Liminal
Lives: Navigating the Spaces Between (Poet and Scholar)
C.
L. Clarke
University
of Saskatchewan
This
paper takes up the question of what it means to inquire into our own
narrative or autobiographical beginnings within a narrative inquiry.
Specifically, I inquire into the use of poetic representation and
poetic expression to explore the layers of autobiographical
beginnings that inform the researcher’s life as both a scholar
and a poet. While autobiographical beginnings are only one aspect of
narrative inquiry, they constitute an essential component to
understanding our own place as researchers within a narrative
inquiry. In this paper, I examine the importance of narrative
beginnings or autobiographical beginnings to narrative inquiry.
Through the demonstration of autobiographical beginnings expressed
poetically, I argue that an examination of narrative beginnings is
essential to positioning the researcher within the research. During
the inquiry, the researcher, like the participants, is in a state of
becoming. Autobiographical beginnings bring to the surface those
factors influencing the researcher’s perspectives, thus
locating the researcher within the inquiry as well as within a larger
life context. In addition to this primary focus of locating the
researcher within the research through narrative beginnings, I
demonstrate the efficacy of employing poetic representation and
poetic expression within a narrative inquiry. Both
narrative/autobiographical beginnings and the poetic representation
of autobiographical beginnings highlight the liminal nature of the
researcher’s identity within an inquiry. My choice of poetic
representation of autobiographical beginnings is not incidental or
merely aesthetic. Poetic representation of autobiographical
beginnings within a narrative inquiry is a rigorous and effective
means of articulating the researcher’s location while, at the
same time, recognizing how the shifting nature of identity requires a
revisiting of the researcher’s perspective to remain connected
to the ways in which the narrative inquiry continuously reshapes the
researcher’s understandings. In narrative inquiry, this process
unfolds over the course of an inquiry through the telling, retelling,
and reliving of the narratives. Through the poetry shared in this
paper as well as the unpacking of the poetry, I demonstrate a small
piece of that cycle. The poetic representation already exists as a
retelling of some of my own pivotal experiences, especially pertinent
to a larger inquiry underway, examining the life and learning that
occurs on the edges of community, spaces conventionally constructed
as marginalized. My research is situated in my understanding of my
experience. As part of a larger narrative inquiry, it attends to the
conventions of narrative inquiry as a methodology (Clandinin &
Caine, 2013; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Caine, Estefan, &
Clandinin, 2013) while employing poetic representation to express key
moments in the researcher’s experience. In my focus on
retelling through poetry and the narrative unpacking of that poetry,
I engage in a reliving of those experiences, as does the reader. I
retell, and thus, relive my own experiences of exclusion, isolation,
and perceived marginalization. Through this retelling and reliving of
my own experiences related to life and learning on the edges of
community, I demonstrate the essential nature of autobiographical
beginnings to the deeper understanding of my research wondering about
those spaces constructed as marginalized.
Autobiographical
Narrative Beginnings: Beginning With Who I Am
Every
day begins for me with writing. I read from the works of other
writers and when some piece of what they have written resonates with
me, I respond in my own writing to those ideas. Always, my writing
returns to my life, to the specific, concrete details that make up my
life, to the moments of wonder, the questions, the veiled answers
that emerge through all this writing and thinking that comprise my
intellectual life. Often, my wondering spirals down into the past, to
the origins of my ideas that grew out of a particular moment or in a
particular place. With each recollection, I am remade through the
retelling of these moments in reflection, the rewriting of my own
history repeatedly. Inevitably, these processes of reflection and
recollection lead to poems. In the distillation of language into
poetry, I find my truest expression of self and thought. This is who
I am. Through poetry I relive the narratives of my life, and through
that reliving I become who I am. Ontologically, this process is the
basis for my identity as a poet. From a theoretical and
methodological perspective, I recognize this process as a cycle of
meaning making grounded in the tradition of narrative inquiry. At the
same time, I employ poetic expression and poetic representation of my
autobiographical beginnings in order to attend to my identity as both
a scholar and a poet. In the liminal space between my identity as
poet and my identity as scholar, I am able to inquire into ways in
which these identities might converge to create richer opportunities
for meaning making in my research.
Clandinin
and Caine (2013) use the terms autobiographical or narrative
beginnings to refer to the personal stories narrative inquirers
explore to “make evident the social and political contexts that
shaped our understandings” (p. 171). Clandinin and Connelly
(2000) assert, “One of the starting points for narrative
inquiry is the researcher’s own narrative of experience, the
researcher’s autobiography” (p. 70). Clandinin and
Connelly (2000) also say, “narrative beginnings of our own
livings, telling, retellings, and reliving help us deal with
questions of who we are in the field and who we are in the texts that
we write on our experience of the field experience” (p. 70). In
other words, inquiring into our own narrative beginnings is essential
to any research endeavor. Examining our own stories along with the
stories of our research participants is essential to understanding
the identity-making process. Because I am a narrative inquirer, I
attend to my autobiographical beginnings in order to understand
myself better as I enter into research alongside my participants. At
the same time, I recognize a strong sense of self that identifies as
a poet and requires poetic expression as part of those narrative
autobiographical beginnings. Leggo (2010) states, “For stories
to be creatively effective, they need to be shaped generatively and
generously” (p. 68). He recognizes the need to attend to the
multiple facets of our identities as researchers when he asserts, “We
need spaces for many kinds of research, including lifewriting
research that focuses on narrative, autobiographical, fictional, and
poetic knowing” (Leggo, 2010, p. 68). As Leggo suggests, my
autobiographical beginnings are both narrative and poetic. I examine
the space between my identity as scholar and my identity as poet by
sharing four original poems describing key experiences in my own life
that shaped my identity and continue to resonate through my research
wonders.
In
the Middle of the Muskeg: Locating Myself Within the Inquiry
Muskeg
I
listened in the night
through
the fog of dreams
to
the world asleep
and
not asleep
around
me.
In
the back gabled bedroom
one
narrow window looked out
over
the garage, dark paneling
the
smell of moth balls
always
cold floors.
The
wire-springed bed frame
with
the metal headboard
creaked
when I breathed
and
all I could do was breathe
and
breathe
into
the night
as
I listened,
scurrying
in the walls
relief
when grey light
touched
the edges of the window
long
before sunlight burned
past
the fire-blackened pine
and
miles of Muskeg
behind
the store.
A
bulldozer once broke through the loam, Dad said
and
sank until it was lost.
He
said, No one knows how deep
the
Muskeg is—so deep
it
might go on forever.
We
clung to a strip of gravel,
an
atoll in a sea of Muskeg.
You
couldn’t go anywhere.
There
was nowhere to go—
our
lives defined
by
the gravel pad
that
kept us all from sinking
out
of sight.
These
days I don’t travel far from home.
I
stay inside this room,
wonder
if the rest of the world exists
or
if I lie awake still afraid
surrounded
by miles of Muskeg. (Clarke, personal writing, 2013)
In
this poem, I express the sense of isolation and disconnection that
permeated my life growing up in Northern Saskatchewan. The poem
Muskeg is
concretely situated in a place that actually existed. In the early
seventies, the highway to La Ronge in Northern Saskatchewan was the
only highway leading in and out of the North. When we first moved
there, the road itself was unpaved. My parents’ store perched
on a gravel-reinforced
lot at the junction of Highway #2 and #969, leading to Montreal Lake.
On either side of the highway, except for the gravel pad where we
lived, muskeg stretched for miles in every direction, creating both a
geographical and metaphorical barrier to movement.
Clandinin
and Caine (2013) say “Place directs attention to places where
lives were lived as well as to the places where inquiry events occur”
(p. 167). Of all the places that I have lived in my life, why do my
recollections constantly return to Timber Cove and life on the edge
of the muskeg? The persistence of these memories indicates that the
experiences lived out on the edge of the muskeg hold deeply rooted
connections to the research wonders I carry with me today.
I
first began to explore the themes of the poem Muskeg in
January 2012, thinking about what part of my own life created an
interest to understand the experience of marginalization. In my
journal writing, I reached back to a place where a sense of isolation
and marginalization were most acute. I wrote about my experiences
growing up in Northern Saskatchewan as someone transplanted into that
landscape—a landscape that was, to me, foreign. In retrospect,
however, I realize that the landscape was not foreign, but rather I
was foreign to the landscape. The poem, however, is a deeper
expression of the recollection of being foreign to one’s
surroundings. Muskeg, in its temporal movement between the
past and the present, connects the experiences of the poet as a child
to the experiences of the poet as an adult—to the experiences
of the poet as a researcher. Methodologically, the poetic
representation of those recollections reaches deeper than the
recollections explicated in the journal entries. The poetic form more
richly captures the complexity of those experiences that acted to
shape my identity as a poet and that continue to shape my identity as
a researcher.
Clandinin
and Connelly (1992), drawing on the work of Schon (1979), assert,
“metaphors are no mere ‘anomalies of language’ but
are instead expressions of living” (Clandinin & Connelly,
1992, p. 369). Clandinin and Connelly (1992) further assert the
importance of metaphor in understanding teacher narratives, stating,
“We and other teachers are, in an important sense, living our
images and metaphors” (p.369). To understand Muskeg
as illustrative of a moment in my “story to live by”
(Connelly & Clandinin, 1999),1
it is necessary to understand the metaphor of the muskeg that
permeates this poem.
Muskeg
is the Cree word for bog.
The muskeg in the poem was a dangerous place because you could break
through the thin layers of mossy soil and drown in the water below.
In this way, the muskeg defined the place where I grew up as a
negative space surrounding the small gravel island built up beside
the highway that was solid enough to support the store with its
living quarters upstairs. Furthermore, the muskeg in the poem
represents the limitations that grow out of the fear of the unknown.
The landscape described in the poem identifies the sense of
limitation the poet as a young girl experienced while living so far
away from anyone else. As a child, I remember the familial travelling
in and out of communities that my parents identified as more valuable
in relation to our home place on the gravel pad. Always, the muskeg
was a benchmark for our lives in relation to other communities. As an
adult, I recognize that Muskeg
has become a benchmark for my research and autobiographical
wonderings. When I was growing up beside the muskeg, we moved through
the borders of inclusiveness and exclusiveness, our identities
shifting as we travelled through each day and through each landscape.
This movement through the borders of communities that I never seemed
to belong to regardless of their make-up
has created in me a persistent desire to understand more deeply the
experience of being on the edges of community.
As
I consider the experiences detailed in the poem Muskeg, I
realize that this poem also recognizes the impact of the stories that
parents tell to keep their children grounded to the same place,
stories that limit their sense of agency and mobility, stories that
work to keep them safe. The story of the bulldozer sinking into the
muskeg was a cautionary tale told by my father to keep my siblings
and me out of the muskeg, to keep us safe from harm. It accomplished
more than that, though—for the longest time, it defined what
was possible and what was not possible.
A
landscape of limitation, defined by borders of fear, of isolation,
and of the unknown, shaped my understanding of experience as also
defined by limitation and marginalization. This definition of the
landscape grew out of my experience as someone transplanted into the
landscape instead of being a part of it. Furthermore, in my adult
contemplations of the historical significance of our arrival and
lives on the gravel atoll beside the muskeg, I recognize that we were
settlers in the muskeg and lived with the settlers’ mentality
of mixing only with other settlers, not with those indigenous to the
area. Perhaps our lives might have been less permeated by a sense of
isolation and disconnection if we had allowed ourselves the community
of the people indigenous to the area. Perhaps they might have taught
us to view the landscape as less harsh or inhospitable if we had been
open to cultivating community with those for whom the landscape was
home.
Not
long ago I had the opportunity to share my musings on the Muskeg
with a group of colleagues during a research retreat. In an
astounding moment of serendipity, one of the research retreat
participants shared that he, too, came from the area my poem
describes. As we talked about the importance of this place to the
development of my identity, this person shared a very different and
much more positive experience of the muskeg. This sparked in me a
wondering around whether or not and how our experiences of inclusion
and exclusion might be, at least in part, a matter of perspective.
What if that perspective provided an opportunity to shift? How might
such a shift in perspective influence the identity making growing out
of that experience of place?
My
poem Muskeg
describes not only a distinct location but also the passage of time
and how the experiences of childhood reverberate through our adult
selves. Furthermore, it clearly articulates the sense of isolation
present in the researcher-poet’s
life—the feeling that the ability to interact socially was
somehow impaired by a childhood spent living in isolation. These
feelings and memories are integral to identity making, particularly
my identities as researcher and poet. As someone who has lived in a
space defined primarily by limitations, I am aware of the ways in
which we limit others’ experiences not only to define them but
also to confine them within expectations. It is this understanding of
my autobiographical beginnings as a researcher-poet,
experienced through the writing and retelling of my poems, which
heightens my interest in learning more about the ways in which life
on the edges of community unfolds for others.
Life
on the Edges: Navigating the Changing Landscape of Autobiographical
Beginnings
The
Blue Dress
I
remember the details
preserved
like dried beans in a mason jar
one
hundred and forty-five dollars a month
for
the bachelor suite at Nesbit Apartments
half
of what I made a month in my job
working
the desk at the YWCA –
one
room no bigger than a bedroom
kitchen
in a closet and a bathroom
with
a claw-foot tub
circa
1912 hardwood
three
tall windows
facing
West.
In
the way back
before
language
every
thought is an image
sealed
in cellophane.
I
am visiting my dad’s mom
in
an apartment with the same floors.
She
wears a blue dress and sips Red Rose tea
beside
the same three windows.
Something
in her frown
and
concrete chin
frightens
me
so
I never wear a blue dress –
only
blue jeans and loose peasant blouses.
My
bed is under the windows
to
catch the scraps of breeze
lifting
from burning asphalt –
downtown
Prince Albert in the summer,
as
big to me then as Los Angeles
or
New York; big enough
to
hide from change
two
floors above
the
street. (Clarke, personal writing, 2013)
The
Blue Dress is a poem that, like Muskeg,
captures the experience of living on the edges of community. It
describes my memories and my living situation as a young woman who
feared she would become like her grandmother whose life had always
seemed confined within her small apartment with little prospect for
interaction outside. Like Muskeg,
this poem relies heavily on a sense of place and provides concrete
images of the details that define that space. Less concrete, however,
is the developing identity revealed within the poems, often through
the juxtaposition of images rather than the explicit detailing of
cause and effect. Here we see a grandmother through the eyes of a
very young child whose impression is that she is rigid, unmoving, and
ultimately unhappy. The child draws a connection between her
grandmother`s sternness to the place where her grandmother lives as
well as what she wears. Within the poem, however, a temporal shift
occurs in which the past reaches forward to claim the present. The
child, now grown, finds herself in the same or a similar apartment as
the one that her grandmother lived in and despite the young woman’s
ritual act of never wearing a blue dress, she struggles to live a
different story from her grandmother`s story. There is also a sense
of unfolding awareness in the poem as the speaker realizes life in
the apartment is both similar to and different from her grandmother’s
life. This sense of the familiar within the unfamiliar creates a
moment in the woman’s life where she is stuck in place—unable
to enact change and move forward and unable to accept the life she is
living.
As
with the poem Muskeg,
the apartment described in the poem is an actual place that I lived
in when I was twenty-two. The descriptions in the poem of my
apartment are as accurate as memory allows, not fictionalized nor, as
far as I can recall, exaggerated. I also distinctly remember visiting
my grandmother in a similar apartment when I was very young. Her
apartment certainly was located within the same downtown
neighbourhood. It may even have been within the same building,
although that is somewhat unclear to me at this point. What is clear,
however, are the emotions that persistently cling to the memory and
the remembered determination to avoid my grandmother’s solitary
lifestyle. Grandma lived alone in that little apartment and I lived
alone in my similar little apartment. It seemed to me then that my
life was replicating the experiences I thought my grandmother had
experienced. I viewed that as negative and in danger of defining who
I would become in later adulthood. I cannot say specifically why this
was so concerning to me. I recall that it was tied to the employment
I had as the night receptionist at the YWCA, which provided only
enough money to live on and not enough to change my life
circumstances. My income certainly would have categorized me within
the group of the working poor, but as a young woman this was an
accepted income bracket. All of my friends who were not living at
home were living in similar tiny apartments and reveling in their
freedom. I was not reveling. I was wondering how I would keep myself
from being trapped within that socioeconomic space and place forever.
In The Blue Dress,
both the child and her adult self demonstrate a complex mix of desire
for change and fear of change. It is a position that the young woman
in the poem experiences, that I experienced—a position that the
woman must adopt due to circumstances—and it is a positioning,
a space and place that the young woman chooses to remain in.
Socioeconomic
status is one of the ways in which we define ourselves or can be
defined by others. Terms such as poor, middle class, and affluent all
serve descriptive purposes in relation to some more or less
articulated norm. While it can be argued that these methods of
defining people or groups of people are inherently constructions with
no connection to the actual experiences and life circumstances of
people, there can be no doubt that these overarching categories do
have an influence on the ways in which people define themselves.
These definitions, however close or far from reality they might be,
are part of a landscape of identity making that emerges out of the
experiences of people. In The Blue
Dress, my younger self recognizes the
starkness of her grandmother’s apartment and connects it to her
grandmother’s identity as harsh and rigid. Rightly or wrongly,
my younger self creates a causal relationship between the space/place
and the identity of her grandmother. When she finds herself living in
a strikingly similar space, she struggles to ensure that her identity
development does not become indelibly influenced by the space.
In
contemplating the themes and metaphors of The
Blue Dress and Muskeg,
I begin to wonder what part of our experiences might be externally
generated and what parts might be internally endured or accepted? At
what point do we begin to story ourselves in the ways that we are
storied? Is it possible to mark the transition or, concomitantly, to
resist the transition? Do people living and learning on the edges of
community inevitably come to see themselves as marginalized?
We
experience The Blue Dress as a retelling. The speaker in the
poem is looking back from some future that has escaped the apartment
with the three windows facing west, just as the speaker in Muskeg
escaped the gravel atoll. However, these escapes are not the foci of
the poems. They are incidental, inferred, with the primary focus
being on those experiences of isolation and marginalization, combined
with a general wondering about the details that might comprise the
experiences. Yet, as the poet, I no longer live either on the edge of
the muskeg or in the apartment from The Blue Dress. I am not
sure, however, if it is possible to view my movement out of the
muskeg and out of the apartment as having escaped those places since
their impact on my identity making and curriculum making remains. A
part of me still experiences that sense of living on the edge of
community explored in this poem. The experience of the experience
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) endures and informs my present
experience.
As
a an interim research text,2 based on field texts, both
Muskeg and The Blue Dress function to focus the
researcher-poet on both the experiences detailed in the poems
and the experience of the poems, which is to say “field texts
slide back and forth between records of the experience under study
and records of oneself as researcher experiencing the experience”
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 87). As I inquire into these
interim research texts, I learn not only more about the experiences
detailed there but also about myself now, as a researcher, inquiring
into those experiences. The process is ongoing, without a stopping
point. In this way, we are always in medias res—researchers,
poets, and individuals in the middle of our stories to live by even
as we pause to inquire into them.
Beyond
the Edge: Crossing the Boundaries of Identity Within Autobiographical
Beginnings
Old Road
Drift
of exhaust
past
apartments, vacant lots
dusty
from too little rain
reminders
of cool, green scrub brush grown thick (4)
among
blackened stumps barely taller (5)
than
my eleven-year-old head
blueberries
warm with summer’s watching
always
watching
for
bears on the old road
to
the dump.
One
day
my
brothers and I followed that road
past
where it ended in a ditch
cut
crossways to keep cars out.
We
followed it through bush
thick
as planted corn, sometimes
hardly
a track amongst the spruce and poplar
until
we burst out onto a highway (18)
surprising
us, stranding us
up
to our waists (20)
in
Labrador Tea. (Clarke, personal writing, 2013)
The
poem Old Road
demonstrates the inward/outward/forward/backward movement of
narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994; 2000):
By
inward, we mean toward the internal conditions, such as feelings,
hopes, aesthetic reactions, and moral dispositions. By outward, we
mean toward the existential conditions, that is, the environment. By
backward and forward, we refer to temporality—past, present,
and future. . . . to experience the experience—that is,
to do research into an experience—is to experience it
simultaneously in these four ways and to ask questions pointing each
way. (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 50)
In
the beginning of Old Road, the perspective is from the
present—the speaker is travelling in a vehicle, experiencing
the smell of exhaust and noticing the urban landscape of apartments
and vacant lots. The vegetation of the vacant lots reminds her of a
different landscape and she moves temporally from the present to the
past through her memories of the “scrub brush grown thick/among
blackened stumps” (Old Road, lines 4-5). Not only does
she move backward temporally but also she moves inward emotionally to
recall her fear of watching for bears on the road leading to the
dump.
The
experience of moving inward and backward produces the recollection of
a specific moment in the poet’s life—the day she explored
the old road with her brothers. The description of their experiences
following the old road beyond the boundaries of their community—“past
where it ended in a ditch/cut crossways to keep cars out” (Old
Road, lines 2-3)—can be read literally. This is a
description of a particular experience, a specific day, and a
specific activity, even a specific landscape, through which the
children traveled to discover what lay beyond their community.
At
the same time, expressed poetically, the articulation of the
experience invites us to think metaphorically about this experience
as well. The children breached the boundary of their community to
inquire into what might lay beyond. Metaphorically, this poem is an
exploration of possibility, of what might exist outside of
established boundaries, both in terms of experience and identity. It
details the emotion associated with the act of stepping outside of
established norms, moving beyond the borders or edges of a community.
It is in the metaphorical contemplation of the experience of border
crossing that the deeper meaning for the poet as an adult emerges.
What is the meaning of the experience of venturing beyond the
boundaries of their community? What might it mean in light of the
descriptions and meanings provided in Muskeg and The Blue
Dress? Taken as a suite of experiences, these poems suggest a
deeper motivation at work in the experiences of the girl and her
brothers. What, if anything, lay beyond the Muskeg?
At
the end of Old Road, the trio “burst out onto a highway”
(Old Road, line 18) as an unexpected outcome of their
explorations. Their surprise prevents them from following the
highway. The image of the trio stranded “up to our waists/in
Labrador Tea” (Old Road, line 19-20) suggests an
inability to move beyond the known into the unknown. The analogy of
being stranded up to their waists in Labrador Tea suggests the forces
at work in the lives of individuals to persuade stasis, to keep a
person in their comfort zone even if that comfort zone is not that
comfortable. The Labrador Tea that surrounds them is a plant
indigenous to the bush of Northern Saskatchewan muskeg. There it is
both familiar and unfamiliar: it is a familiar plant often viewed by
the children along the roadsides, and near their homes on the gravel
pad and unfamiliar because they do not understand its use, its
importance. In this sense, its potential remains a mystery. The
Labrador Tea in the poem is a metaphor for the boundary the children
must pass through to enter into a different community. The highway
the children burst out upon is a surprise and represents the
unfamiliar. The poem suggests that perhaps, for some, living and
learning on the edges of community is more comfortable, more familiar
than venturing beyond the edges or margins into the unknown.
Certainly, the poetic representation of these experiences raises
questions about the boundaries of communities, the forces that
influence individuals to adhere to those boundaries or,
concomitantly, to pass through them, and how the experiences of
living and learning on the edges of community resonate through a
person’s life to create a metaphorical echo that repeatedly
influences identity making. As Caine, Estefan, and Clandinin (2013)
assert, “In a narrative inquiry, stories are not just a medium
of learning, development, or transformation, but also a life”
(p. 578). As we compose narratives, then, we are composed.
Living
In-Between: Navigating Our Multiple Stories to Live By
Innocence
Before
there
were Sunday suppers
spaghetti
with meat sauce
brown
bag lunches with smiling faces
soft
green dresses
patent
leather shoes –
white
gloves for church
white
socks for school.
Before
there
were Halloween pillowcases filled with candy
spruce
trees heavy with tinsel
hand-kneaded
doughnuts, wood stoves, tea.
Every
bed made itself
every
mitten found its mate
every
afternoon started its own fire
to
chase the chill away before supper.
I
still look for smoke
rising
from the chimney
a
familiar face alive
in
the kitchen window
as
the bus pulls away
down
the lane.
In
this final poem of my autobiographical beginning, Innocence
breaks from the previously discussed themes of marginalization and
movement through the borders of community to capture a time in my
life when there was narrative coherence in my experiences and all the
details of those experiences reinforced a sense of belonging and
safety. The irony of the poem, of course, is that it begins by
looking back to a time of easy predictability, immediately suggesting
that the landscape of belonging has shifted and grown into something
decidedly different from the experiences detailed in the first two
stanzas. Stanza 1 and Stanza 2 begin with the temporal benchmark of
“Before” although we are never told “Before”
what. As readers, we can assume an experience so significant that it
makes the experiences detailed in the poem stand out in contrast. It
is here that we see the effectiveness of using poetic representation
as opposed to a prose narrative. In prose, there is an expectation to
complete the thought, to tell or at least show the full story of what
came before, what intervened, and what came after as the conventional
form of a prose narrative. With poetry, it is possible to leave
unspoken the intervening event, creating possibility for the reader
to fill in the gaps with their own experience.
Anyone
who knows me knows that the event of my mother’s death when I
was 17 years old stands as a benchmark for all other experiences in
my life. This is the experience that the “Before” refers
to without explicitly stating it. Interestingly, Innocence
also describes a place, and the human components of that space,
“before” the Muskeg. The scene depicted occurred
as part of my childhood before we moved to the muskeg; however, 10
years later my mother passed away. From that perspective, “Before”
could also refer to life before the muskeg. What we know from the
details provided in the poem Innocence is that there was a
coherence in the experiences of the poet prior to the life event and
that the coherence of those experiences resonates through whatever
came afterwards, so much so that she imagines arriving home to find
the same wood smoke rising from the chimney and the same treasured
person watching for her from the kitchen window. In the sense that
this experience is imagined, it is a forward-looking story
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), one that imagines a reconstruction
of narrative coherence in the poet-researcher’s story to
live by. At the same time, it holds within it the seed of a
backward-looking story, the realization that the person she
expects to see there will not be there. The past and the present
exist at the same time in this narrative and through the images
provided by the poet they vie for centrality. Together, the four
poems (Muskeg, The Blue Dress, Old Road, and
Innocence) individually and collectively provide a sense of
from where the researcher-poet comes, from where I come—the
experiences that shaped my identity and that resonate with me today,
informing the relationships I develop with research participants and
the insights and interpretations that grow out of those
relationships.
Brady
(2009) emphasizes the impossibility of remaining objective as a
researcher. In quantitative research, data is said to speak for
itself but, as Brady (2009) points out, “Nothing speaks for
itself. Interpretation is as necessary to human life as breathing”
(p. xi). Brady’s expression of the researcher’s
involvement in interpreting data reminds me of Connelly and
Clandinin’s (2006) emphasis on the importance of
autobiographical beginnings in narrative inquiry. Only when we begin
to understand our own narrative beginnings do we situate ourselves
positively toward understanding the personal and relational
understandings that grow out of narrative inquiry.
Inquiring
into our own narrative beginnings is essential to any research
endeavor. At the same time, trying to maintain a professional
distance from oneself as one attempts to make meaning of one’s
personal narratives leads to a sense of dividedness that is
impossible to suppress. I find it difficult to separate or
compartmentalize my understanding of self into the professional and
the personal as conventional academic discourse suggests that we
should. This is part of the reason why even in my research, poetry
takes a prominent position. I cannot separate my identity as a poet
from my identity as a researcher. The two co-exist in my work in the
same way that they co-exist in my life. For me, being both a poet and
a narrative inquirer means I live in the in-between space where
creative expression and scholarly expression overlap. As Caine,
Estefan, and Clandinin (2013) state: “These in-between spaces
are filled with uncertainty and indeterminacy. They are places of
liminality; the betwixts and betweens, which, we argue, require
attention to context(s), relationship(s), and time to explore
narratively” (p. 580). Like a Venn diagram,3 the
deepening understanding of my stories and the stories of research
participants grows from the spaces in-between creative
expression and scholarly expression where the two circles overlap. In
those spaces in-between from which the poetry emerges, a new
community of understanding forms—a relational community defined
by its overlapping borders while, at the same time, not confined by
them. This wondering from a place of liminality is all part of a
whole that wonders about life in general and seeks to make sense of
life holistically, not one compartment at a time. The children who
come into our classrooms also come with a holistic wondering about
the world and about life as a whole, not just about the subjects we
say are valuable or in the order and timelines that we present them.
In this way, my inability to compartmentalize mirrors children’s
inability to separate themselves from their identity as student and
their identities as daughters, sons, grandchildren, or whatever other
identities they might hold.
As
Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) says, “Despite our desperate, eternal
attempt to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak”
(p. 94). In the same way, the categories or compartments of our lives
bleed together, one into the other, until they are indistinguishable
as categories and become the liquid in a fluid process that flows
from one moment to the next without interruption. As researchers who
struggle to separate our own identities into categories, we recognize
the inappropriateness of trying to do the same in our exploration of
the identity making of our research participants, whether they are
children or adults, in a school setting or elsewhere. Identity making
is, by its very nature, complex and ongoing. Our explorations into
identity making should reflect that complexity.
A
Return to the Beginning: Exploring the Researcher’s Identity
Within the Inquiry
As
I consider my own process of identity making and the importance of
understanding my autobiographical beginnings, and as I enter into
these explorations of identity making, I am reminded of the poem
Walking at Brighton by Dave Margoshes (1988). In this poem,
Margoshes (1988) explores the retrospective narrative of a speaker
who recalls feeling on the edges of his familial community, “and
I was a stranger in the family,/always walking behind where the view
is different” (p. 16). I recognize the sentiment expressed in
Margoshes’ poem of being a stranger within your own family. The
community of my family was not a community in which I was
comfortable. Like Margoshes’ speaker, I seemed always to see
things from a different perspective than my siblings or parents,
suddenly and consistently bumping up against my difference and their
difference even though on the surface we shared the same
circumstances.
In
my own family, I lived an experience of exclusion that Clandinin et
al. (2010) detail in the context of dominant school narratives, where
the exclusion of personal narratives excludes and discourages
individuals from seeking connection with those who appear to fit into
the dominant school narrative (p. 449). My sense of disconnect came
not so much from a dominant cultural narrative in conflict with my
identity as it did from a familial narrative that storied me as
separate, as different. The identities that I carried with me, that I
still carry with me, of feeling isolated and separate, apart from
community, are integrally connected to my identity as a curriculum
maker. They are present in the narratives that emerge from my life as
well as in the moments shaped by interaction with colleagues and
children. From my earliest days a binary of self and other was
strongly established in my experience primarily through familial
curriculum-making (Clandinin et al., 2006) moments. From my very
earliest days through my own sense of not belonging to the community
of my family, I began to question the dichotomous positioning of the
centre and the edges of community. I began to wonder which, if any,
group I belonged to or if, in fact, I might belong to both.
Clandinin
et al. (2010) recognize, “Within the institutional landscape,
claiming an identity can be more challenging than passively accepting
one” (p. 473). I suggest it is not only in the institutional
landscape but also in all landscapes, including the family, where
identity making remains a complex and fragile process. In the midst
of this fragile process, I wonder what happens when children’s
sense of themselves is under attack by a dominant narrative that does
not fit coherently with their own. I wonder what it means in terms of
identity making to be excluded so readily and so regularly that the
only comfortable space is the space that excludes. What does it mean
to identity making to recognize yourself as positioned on the outside
looking in or, as Margoshes (1988) frames it, to “always be
walking behind where the view is different” (p. 16)?
Dewey
(1938) suggests context becomes the truths of a present experience,
informing our understanding of narratives as we endeavor to unpack
them. Jackson (1992) also supports an emphasis on context by arguing,
“all experience is necessarily situational and contextualized,
that there is no privileged position outside of experience from which
to achieve a free and independent (i.e., non-contextualized)
perspective” (p. 10). Jackson (1992) acknowledges the presence
of bias in all forms of inquiry and research by stating, “We
begin our search for answers already faced in one direction or
another, our proclivities pre-established, our inclinations
making us lean this way or that” (p. 20). Essentially, Jackson
argues for recognition of a bias by the researcher rather than a
futile attempt to claim objectivity and distance. If we examine the
metaphor of facing in a particular direction, it becomes clear that
we can only see what is within our field of vision—our
perspectives, then, are metaphorically determined by the “field
of vision” defined by the direction in which we look.
Jackson’s
(1992) recognition of probable bias fits well with Dewey’s
(1938) ideas about contextualized perspective. Together they assert
that our perspectives never exist in a void but rather grow out of a
context that turns in one direction or another prior to exploration.
This is not to say that a person cannot turn around to face another
direction. Jackson referred to our proclivity, preference, and
context, intersecting to create a propensity for one position or
another. In Jackson’s (1992) words, “there can be no
position outside interpretation, there is no non-interpretive
stance. There are only ways of looking, a category that includes ways
of looking at ways of looking” (p. 20). Here,
Jackson nods to the multiple layers of exploration that inform our
perspectives as we look and look at how we look—meta-narrative,
so to speak. Our understandings, by their very nature, are at best
personal interpretations.
A
Liminal Life: Both Poet and Scholar
Why
do we choose the threads we choose when we begin to unpack the field
texts from our research? Why do we notice the things we then attend
to? What is it in our own experiences that shape a particular
research experience? Brady (2009) points out, “all research
necessarily starts with an observer moving through the world as a
personally-situated [sic] sensuous and intellectual being”
(p. xi). As the four poems presented earlier demonstrate, each
person, each researcher is personally situated. Our meaning making is
inextricably bound up with our identity and the experiences that we
have and carry with us. My own experiences of living in an isolated
part of Northern Saskatchewan shaped my interest in understanding the
human experience of marginalization, it motivated me to rethink the
way I frame marginalization and to ask whether or not I might see
that space as constructed through identity and experience—as
something determined individually and organically as a result of my
experiences. Although I have provided only four brief moments of my
autobiographical beginnings expressed poetically, they capture the
essence of what has driven me to ask questions about life and
learning on the edges of community. Without exploring my own
autobiographical beginnings, and without exploring them poetically, I
would not understand as deeply as I do who I was, who I am, and who I
am becoming. Furthermore, I would not have as deep an understanding
of the factors related to my identity as a poet and scholar that not
only bring me to these research wonders but also that press me
forward through the larger inquiry itself. In an academy that so
often encourages researchers to strip themselves of all identifying
features, these poetic autobiographical beginnings are essential to
understanding how I position myself within the narrative inquires in
which I engage. They provide a contextual grounding for the
foundational focus of the work that I do. Represented poetically,
these narrative beginnings identify me not as either a poet or a
scholar but as both a poet and a scholar. In this sense, I am no
longer stranded up to my waist in Labrador Tea like the young girl in
Old Road, but rather I have begun to cross the border out of
the muskeg, to move through that boundary and into the community
beyond.
References
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I. (2009). Foreword. In M. Prendergast, C., Leggo, & P. Sameshima
(Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences
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Caine,
V., Estefan, A., & Clandinin, D. J. (2013). A return to
methodological commitment: Reflections on narrative inquiry.
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D. J. (2013). Engaging in narrative inquiry. Walnut Creek, CA:
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sciences (pp. 166-179). New York, NY: Routledge.
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————
Endnotes
1
The term stories to
live by is a narrative term for
identity used by Connelly and Clandinin (1999) to demonstrate the
connection between narrative and identity.
2Clandinin
and Connelly (2000) describe interim research texts as “texts
situated in the spaces between field texts and final published
research texts” (p.133). Clandinin (2013) explains interim
research texts as a way for researchers to “continue to engage
in relational ways with participants” (p. 47) as they begin the
task of analysis of the field texts. Ideally, interim research texts
are negotiated and even co-composed with the research participants as
the researcher and participants determine together how best to create
a research text that is both authentic and compelling (Clandinin,
2013). Interim research texts, therefore, can often be partial texts
that move the ongoing interpretation from field texts to the final
research text (Clandinin, 2013).
3
Caine, Estefan, and Clandinin (2013) asserte: “Often our
understanding as narrative inquirers does not come instantaneously,
or quickly, or by engaging in clever analysis. Instead our
understanding deepens as we retell and relive our lived stories over
time, place, and social contexts” (p. 581). My experience has
certainly mirrored this sense of deepening rather than an epiphanal
sense of suddenly seeing what was unclear before. This deepening of
understanding occurs as part of the process of the relational
research that is narrative inquiry.