Cultural (re)Membering Through Memoir: An Outsider Autoethnography

“A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.” Patricia Hampl
Erin Sharkey
12-07-09

“Culture” is defined as an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning. Or the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterize an institution, organization of group.

“Ethnography” - A field study across difference.

“Autoenthnography” - “an attempt to see one's self as other might.” Susan Bennett or “an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural.” Ellis and Bochner

Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, Bone Black – bell hooks
To me, telling the story of my growing-up years was intimately connected with longing to kill the self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill that self in writing. Once that self was gone-- out of my life forever-- I could more easily become the me of me. Pg 81.

(The memories) came in a surreal, dreamlike style that made me cease to think of them as strictly autobiographical because it seemed that myth, dream and reality had merged.
“limitations of autobiography, of the extent to which autobiography is a very personal storytelling- a unique recounting of events not so much as they have happened but as we remember and invent them. Pg 83

Fiction and autobiography- Audre Lordes bio-mythography.
Reunion and release

Autobiography as hope chest- artifact, gifts for future. Safekeeping for another time.
“Mama tells us-- her daughters-- that the girls in her family started gathering things for their hope chest when they were very young, gathering all the things they would carry with them into marriage.” bone black, pg 1

“I see her remembering, clutching tightly in her hand some object, some bit of herself that she has had to part with in order to live in the present. I see her examining each hope to see if it has been fulfilled, if promises have been kept.”


There was no agonizing, screaming custody exchange in a target parking lot, we met on neutral ground. Curtis and Curt Jr. (the eldest of my younger brothers) picked me up in the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago on a spring morning in March. I jumped over puddles after locking three sets of doors on my way out. They were standing near the car and Curtis wasn't as tall as I remembered. Curtis was wearing an athletic jump suit, over a t-shirt covered in shiny bullet heads. From this distance all of this looked younger than this 53 years. When I got to them I opened my arms to signal that I was willing to embrace them and Curtis walked in to them. It was then that the feeling small was all around me, I was on my toes surrounded my his smell. Up close I can see the years on his face and body. Curt Jr. had a little combed out fro and he smiled as he looked away, his gold grill shined in the sunlight. Curtis pulled him towards me and introduced my brother saying that he needed my advice so it was great we had so much time together on this road trip.

Curt Jr. is the only one of the brothers I might have remembered from over 23 years ago. I have a foggy, shifting memory of Curt Jr.'s mom and a girl that may be his older sister. He sits in the back seat.

We drive out of the North side neighborhood and embark on the 1 hour drive on the 94 towards Milwaukee. I had been fighting frantic thoughts, panic since I arrived at the airport in Buffalo the morning before. At the second toll booth I realize that I had an almost overwhelming calm and that I may have felt that way since my cell phone rang and I started the business of gathering my things to walk out to meet my father after a 23 year absence. It makes me chuckle a little to myself.

This car we were in, a maroon sedan, I start to suspect is not Curtis' car. He searched for the button to lower the windows like his arm did not have enough space, there is a feminine feel inside too and his knees are high on either side of the steering wheel. The conversation goes between talk of how much this visit was anticipated by a list of people I don't remember or I can hear them vaguely in my mother's voice, Curt Jr.'s problems with figuring out how to find work, and how my flight was, I must have answered how my flight was 4 or 5 times . I can tell that they are a little nervous. Curtis drives past one of the toll stations without paying. We past Racine about half way through the drive, this is where my mom's family lives, signs for Wisconsin cheese and Danish Kringel line the highway. Curtis says something like-- “you must know that place”, and I do.

The city comes up around us soon after that. And Curtis says that we are heading to my cousin Bubbles' 6th birthday party and my aunties are all there waiting to see me. We pulled into the Chuck E. Cheese's parking lot in a strip mall. I jumped over another puddle in the parking lot on the way in, Curtis holds the door in such a way that I need to duck under his arm to enter. In an instant the sunlight was violently replaced by lights chasing,and bells ringing with children's squeals roaring behind. For a moment, I know no one. And then over the din there was a scream, a yelp from the dining room and I am once again in arms and surrounded by women. Each was full of questions, each wanted to know if I remember them. Each looked at me from head to toe and back again. Each had stories to tell. I must have been at that Chuck E. Cheese's before although they all look the same.

My body is theirs. They touch me on my arm and feel my hair, a little spank and move my face from side to side looking for themselves there. I do not need to examine to see my breasts under their sweaters and the ridge on my lower back connecting my hips, the way my thighs meet. And the little things too, like the islands of freakles on my lips and nose. I may have learned how to move my body from my mom but my physical lineage was in this room.

There is a string of names I try to keep straight, try to match with that little stack of photos in my purse and stories mom has gifted me of these women as teenagers. Auntie Mae makes fun of me, asks if my mom is still uptight. Aunt Bece launches into a story about her husband like we are just catching up. Her daughter, my cousin Latoya cries a little, I am her missing comrade. And over that greasy thin crust pizza we try to fill in the last 2 decades. Curtis watches from the end of the long table, sometimes laughing to himself. My Aunt Gayle grabs my hand, challenges me to wack a mole. She explains that the family works together to get as many tickets as they can and then they let the birthday girl pick something off the top shelf, that way the party results in the present. We wack and then shoot hoops and drive cars without any real talking, some cheering and goading. Suspicious, my cousins Bubbles and Randy, watch us trying to figure out who I am.

Curtis was watching too, and he got closer, looked over my shoulder as I laughed and drove off the racetrack on the screen. He quietly told me my brothers had arrived and the finish line came up on the horizon. The twins, Joseph and Joshua, were 13 awkward as well as a little nervous to meet me, I could tell from the shifting feet. They were tall and lean, they stood shoulder to shoulder. Their faces were like a memory to me.
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“Facts can exist without human intelligence but the truth cannot” Toni Morrison- Site of Memory
Mixed women's autoethnographical exploration- ethnography inside difference
insiders outsiders inside look
Danzy Senna – Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
The journey to discover her father's unwritten and dismembered family history. And on this quest she gets to know her father and the forces of history as well as herself. On one moving visit to Montgomery AL, she takes note of names, complexion, hair, movements, voice, language, clothing, church.
“This was my black family-- the proof that I was connected to a large Southern clan who had not married out of the race or fled their origins to escape who they were, who were not tragic or lost.”
Catherine McKinley Book of Sarahs
Stacey Ann Chin newly published autobiography – other side of paradise.
Michelle Cliff – Postcolonialism & Autobiography
observated quality- He notices, she drives, she is the first human, but she is not.
“I and Jamaica is who I am. No matter how far I travel – how deep the ambivalence I feel about ever returning. And Jamaica is a place in which we/they/I connect and disconnect – change place.”
Lit reading by Sidonie Smith
Autobiography's legacy has been particularly troubling because of its identification with the western romance of individualism. In the master narratives of modernity, the autobiographical “I” has functioned as a culturally forceful enunciatory site of the autonomous, free, rational, unified individual or “self.” If this is true than what is a de/colonizing subject to do and I would argue that mixed race women trouble this notion as well. Can the masters tool ever dismantle the masters house?
What are the performative liabilities and possibilities?
“To take possession of the autobiographical “I” in a cultural context in which that “I” is normative, is at once to be possessed by cultural norms and to become culturally intelligible.”
1.rendering the “I” unstable, shifting, provisional, troubled by and in it identifications
2.if the autobiographical subject is multiple




The next day, Curtis took me on a tour of “his” Milwaukee, my brothers schools, important buildings in Milwaukee history, houses his mother lived in, the place we lived when I was born. We stopped at an old department store-- he wanted me to help him pick out a tie for church on Sunday, to show me where he buys the size 19 shoes. We walked the aisles silently looking through the clothes. A short gentlemen with his glasses on the tip of this nose, a measuring tape around his neck, calls out for him, tells him about the new shoes they have in, that he put aside for Curtis because he knew they were his style.

I am definitely on tour. We stop by Mae's house. Her laugh is so beautiful, like the sweetest cackle. Curtis lets her make fun of him, poke at him. She offers to teach me how to cook, quizzes me on soul food dishes. Do I eat collards, have I had real biscuits, do I know how to cook like black folks? She asked what my mom says about them, so I reach in my bag for those pictures. I said that she kept these for me and Mae snatches them up. There is glee at the sight her childhood. They are the funniest things she has ever seen, the most precious. Every picture she wants someone else to see, look at your big head, what were you wearing, what were we doing here. Every picture she repeats— I'm a need copies of these. She goes through them several times and her playful face gets serious and she said tell your mom how grateful we are for these. She gets up with out another word and takes me by the hand to her bedroom. There on her dresser is a picture of me, I was probably 5, around the time of that last visit. It was in a little gold frame surrounded by other family members school pictures.

At Curtis' aunt Jewel's house that same picture was on the mantle.

We go by Gayle's house. As we walk up the steps to the door, he says that there is someone here who is very excited to see you. The entrance way was dark and the house smelled like cooking, a little like grandmas used to. He calls out into the house, and I wait in the dining room for this someone. I hear her before she comes around the corner, my Aunt Bobbi appears and I wouldn't have recognized her if that voice had not proceeded her. She was twitching, her eyes looked everywhere but right at me. She was wearing a gray sweatsuit, and dirty socks. Her face was ashy and a sort of gray itself. The embrace was over before it started. My mom used to tell me how Bobbi was my safe place when grandma wasn't around on those visits. She was talking without breathing, rambling. She kept saying she knew she would see me again. She went into her bedroom to get something to show to me. This something was a little 2 inch square picture of me from 1985. It was yellowed and worn around the edges, it had been folded and stuffed. It was care.

The last stop of the day was to Curtis and the boys' little apartment over the airbrush t shirt business. We stopped in so that he could introduce me to the owner, who said don't tell me this is your daughter as we walked in. I have never had the sight of me announce- call out my parentage. He insisted on making me a t shirt, airbrushed in yellow and blue, my name in swirls. It would be dried and ready before my departure the next day. The twins ran up the stairs and Curtis and I climbed the narrow stairscase after, his full frame filling the space. The apartment was nearly bare, and smelled like boys and grease. We sat at the kitchen table while the boys gathered things to show me from corners of the place, a trophy from basketball, a report card, their school uniform shirts. Curtis' cell phone rang and after a few minutes of talking, he hands me the phone. I am not sure who is on the line and the female voice sounds friendly like I should. I look at Curtis and he says “it's Summer.” I remember from conversations with Curtis on the phone in the months before this visit, that Summer was Curtis' girlfriend and it occurs to me for the first time that she has not been at all. As if on cue, she apologizes for not being there to meet me, and says she is embarrassed to say that its because she is at the Women's Holding Center but it will be better for the baby that she stays clean for the rest of the pregnancy. And its a girl. I didn't know where to look or how to hold my hands. When I looked up toward Curtis, he stood up and went to his room off the kitchen. He emerged with a small black and white sonogram and handed it to me. And this woman I had never meet or spoken to before this moment asked me if I would give my sister her name.
Pictures serves not only as hope but also
Pictures served as safe passage
Pictures promised (re)membering and storying
Pictures suggested goodwill
Pictures kept safe by this white lady, as they had no safe place
Pictures as artifacts, proof

Argue that Autoethnography functions as cultural remembering but also allows for the autobiography to write the shifting self and the multiple self. Mixed women writing allows for an insider outsiders inside look at cultural and the borders around and the origins of those performative culturally markers.
Site of intergration, disintergration, and transgression.