the convention of archives, the organic nature of their elements, or their interrelationship, grants a meaning that exceeds their individual value within a certain fond and among related fonds. The same is observed in the case of immaterial or theoretical archives. Deller asserts that despite the somber subject of loss, not all material grief memoirs are necessarily sad, but they can also emanate some playfulness through a creative and imaginative narrative structure.

The debate around alternative or theoretical concepts of archives by traditional archivists is confronted with the possibilities of conviviality with theoretical archives in material grief memoirs. Deller observes that by dealing with elements of the three narratives they investigate as components of an archive, combined and working together, there emerges a narrative that provides grounds for exploring notions of truth, memory, identity, and “continued conversations with lost loved ones.” By resorting to the material image of a box as a container of memory artifacts, the author intends to place their reasoning outside the box of the cliché and/or conceptual constraints as to what is understood as an archive or the archival turn trendiness. Although there seems to be no consensus toward a fixed definition of the archive, the expansion of what can be considered archival enables the assemblage of everyday fragments of life and, through their interaction, a new way of building awareness about one’s past and life story.

According to Deller, the idea of peaceful coexistence must surmount the “false dichotomy” between theoretical and material archives, along with the neglect of the intersecting of “materiality, immateriality, and imagination.” A very relevant question is posed about this quarrel: what kinds of archival materials belong to the twenty first century? When seen within the context of grief memoirs, immaterial elements of memory that constitute the body of material grief memoirs walk in tandem with lost or inaccessible elements. Deller argues that the liminal space of grief memoirs accepts the existence of “perishable or intangible items” and gives them materiality possible through language.

Moreover, the parallels established by Deller between grief memoir and museum, inventory, and medical record enable us to think of the actions that originate from museum and archive collections as similar to those necessary to create an immaterial archive of grief. Collecting, arranging, and classifying are steps to generate and identify the relationship between archival elements and their possible meanings crafted thereafter. Deller applies these actions to their analyses of the three memoirs to expose how grief memoirs help memoirists to “organize their life experiences in archival ways and the impacts of doing so.”

The special cluster derived from the IABAA 2021 Conference concludes with a conversation that happened as a plenary panel among Laura J. Beard, Ricia Anne Chansky, Amy Kaler, and Marcy Schwartz. The panel followed the theme of the conference, emphasizing the potential and limits of life stories to promote changes in the face of challenging global issues such as climate change, environmental catastrophe, and social justice issues. The conversation was set in motion by a question regarding how life stories help to offer entry points in “big, challenging issues in the world today.”

The first voice to attempt an answer replies with another question: although there is a consensus about climate change’s catastrophic consequences, “what’s preventing us from preventing our own destruction?,” asks Ricia Chansky. The idea of a global catastrophe seems to immobilize individuals and inhibit them from taking action. If the destruction is imminent, individual efforts mean little or nothing. Chansky offers another way of approaching the theme by shifting from global to local, from universal to individual or personal instances to reach a “very human level – something that auto/biographical narratives are historically and contemporarily well-versed doing.” The oral history project “Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane,” conducted by Chansky, used eyewitness testimony to tame statistics and to bring the destructive consequences of a climate event to personal levels. Similarly, Amy Kaler notes that some overwhelming issues are indeed difficult to grasp at the individual level and that stories can be useful to rearrange pieces of information that result in a clearer understanding of an otherwise complex and vast problem. From her personal experience, she recalls the North American anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s in which life stories of lesser-known South African people were used to draw attention to policymakers beyond bigger politician names such as Nelson Mandela and Steven Biko.

Not only auto/biographical accounts but fictional stories have the power to instill reflection on global challenges and crises, according to Marcy Schwartz. She mentions an observation of Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar about the nature of short stories as snapshots of lives to assess the impact of journalistic photographs of critical historical moments. The drowned boy on a Turkish beach tells his and many other stories of the refugee crisis that can illuminate the real dimension of the problem. The example of the impact of the lecture on James Joyce’s short story “Eveline” in an audience of Puerto Rican women in the 1970s is eloquent, especially with the recognition by one woman of that fictional story being her life story – which shows the power of stories to change and promote changes. Schwartz believes that “Stories move us from the micro to the macro, from the personal and intimate scene to the social and political expanse of human experience in the world.”

However, the undeniable importance of stories for change prompts another problematic point: Which stories are told? What about the stories that are not told? Who or what authority determines what is going to be told by whom? As Laura Beard remarks, colonialism and systems of oppression limit the circulation of stories, and it is the task of life-writing scholars to propose and implement changes in these structures. Schwartz adds “we must intervene, tell, listen, and be part of those stories.”

While many global catastrophes and crises are still ongoing, in the aftermath of COVID-19 we can gradually begin to perceive its impacts and changes it has brought about. They are seen in the alternative ways of dealing with pain and loss, and in learning how to transform them into stories. We have also learned to reevaluate our notions of distance, presence and absence, of how convincing or complete a story should be. The impediments to in-person gatherings have taught us how to stay connected in yet a different sense. The presence and absence, our own or of loved ones, have also been reframed and resignified. An image of despair, pain, or death could testify to one or multiple adversities. We tell stories in order to change ourselves, and in order to inspire change in others. Not any change, but one that brings us closer in solidarity with others.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Sergio Da Silva Barcellos

Sergio da Silva Barcellos received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Literary Studies from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He teaches an annual seminar on Auto/Biographical Studies at the Rio de Janeiro State University, since 2009, and developed a postdoctoral research project on Time, Memory and Diary Writing cosponsored by Hofstra University and the Capes Foundation. Barcellos was granted an award from Fundação Nacional de Artes, Brazil (FUNARTE) to organize, classify and publish a guide to Carolina Maria de Jesus’ archival collection. He is the author of the biography Toque de Silêncio - Uma história de homossexualidade na Marinha do Brasil (1997), and academic titles Armadilhas para a narrativa - Estratégias narrativas em dois romances de Carlos Sussekind (2006), and Escrita do eu, refúgio do outro: Identidade e alteridade na escrita diarística (2019). In 2014 he organized the volume Vida por Escrito - Guia do Acervo de Carolina Maria de Jesus. Sergio da Silva Barcellos is a founding member of IABA-Américas (International Auto/Biography Association).