Language brings us together; it pulls us apart; it makes possible our fictions of the past, and our imaginings of the future.āAnnette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination
Youāre only as sick as your secrets.āAnonymous
An (Accidental) Introduction
This project is born out of an uprisingāan eruption if you willāan in-breaking of a story that wonāt stay put, wonāt die, wonāt be kept down, wonāt fall away, wonāt bow to the forces of darkness, wonāt be beaten into submission by the demands of secrecy. The book consists of memories, dreams, reflections, secrets, whispers, and imaginings shaped into stories aimed at developing our understanding of human communication and extending the sensibilities and practices of the autoethnographer as she or he sets about the process of āwriting lives.ā It is also a story about family, about those most intimate connections we experience in our human world. And it is an inquiryāspecifically, into the commonplace practices of family secrecy. It is a challenge to the shock patterns that people fall into in the face of trauma.
I have set out, in these pages, to shed light on the dark folds, to open the doors to the closets of secrecy, to engage the power of story as a way to penetrateāand perhaps lift ourselves out ofāthe darkness of despair. Most of all this is a story, a story about the healing power of story itself. It is a story about the primary counterforce working against secrecy, about the practice of spontaneously and vigorously developing a dynamic and centered family storytelling practiceāa practice that, when fully engaged, breaks down the barriers of secrecy. Along the way, I offer a narrative exploration of the questions, dilemmas, obstacles, pitfalls, and contours of the journey of autoethnographic/narrative research into the communicative lives of self, friends, and family members.
I embarked on this project because I firmly believe that we need, in these troubled timesāneed perhaps more than anythingāstories of mythic proportions, stories charged with the power of love, stories that evoke change in longstanding destructive patterns, stories that urge us to shift the energy of pain and loss and secrecy toward the light of joy and integration and communication.
I also believe that one powerful way to get to that release from anxiety and despairāand thus turn toward wholeness and healingācan be found in the active practice of autoethnographic writing. So this book is an autoethnographic meditation on the craft of the family autoethnographer, on the spiritual and ethical and methodological and practical concerns and practices of the autoethnographer who writes about family lives. The book is thus framed within a series of stories about the complexities, anxieties, and eruptions that occur in everyday family communicative life and about how these matters affect the writing of autoethnography.
I ask as a central question: By what alchemy might a reflexive, conscientious storyteller evoke, emit, and open the secret lives of families into stories of powerful, transformative healing?
And, from that question, many more pour forth ā¦
How might we represent the memories, dreams, reflections, secrets, silences, stories, dialogues, and deceptions of those we come to know?
What are the consequences of particular choices of representation?
What is the role of memory, and the status of ātruth,ā in the writing of narrative accounts of these matters?
How might we who aspire to write lives become open to stumbling, sometimes accidentally, into a story?
How might the autoethnographer mindfully follow the urgings of the heart, the flood of dreams, the breath of a secret, the wisp of a memory, to find that great treasure, the evocative tale of human life?
How might we expand the practice of autoethnography to include the incremental, the accidental, the spontaneous, the random spark?
How do mythic consciousness, archetypal and personal shadow energies, dreamwork and synchronicities, memory and narrative conscience inform the choices and the work of the autoethnographer?
What are the ethical contours of the relationships between the writer, the reader, and the characters in an autoethnography?
These and other vital questions will be raised, opened, played with, wrestled with, cared for, responded to, and storied.
So, in the end, the book is a study of the deeper contours of memories, dreams, reflections, silences, secrets, and stories as they play out in family relationships. At the same time, through positioning engaged/accidental autoethnographic practice at the center of a conscience-driven research life, I offer direct reflection on the process of writing autoethnography, with a particular focus on the troubled, sometimes agonizing, often contradictory needs to evoke and stimulate actual life, while at the same time being careful not to harm others.
The study is deeply grounded in the idea of dealing with anxiety and secrecy via the invocation and practice of narrative conscienceāa way of approaching the writing of (auto)ethnography that emerges from the synergy of the ethical and the mythical impulses that reside deep within each of us. It deals directly with the āshadowā worlds of secrecy, deception, dissembling, silence, and silencing that emerge so often when traumatic events interrupt our lives. The study rests onāand demonstratesāthe claim that writing autoethnography is a fundamentally ethicalāif sometimes accidentalāperformance that can, in the end, lead to healing, wholeness, even redemption. Invocation of the ethical impulse as a guide for evocative writing is woven into the stories.
So, I focus explicitly on developing the autoethnographic project as a way to heal wounds and transcend silence. By extending our imaginative expansion of our storied repertoires through the incorporation of memories, dreams, and secrets as a vital space within the nexus of our story-making practices, we can surely begin to story some sense into our lives, which may otherwise be agonized by the dark, lurking shadows of anxiety, silence, secrecy, hopelessness, and despair.
The inspiration for this book comes from the thin shards of memory, from the foggy wisps of dreams, from the shaky silences, and from the dark underbelly of secrecy in my own life and the lives of people Iāve come to know along this journey. In my quest to develop and, at the same time, unravel, the mysteries that abound in this quest, I have stumbled on an idea that I think shows promise: accidental ethnography. More on that in the next chapter. But I begin at the beginning: with the idea of attending to the signs, which, if read properly, may open up the possibility of exploring what to do with family secrets.
Signs and Mysteries
āI pay attention to signs,ā Opal says, āDonāt you?āāNo,ā Rose says. She knows better now than to trust in such foolishness.My Aunt May says signs are the Lordās way of letting you know Heās always making plans for you way down the road, plans you canāt even imagine. Iām not so sure about the Lord part of it, but I do believe there are signs giving us information. Thereās meaning to things. Weāve just got to have patience to find them.āAnne D. LeClaire, Entering Normal
These are mysteries, questions without answers that speak to imagined possibilities for meanings.āH. L. Goodall, Jr., Divine Signs
There are moments in every life when it is unclear what will come next, but during which, somehow, we know we are caught up in something significant. There is a feeling that something powerful is at work, though often what exactly is going onāor what will come of it, if anything, is a mystery.
I have found that these moments just come on me at times, catching me unaware. They can come as little wisps of memory, as an experience of falling back in time, triggered by some seemingly random event in my current worldāa sight, a smell, a texture, a sound. Or I might just rise from my chair spontaneously, pushed upward by an intuitive sense that something is not quite right. Or perhaps I sense a dream hovering at the edge of my consciousness, the kind of dream that recedes before me as I try to catch its meaning. Sometimes a fantasy surges up and grabs me, and plays itself out, tugging at my heart. Or, as I move through my day, I might find myself caught up in a moment of reflection, where something nudges my consciousness, or my conscience, pulling my attention to a new place. Or, as happens once in a while, I feel a surge of joyāor of sadnessārising up through my heart.
Sometimes events in our lives seem meaningfully connected, linked not just by chance, but by some larger organizing principle.
At others, it all seems so random.
Have you ever been in a conversation (or elsewhere) and found yourself in a moment of breakthrough, an āAha!ā or epiphany?
Have you ever been minding your own business, going about your day, and found the tattered shreds of a dream, or a memory, or a secret, seeping into your consciousness?
Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat, your heart shattered by a dark dream?
Have you ever felt the thin wisp of a partial memory hovering at the edge of consciousness, just out of reach?
Or, have you ever had a full memory come flooding back, unannounced, suddenly overwhelming you?
Have you ever felt something being triggered, something inside you that is, perhaps, unpleasant, and only marginally linked to the current situation?
Have you ever been in a conversation, and found yourself or someone else, saying or doing something that seems inappropriate, or out of turn?
Have you ever had or witnessed an outburst?
Have you ever felt a shadow creeping up into your mind, over your heart, through your consciousness?
Have you ever wondered at the darkness within yourāor someone elseāsāsoul?
Have you ever pondered how thin the line might be between sanity and madness, or between dream and reality, or between memory and truth, or between secret and story?
These and other questions hover at the edge of my mind sometimes. And I look around the world for signs, for something to make sense of these experiences. I seek clues. As a detective of everyday life, an ethnographer, I observe and participate in this world, and I seek to bring a storied sense to my experience (Goodall, 1996).
My neighbor, a woman in her late seventies, has an adult son, middle-aged, probably around fifty or so, who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. He sometimes comes to stay with her, as he finds it hard to maintain a household or to live among other humans. He is prone to outbursts of shouting, though this is not usually directed at another person. Rather, he shouts aloud to unseen people, in words and sounds most of us cannot understand.
One day recently, as I was walking down my driveway toward my garage, something in my neighborās backyard caught my eye.
I couldnāt make out what it was, but for some reason I found myself drawn to it. As I got closer, it still took a moment to register what I was seeing. At first it made no sense. But here it was, lying in the grass: a simple painting of a black background, in the center of which was a large red heart. It looked like the artwork of a child of about age six, with the simple, familiar, valentine-shaped heart we all recognize. But what was striking about this scene was that someone had driven an axeāyes, a full-sized, firewood-chopping axeāthrough the center of the heart.
As I gazed on it, I found myself wondering how to interpret this particular sign. Was this something that should cause me fear? Or bring me fascination?...