Modulating vocabularies of trauma and mundanity in refugee blogs
Ben Hoh, University of Technology, Sydney
Delivered at the BlogTalk Downunder conference, Sydney 2005
Abstract: What happens when stories of suffering collide with details of the mundane in blogs? Reading the writings of refugee bloggers in a recent community cultural development project called “Storybox” as a kind of allegorical labour, this paper explores the ways in which the accretive and fragmentary aspects of the medium contribute to the shifting modulation of “occult” vocabularies that transgress notions of the public and private. This suggests a mode of culture whose basis is somewhere other than “everyday life”. Cinematic and comic-book allegories for this mode are also considered, as are the relationships of the Storybox project and trauma to aporias of design (and) literacy.
What’s going on when people blog about terrible, almost unspeakable things that might have happened to them, and when they blog about their cat? What does it mean to bear witness in fragments that might be at once profoundly painful or mundane, or more interestingly, both? What modes of culture are elaborated by these kinds of expression?
In 2004 I coordinated Storybox, a small writing project for young refugees, using blogging as a medium. The Storyboxers experimented with ways to write about listening to dancehall pop star Sean Paul, for example, or growing up dealing with systematic abuse in a refugee camp — both types of experience were “everyday” ones for many of these people. It was a rewarding experiment, which I hope contributed a little to the participants’ capacities for autonomous expression. But when I tried to bypass the affective nature of their involvement in my first attempt to write this paper (which was originally going to be more about design and political theory), I found myself blocked. In the language of “trauma studies”, it was as if I myself faced an impossible task of representation. But following Giorgio Agamben’s insistence that just going along with the “unsayable” character of Auschwitz simply puts it on a pedestal as an object of worship (Agamben 2002: 32), I realised that rather than let my dilemma of representation freeze me in an act of genuflection, I’d have to grapple with what I’d put in the “too-hard basket”. I knew that these experiences weren’t ready to conveniently instrumentalised without a difficult kind of “accounting”— not in a way that attempted closure, but through a fragmentary, allegorical kind labour that makes suggestions.
My publicly expressed aims for Storybox were all about measurable outcomes: “literacy”, “learning computer skills” and “access to the public sphere” for young refugees in Western Sydney. To a degree, such aims are congruent with the project of incorporating new migrants into the nation-state, which is scary, but also a knowing strategy for communities to pragmatically survive under the present order. But we also smuggled in more interesting goals that drew practically from the traditions of social action and radical pedagogy:
problematising the concept of “literacy”;
participating in a vague form of “narrative therapy”;
creating new modes of expression amongst and across communities;
building new knowledges by thinking critically about one’s own experiences;
exploring the distinctions between private and public life; and
creating alternatives to the bourgeois public sphere.
The workshops took place over several weeks, with different groups of young people — the participants were teenagers from Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Burundi and Sierra Leone. The group of young Africans had been in Australia for less than six months, and most had never really used computers, leading to an incredibly concentrated encounter with computers, net infrastructures and information systems. On the other hand, most of the young Afghan Storyboxers had been in Australia for five years, and were comfortable using the Internet. (One young Afghan woman had never met her best friend, with whom she corresponded exclusively via email.)
Vocabularies of Witnessing
One of the major reasons that blogging had been identified as a potentially interesting medium for refugee writers was its relative anonymity; whether through formal anonymity or via a nested, dissociative displacement of contexts, perhaps the weird, “floating” nature of writing the self online would provide an amount of safety against which participants could feel freer to explore traumatic memories. But against conventional narrative therapy’s humanist concept of “externalisation through storytelling”, which attempts to extricate a pre-existing, coherent subject from systems of power, our opening of the “can of worms” that comes with traumatic memory was always about leveraging the aggregative, fragmentary potentials of the blogging medium, which tend away from the assumption of unities. We were thus careful not to assume a teleology of closure, not to offer participants a prefabricated model of expression in which their testimony — in addition to perhaps being therapeutic or politically vital — would somehow magically restore a lost wholeness. As Little White Secrets, one of our Sierra Leonean bloggers, viscerally declares:
[T]he only image most children like me know are the images of atrocities, the misery from chopping of hands, limbs and other parts of the body; to rape; kidnapping and forcing young boys and girls into the army. most scenarios become all too familiar that it becomes too difficult to let them go. As a child i have seen my house burn down. i have seen people killed. i have seen people take their last breath. This trauma will never go away. (Little White Secrets 2005: permalink, emphasis added)
This generalised severing of bodies becomes an almost ecological trauma, a landscape of injury that forecloses the temptation to fall into the waiting arms of rehumanising cliches. Despite the boundless energy on display throughout her blog, Little White Secrets betrays no illusions of eventual transcendence, invoking instead the promises of vectors of change, of perpetual contingency:
Life is like a temporary group, that dissolve when they achieve their goal… Sometimes we set a goal in our lifes, that we never achieve. (Little White Secrets 2005: permalink)
The tone isn’t mournful, just merely ambivalent — even hopeful. And by engaging with the blog form’s serial open-endedness, such aphoristic fragments can be accreted into suggestive formations over time. The partial, temporal bricolage of blogging also means all our coordinates could very well fall apart around the corner. Denis Sado, the only Storybox participant comfortable with blogging under his real name, would often outline memories and issues in logistical and institutional terms; for example, his description of the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya:
There are food distribution which usually done every forthnight, and this done by CARE Kenya logistic sector. UNHCR is responsible for keeping refugees security and protection. And GTZ-IS is responsible for health stutus in the camp while GTZrescue responsible for firewood and maintaining forest plantation around the camp. (Sado 2005: permalink)
But then this would be punctuated by occasional, furtive disclosures:
I do remember and never forget what reall happened to my dad when we were going with him to school”the bomb fell on the ground i didn’t know what happeded and at last found my dad laying down dead”I HATE TALKING ABOUT THIS! (Sado 2005: permalink)
It seems almost obscene to quote this — to reenact the making-public of this memory. And Denis obviously found it obscene to write his story in the first place. But the problem of reenactment leads to precisely the point that has been plaguing me: the “public” of a quasi-academic conference paper is incredibly different from the “public” to which Denis made this evidently difficult disclosure. This practical negotiation of multiple “publics” is one of the main reasons that makes this paper uncomfortable to write: the act of contextual translation hurts. But this multiplicity also heralds an infinity of possibilities, and it is the witnessing of witnessing that leads to the undoing of positions, and hence to critique, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub note in Testimony (1992), their study of trauma in literature.
The Storybox blogs demonstrate that storytelling via accretion not only enables different registers to be deployed from post to post, but can also enable something else entirely. NaturallySweet, a young Afghan woman, recently visited Afghanistan and met relatives and friends of the family after years of absence, so she blogged about the true story of a female friend in Afghanistan — recalling events that have recently passed, or which are even transpiring now, but in the seemingly “timeless”, almost allegorical language of fairytale:
Her great grandfather was the leader of 6 Big Colonies. He used to own a horse which was very dear and used 2 wear a gold necklace which at the time no one at all could afford 2 have. He had 2 wives and from them two he had 5 sons and 5 daughters alltogether… “A.H” (who’s Aziza’s- father) got married as well and had 2 sons and 2 daughters. They were very poor which resulted from draught and war; they couldn’t plant their crops and had nothing to eat and survive during the war times….
… for a few years he struggling to do this till one day he gave up because he got sick and there was no way at all dat he could medicate himself or see a doctor at that time because he was very poor and no one else as well could help him because they were also very poor!
SO HE DIED!
he died of depression, poverty, post traumatic shock and heart attack!
(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)
The creeping use of numerical shorthand and the vernacular use of “dat” foreshadow her utterly contemporary diagnosis of “depression, poverty, post traumatic shock and heart attack”, which interrupts the spell — the sense of safety created by the virtual, temporal buffer zone of myth. This interruption is a clue that something else is going on. This is confirmed when her friend Aziza’s father dies; the children fall under her grandfather’s care, and her sister is given away for marriage:
So when J (her older sister) turned 14 her grandpa then gives her away to an old man aged 5o yrs old and technically sells her and yah!
SO SLACK OF HIM- HE MUST’VE BEEN AN ARSE HOLE
(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)> (NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)
Rather than read this fantastic eruption as a clanging inconsistency or an aesthetic failure, it can be seen instead as something new: in Deleuzoguattarian terms, it signals a “plane of consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) — obviously not a homogenous zone, but consistent in a way that involves disparate elements held together with a common intensity: a style. After a period of acclimatisation to the scene of the Storybox project, NaturallySweet was evidently comfortable enough with this style to write about the loss of her father in the following terms:
I don’t know man i had a post-traumatic-shock about wat had happened 2 me… I lost someone so dear that can not be priced because it’s too dear 2 me and nothing compares t him. I lost my father who i rarely knew because he kept going and coming out of the country inorder to feed us.
(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)
Her rendering of traumatic memory in the vocabulary of “teen-speak” (and “AOL-speak”, or even “SMS-speak”) desacralises those memories, but I think it is important to resist any urge to characterise this as a euphemistic symptom of suturing — a mere “papering-over” of trauma with the “inadequate” language of the mundane in the absence of a more “appropriate” or “respectful” poetic capacity. And yet NaturallySweet’s modulation of trauma is unnerving, because while the function of her vernacular abbreviations is clearly intimate, they usually signify trivia. For instance, first consider this entry:
hey everybody i’m at skool right now and am soooooooooo borrrrrrrred i’m half asleep right now oki ta ta
smell ya later u bootiful ppl
(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)
Now consider her repetition of the teen-vernacular “sooooooooo” — usually reserved for the exaggerated inflection of the apparent inconsequentialities of “everyday life” — in relation to the rise of the Taliban:
my journey begun when i was only 11 years old and that’s for a girl living under the regime of vicious groups that came out of no where and thought “oh yeah baby lets attack Afghanistan and kill the innocent ppl, and separate the men from their women” i mean that’s just sooooooooooooooooo devastating…
(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)
It is absolutely clear that she isn’t trivialising the issue, but what is going on here? In an underlying traumatic context in which no words are adequate, the rhizomatic medium of the blog can support, among other things, a move beyond mere shifts in tone between fragmentary entries, and towards a mutual becoming minor (in the Deleuzoguattarian sense of straying from models of normality) of all available vocabularies within the flow of a single sentence. I would suggest that NaturallySweet is assembling mutant, ambivalent registers that cross-contaminate our preconceived notions of private and public, staging an encounter between the crystalline prose of myth and language of the mundane, and creating hybrid vernaculars that are neither. So it is not really a matter of what these new vernaculars “actually mean” in a representational sense, but what they enable: a reconception of what used to be the spheres of everyday life and the political, into something else — into whatever space that can be apprehended with such a vocabulary. Call it “the neveryday” — an alternative platform upon which de Certeau’s model of “textual poaching” (de Certeau 1984) can be modified; in de Certeau’s model, the poacher is forever destined to be guerilla-as-loyal-opposition to “the writer”, but a “neveryday” mode of enunciation is more waywardly “queer” and less heroic, and yet also seems necessarily based on a transgressive, sometimes incomprehensibly extreme platform of an underwriting trauma, a crack in subjectivity. And while the embodied specificities of the refugee experience are irreducible, this crack is not — the coherent subject is an impossibility, and that this inevitably involves trauma; I would therefore suggest that the Storyboxers’ “neveryday”, with its underwriting trauma, could be a useful model for how both casual mundanity and affectual extremities are often modulated through each other in the blogging of the self.
Touchy Feely Filth
Another way of illustrating the “neveryday” imaginary of blogging is through an allegory: Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s comic book, The Filth (Morrison and Weston, 2004). Their (anti-)hero is Greg Feely, an ordinary, “sentimental” cat-lover who leads a double life as Ned Slade, a transdimensional agent for the psychic police-cum-waste-disposal agency of the world, known as The Filth. Middle-aged, balding, and sporting both a tasteful comb-over and a porn addition, Greg finds that his lonely life with his cat Tony is apparently a deep-cover “personality safe house” for Slade. Pressed back into service, Greg/Ned tries to negotiate his traumatic imbrication in the system. While he’s battling giant flying spermatozoa or navigating the sewer of the world, Greg/Ned will wonder out loud if he’s forgotten to feed the cat. It is truly touching, and not pathetic. What Morrison’s narrative achieves is the realisation that in the middle of struggles over the fate of life itself, “I Love My Cat” narratives are amongst the best narratives there are. And yet this touchy-feely mundanity of cat-love is neither an authentic origin for Feely, nor just a “fake” but necessary refuge for the “real” Slade, despite its proven worth. As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the cat scenario is neither the “real” story, nor even just one valid segment amongst several, but one of several occult media dialects: the killer sperm, the cat and the zombie “anti-persons” all enunciate or channel through each other. In the end, we learn that cat-love can be generated by a sentient nanotech infestation, but is still valid.
The Filth can thus be read as an allegory of the way bloggers can deterritorialise geopolitical commentary and mundanity into a “neveryday” plane of consistency, and can also be an “answer” of sorts to the elitist, phobic disavowals of blogs as being full of pointless stories about people’s cats (as if that were a bad thing in the first place). In The Filth, cat-blogging allegorically retains its nobility as an exemplary effect, but with the realisation that its vocabulary is a partial medium in the occult sense, sometimes sharing storytelling techniques with narratives of genocide. The capacity for such writing is always there. We have the technology. And The Filth really highlights technologies of writing, if noticeably of an “old skool” era: the head of The Filth’s communications is “La Pen”, who sports four huge fountain pens as appendages, and Feely/Slade discovers that The Filth’s mysterious origin, based on something called “the Crack”, and which “runs through everything… [a]nd everyone” (Morrison and Weston 2004: 209), is actually a mining operation that extracts supernatural ink from an island-sized fountain pen found lying at the bottom of an interdimensional sea, perhaps abandoned by God after the act of Creation. Telling a story is not the unfolding of some whole narrative, it’s a shapeshifting resource grab that is founded on trauma. Everything flows from the Crack.
The Box and the Real
The fact that I imagined Storybox from the beginning as a kind of critique begs the question of whether the apparent outcomes were a self-fulfilling prophecy. How well I deal with this problem depends on how reflexively I could grapple with social problematics that had previously just been bullet points — something that will always complicate things beyond measure. And yet when I named the project “Storybox”, it did feel like a prophecy of sorts, or perhaps more like a haunting. “Box” somehow felt resonant in an “appropriate” way, but lacked a positive, “empowering” flavour, which troubled me. I went with it anyway. Cue another allegory:
Recall the incredible scene which splits David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in two: the appearance of the blue box in Club Silencio. The lovers Betty and Rita, in an attempt to uncover the truth behind Rita’s amnesiac past, end up in an old theatre called “Club Silencio”, where they are regaled with seductive but simultaneously alienating stage acts that are mimed to taped music. The beginning of each act seems seamless, but is then revealed deliberately to be mimed near the end. “No Hay Banda,” announces the MC — “there is no band”. The show climaxes in an incredibly moving Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, complete with actual tears, and at the peak of the song’s emotion, the singer collapses, and the prerecorded voice sings on. At this very moment, a strange blue box somehow appears in Betty’s handbag, ready for the mysterious blue key that Rita has had all along. They rush home and open the box. At this point the film’s narrative universe is utterly dislocated, from that point offering us a jarringly different, and yet strangely similar story.
The most “coherent" reading of Mulholland Drive identifies the narrative up to that point as a desperate fantasy of the mundane Diane, the “real” “Betty”, who has actually murdered her girlfriend Camilla, the “real” “Rita”. It is this violent act of sexual jealousy which apparently lies in the (vaginal?) box of repression, which resurfaces at the moment of confrontation with loss in Club Silencio. Not the most promising connotations for Storybox. But I chose the name partly because of the whiff of trauma. And what if there is another way to approach it? What if the blue box is indeed an allegorical symbol for trauma, but one which operates as a nexus for the different narratives of the film, which do not have to be organised hierarchically in such a boringly classical psychoanalytic scenario because they are actually vocabularies of a neveryday imaginary? What if the shift from Betty and Rita’s story to that of Diane and Camilla is analogous to what happens when NaturallySweet describes life at school in Sydney or under the Taliban as “soooooooooo boring” and “soooooooooo devastating”?
The Box and the Real 2: Legibilities of the Human and the Apparatus of “Captcha”
The box of allegory returns again via David Lynch, this time as a resonating gatekeeper of “humanity” in his cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. In an early scene, our protagonist Paul is tested by a visiting “Reverend Mother”: he is forced to put his hand in a dark green box. “What’s in the box?” he asks. “Pain,” is the reply. Premature removal of his hand from the box means instant death. Paul’s hand experiences an ever-heightening burning, but he keeps his hand in the box to the end, fighting his instincts and thus proving his “humanity”.
As noted above, the group of young African refugees involved in the Storybox project had little prior experience with computers and the Internet, so it seemed sensible to start at a point before blogs, with email. Everyone thus signed up for free webmail accounts in one of our first workshops. Interestingly, it took more than three hours for this process to yield any workable results. At Hotmail, and echoed at the gates of every social software service, prospective users are presented with a dizzying array of form-fields, all of which are mandatory: occupation, date of birth, etc. The last question — the signing of the user agreement — strangely requires the user to fill in their last name for a second time. The Storyboxers would ask why such information was necessary, and would often enter it in a way that wasn’t acceptable to the system; the practice of (machine-readable) textual consistency — especially for usernames and passwords — was a particularly troublesome factor for them, a seemingly meaningless reduction of language to dotted i’s and crossed t’s. But the kicker was the penultimate question:
Yes, it’s a spam-bot test. (Funnily enough, it also resembles a piece of trendy, illegible typography from the early ’90s, perhaps from RayGun magazine.) Such tests are known as CAPTCHAs — “Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and are commonly used by web services that involve social communications, including Blogger, the blogging system we were using. They act as a gateway to prevent inhuman communication, stopping automated scripts from procuring accounts for transmitting spam.
“What does this mean?” the young people would ask me when confronted with an avant garde-looking CAPTCHA. “Why do we have to answer this… question?”
“To… prove that you’re human,” I replied in a whisper, recalling the actual wording used in some of these kinds of tests, and realising the gravity of the situation — many of the people in the room had experienced processes of attempted dehumanisation. And as it turned out, few of the participants could pass this test, even though most of them had a fairly workable grasp of written English. Many seemed understandably frustrated by this in a way that implied that the test was unfair and insulting, yet another challenge to their humanity in a history of such challenges, and some seemed upset by its implications, although they were cheered somewhat when I failed the test a couple of times in a row — and I’m a graphic designer who’s done my fair share of illegible typographic distortion over the years. (To be fair to Microsoft, there was an option for a speech recognition test for blind users in the Hotmail CAPTCHA, but in our lab environment, our computers’ tiny, inbuilt speakers made this, too, completely unintelligible.)
Now, the “problem” with the encounter between refugee participants and the gatekeeping registration form was not so much a question of “literacy” or its apparent lack, nor simply that mainstream software’s “usability” has a long way to go — for example, after I told this story at last years’ Sydney Design Symposium, someone used it as an example of regrettable “neglect” in the sphere of design practice. While (perhaps debatably) accurate in a descriptive sense, these perspectives, like the mystifying terminologies of “social capital”, leave our terms of reference within this whole game of informatics intact, when in fact what a story like this can do is crack that game open. This crack recalls the Voigt-Kampff test of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner — a psychometric “empathy test” that can supposedly weed out androids from humans. Unlike the novel on which it was based, Blade Runner enacts the collapse of any underpinning taxonomy of the human; it is an anamorphic moment, similar to the desubjectifying shift in perspective applied to the two noblemen in Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors:
The large grey smudge at the bottom the painting is a skull — the sobering spectre of Death’s head, of mortality itself, draped behind the human potential for hubris — and to see that properly, the viewer must approach the painting in a way that does away with its conventional framing, so that its coordinates (which in this case provide a representative grid for wealth, spatial territorialisation and masculinist power) are completely distorted.
I would therefore like to approach this encounter between young refugee bloggers and the “apparatus of CAPTCHA” in social software as an anamorphic event, a traumatic manifestation of the limits of the entire framework upon which our notions of “literacy”, “usability” — and indeed “the user” and “the human” — are founded. And it haunts the whole enterprise of the writing of difference in a software-mediated environment. This rupture, this crack means that it’s not really a matter of identifying new goals for informatics literacy so that users can better conform to software’s expectations of them, or indeed, of making software more “usable” to more people, even if those things could be practical outcomes, because the invitation contained in such an encounter can yank the carpet from underneath the bureaucratic, managerial hoops of literacy, or the impossible idealisation of a yet-more universal “user”. Similar possibilities were present in the recent “Cornelia Rau incident”, in which an Australian resident with mental health “issues” was mistakenly incarcerated in a detention centre for asylum seekers; do we use this as an opportunity to be outraged that an Australian resident is “treated like an asylum seeker”, and demand better “screening procedures” to avoid such seemingly obvious injustices (thus leaving our assumptions about mandatory refugee detention intact), or do we accept it as an invitation to anamorphically problematise the very ground — citizenship, security, the nation — upon which such a system rests?
Inconclusion
A marginal disclosure: it seems fairly clear that my exploration of “neveryday” traumatic imaginaries and my briefer account of the traumatic design/literacy aporia negotiated by the Storybox project both have some way to go before they can “talk to each other”. (While this is frustrating in terms of this paper’s construction, it is also quite heartening news to me, because as previously described, I originally tried to sidestep the guts of the project for this paper.) What both nodes of the paper have in common conceptually is the Crack. To repeat the authorities of The Filth again, “The Crack runs through everything… [a]nd everyone” (Morrison and Weston 2004: 209). Everything and everyone? Yes: the trauma of information design systems, and the trauma of those who write (or that which writes?). I am not entirely sure if this is a lazy slippage, but the speculative thought that springs to mind is that while I have stated that the design/literacy aporia crystallised in the “CAPTCHA” cannot be “solved” through an extension of the dominant logics already at play, perhaps the (non)grounding of the Crack can suggest an alternative to simply suggesting their abolition, with nothing to suggest in their place. If the Storybox participants can generate “neveryday” vocabularies in a wayward negotiation of their (pre)conditions of trauma, perhaps “information design” can, too. What this could involve remains to be seen.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books, New York
De Certeau, Michel. 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley
Delezue, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Felman, Shoshana and Laub Dori. 1992, Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, Routledge, New York
Little White Secrets. 2005, Life is what we make out of it, Storybox blogging project, Sydney, viewed 17 March 2005, \<http://blackninnocent.blogspot.com>;
Morrison, Grant and Chris Weston. 2004, The Filth, DC Comics, New York
NaturallySweet. 2005, Love Like Never Gets Hurt, Storybox blogging project, Sydney, viewed 17 March 2005, \<http://naturallysweet.blogspot.com>;
Sado, Denis. 2005, Dadaab Refugee Camp, Storybox blogging project, Sydney, viewed 17 March 2005, \<http://asifsado.blogspot.com>;
