I really didn’t realize it until after the completion of my project and I had a chance to review others work, but there were several different ways to complete this assignment. Erin chose a specific event, the tragedy of being involved in a high school shooting, and was able to write the affects of that experience. The affects about which I was writing were derived from what I perceive to be the “life” of someone who is experiencing cultural disorientation, so I chose to develop a narrative around that “life” (similar to Jessica’s).
Since I was writing the experience of an individual’s life and not a specific event, I found it difficult to suspend writing a narrative with completion. As we learned from our relay novels (specifically The Crying of Lot 49) life’s narratives often don’t come with a bow on top, but simply continue. My challenge was to defer my aesthetic creativity to re-enforcing my paradigm, and not stray toward a tendency to create tidy endings.
I focused on creating affects by creating as much disparity between my protagonist Alex’s feelings about his family and cultural background, and the “America” that I recognize to be my own. By juxtaposing Alex’s Mexican way of life so abruptly with my American values (love for basketball, fascination with time, disrespect for own belongings and environment, and the white man in the grocery store) I was able to gain a clearer image of the confusion and frustration that might be experienced by someone in Alex’s position.
One of the more difficult aspects of this assignment for me was how to create resonance between heterogeneous elements. I did this in three ways. First, I cited a passage from the book Angel City in order to show the brutal working conditions many menial workers were facing a mere decade ago. Second, I had Alex recall the story of his own birth in an open field, through a dream. Last, I provided the interview with “The Migrant Mother” to show how working conditions haven’t really improved that much for migrant workers over the past 75 years.
It wasn’t until now that I realized the overall importance of our experiment, or how difficult it can be to write another’s experience through your own forms of expression. The writer of another’s experience will always be inherently limited as to what they are able to produce, having never lived the experience themselves. Here in lies the advantage of this mode of expression, however. The writer of another’s experience has their own experience to draw from, leading to insights that couldn’t be written or recorded by someone writing about themselves or their own experience. While this gives the author a substantial amount of creative freedom, it also obligates writing with responsibility and fairness. Without suspending judgment of the subject, you are no longer writing the affects of other’s experience, but rather a creative novel or other work that doesn’t properly reflect or communicate the message.
