Home and Away

Lived Experience in Performative Narratives

Leigh Anne Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367698782
• eBook ISBN: 9781000469288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Home and Away explores how performative writing serve as a process that critically interrogates space/place in relation to personal, social, cultural, and political understanding.

By combining aesthetic expression and inquiry with critical reflection, the contributors in this volume use a variety of narrative strategies—autoethnography, mystoriography, creative cartography, the lyric essay, fictocriticism, collage, the screenplay, and poetics—to position place as the starting point for the aesthetic impulse. The anthology showcases the power and potential of performative writing to illustrate the ways we interact with and in place; provides examples of the ways one can express lived experience; and demonstrates the ways discourses overlap while extending our understanding of identity and place, whether one is home or away. Although the chapters are fixed by their literary form in this volume, many of chapters are best realized in a performance or shared publicly via an oral tradition.

This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in performance, communication studies, and literature.

1Rural Ruins as Excavation of Memory, Material, and Metaphor

Lindsay P. Greer

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143703-2

Family farms have struggled to survive in the United States since the rise of industrialization. At the turn of the 20th century, “forty-one percent of employed Americans worked in agriculture,” and by 1970 “that number was only four percent.”¹ The history of 20th-century agriculture parallels the commercialization of other industries that accelerated in the 1980s. The gradual transition away from agrarian life reached yet another critical point in 2000, when the U.S. census omitted “farmer” from its list of formal occupations.² No longer the realm of middle-class abundance, rural landscapes became increasingly haunted by abandoned farm equipment and vacant houses serving as “symbolic reminders of economic transition.”³ In spite of the downturn in small-scale agriculture, my family continues to maintain ownership of the farm our ancestors started over a century ago. The farm began as part of my great-grandmother’s wedding dowry in 1875 and remains in existence due to the labor of my 93-year-old grandmother.

The view from my grandmother’s front porch goes on for miles as farms, and the ruins of former farms unfurl for as far as the eye can see. Viewed against the horizon, the farms all seem to stitch together seamlessly like a discolored quilt of pasture and dirt road. Growing up, my cousins and I freely roamed the farm, sometimes without shoes. At every family gathering we dared each other to touch the electric fence. Foolishly, I took the dare on at least one occasion, and the current swelled through me like the sting of an electric wasp. Every spring, feral kittens prowled the yard next to the barn. Hoping to take one home as our pet, the cousins and I chased them under old cars and through patches of long grass. The kittens were fast enough to avoid domestication; instead, they covered us in scratches as our parents shouted for us to leave the damn cats alone already and come inside. Though the farm lives on as a setting for my childhood memories, the actual farm remains a place shrouded in mystery for me. I know little of the family history behind the farm, so this project marks the beginning of my excavation and retelling of these family memories. My hands know little of the physical labor it takes to tend a farm; they remain soft rather than calloused from working outdoors. Rural life remains ill-fitting on me, much in the way my grandma’s work boots used to slide off my feet. The few times I tried to wear them I skinned my knees by falling. Always out of step with the tempo of the farm, I kept rural life at a distance, even in my own memories.

Romantic notions of rural life often come steeped in an “agrarian mythos” that frames agriculture through a nostalgic and moralistic lens.⁴ The agrarian myth first appeared as the “yeoman farmer,” a folk hero held up as symbol for “self-sufficient aspects of American life” in the 18th century.⁵ The yeoman archetype became code “for a man of simple tastes, sturdy independence, and admirable disdain for all things newfangled.”⁶ In other words, farmers of the 18th century were celebrated as boot-strapping frontiers men, while they were also subtly looked down upon as simplistic folks unburdened by more worldly ambitions. The agrarian myth emerges from whitewashed understandings of agriculture and the individualist bootstrap narrative many politicians still use to characterize farming, even as the rural landscape withers. Additionally, such a bland moralistic framing of the Midwest reproduces the already limited (mis)representation of rural folks that circulate within popular arts and culture.

Popular culture of my childhood represented rural places as full of folksy, close-minded, conservative people oblivious to the larger world. I have met incurious people in my lifetime, but from experience I have learned that such people exist everywhere. For as long as I recall, the widely accepted narrative of the Midwest told me I needed to escape if I wanted to succeed in the ways I planned. Pop culture certainly helped this idea along by showing every character as the antithesis of who I wanted to be in the world. Though obviously caricatures, these representations saturated my formative years and developing self-concept. Realizing that “rural” equated to “unsophisticated” in the minds of people outside of the region, I wanted to run away out of embarrassment. Only later upon entering early adulthood did I begin recognizing the discordance between these representations and my own embodied experience. Writing on the significance of homeplace within performance studies, Shauna MacDonald explains that “places are embodied; we experience them sensuously and provocatively, even if our culture has taught us not to. The places and spaces we inhabit throughout our lives affect us as we affect them.”⁷ These words strike a chord because reminders of my rural upbringing have followed me everywhere in adulthood. Regardless of how I feel about the Midwest, its influence remains in stubborn habits and the coarse edges in my dialect. Since I began the slow process of unpacking my feelings about the rural Midwest, ruins have become one site for excavating memory via materiality and metaphor. Though a significant body of literature exists on the ruins of post-industrial cities, the ruins of deindustrialized rural spaces have yet to attract the same level of attention.

The Rise of Ruin Porn

When I was growing up, Detroit served as my stand-in for every American city. For me, it represented the collective cityscapes I watched on film and imagined from books. Rather than symbolizing ruin, Detroit represented the seductive pulse of urbanity, a future looming just beyond the horizon line of my small town, a nucleus buzzing with the energy of ideas and opportunities. In recent years, Detroit has become the site of countless examples and think pieces on the genre of photography known as “ruin porn.”⁸ This genre updates the “ruin gaze” for a technologically savvy generation, for as DeSilvey and Edensor observe, we find ourselves “in the midst of a Ruinenlust which carries strange echoes of earlier obsessions with ruination and decay.”⁹ The popularity of ruin photography is fraught, since “even the best intentioned of the genre … can only convey a ‘vague sense of historical pathos,’ serving as tributes of past industrial grandeur or warnings of the rusted future that awaits us all.”¹⁰ Taking ruin photography is never a two-dimensional experience, but one that involves the body and its relation to space. In the era of selfies, the absence of visible bodies becomes ever more pronounced. As others have noted,¹¹ this glaring absence of human subjects removes the possibility for critiquing the systems that enable ruin by removing any trace of human suffering from the spaces photographed.

If ghosts of a once thriving automobile industry haunt Detroit, then the memories of former harvests and family farms haunt the rural landscape through empty houses, rusted machinery, and discarded remnants of agricultural life. Ruin porn serves as a reminder that despite our attempts at preservation, change, and eventually death, these factors remain inevitable parts of life. Ruins provide material evidence of capitalism’s “slow violence,” which Rob Nixon describes as the “delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”¹² Slow violence names “an attritional violence” that blends into the fabric of daily life, seemingly natural and largely invisible. Through their presence, ruins show the impermanence of the structures and concepts we accept as timeless and universal.

Writing the Ruins

Wandering the landscapes around the farm, I noted that the ruins acted as archives for the material traces of agrarian and industrial culture. Ruins exist “as a threshold between varying temporalities, a presence of an absence.”¹³ By showing that life adapts and continues beyond our presence, ruins serve as reminders of our own mortality and of the interconnection between living (and non-living) things on this planet. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt insist in the introduction to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet that “we must wander through landscapes, where assemblages of the dead gather together with the living.”¹⁴ Ruins offer themselves as one such assemblage where the dead and living mingle together.

My writing takes the form of assemblage by weaving together snippets of conversation, memories, community folklore, poetic description, and photography into a piece of performative writing that evokes my encounter with the ruins surrounding my grandmother’s farm. Rather than fiercely staking claim in an argument, performative writing values multiplicity and nuance, similar to assemblage’s arrangement of multiple texts or objects to create meaning through the interconnection and/or discordance that arises.¹⁵ It is in this spirit that I offer my story.

***

A small cluster of vacant farmhouses occupies the land across the street from my grandma. My uncle tells me he once knocked on a rotting wall in one of the vacant collapsing houses to test if the wood was still solid. Bees, riled from sleep, started buzzing from somewhere within the rotting timber. Unlike honeybees, carpenter bees build their homes by burrowing into the wood. Living inside abandoned structures, carpenter bees transform vacant houses into new homes. My uncle left the house as he found it, and to this day it remains standing. I imagine the bees still live in that wall: a colony undisturbed.

The Michigan town where my grandma lives is the type of place where everyone

It is the kind of town where everyone says they love you, yet no one wants to see you grow too much or go too far away. It is the kind of place where everyone supports you

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Poetics, Performativity, and the Personal Narrative: An Introduction
• 1 Rural Ruins as Excavation of Memory, Material, and Metaphor
• 2 Riding the Hippogriff: Fandom, Performance, and Place in the Wizarding World: an Autoethnographic, Fictocritical (Unfilmable) Screenplay
• 3 Pilgrimage to Paisley Park: A Mystory
• 4 Walking, Wandering, Writing: The 2017 Women’s March and the Celebration of Disruption
• 5 Wandering New Orleans: Grammar of the Legs as Creative Production
• 6 Walking in the City: Intersections of Identity, Space, and Place
• 7 Sherman’s March on Columbia, Searching for Green Pipes, Eating Tacos, and Shooting Yankees: Tales from a Self-Guided Tour and Shelling Reenactment
• 8 Home, Awareness, Space
• 9 “Well, At Least This Isn’t as Bad as ’78”: Using Stories to Make Sense of the Ohio Blizzard of 1978
• 10 When Home Goes from Being a Place to Being a Person: A Critical Autoethnography of Identity, Culture, and Geography
• 11 Performing Pilgrimage, Mourning, and Transformation on the Camino de Santiago
• About the Contributors
• Index