alternarrative

Al-Rawi (“the narrator”), to the extent that he may be said to exist outside of this narrative, is best described as a student, possibly forever. He is currently based in a major American city in the North East — where, following a brief stint at a non-profit, he is now back in school as a poor, starving graduate student. Having spent nearly a third of his life living in each of three very different countries, Rawi tends to switch “identities” faster than he inhabits them. At the moment, some of those labels include, in no particular order: Humanist, Islami(ci)st, Leftist, Feminist, Pseuo-Anthropologist, Historian, South Asian, etc. But like most people, Rawi is mainly just preoccupied with the meaning of life. He is also a voracious reader, and like many a clichéd failed writer, he reads a lot more than he writes. Indeed, much of what he writes is about what he reads. The blockquote is therefore a bedrock of this blog.

Und so erzähle ich mir mein Leben. (Nietzsche)

“And so I tell myself my life.”

Humankind’s impulse to tell stories is as old as humanity itself, if not older. Indeed, narrative almost precedes human beings, in the sense that even God must tell us stories of how we came about (Or, depending on your theistic stance: we tell ourselves stories about God telling us stories about ourselves). Perhaps our very existence is merely God trying to tell a story.

But narrative continues to occupy an ambiguous status in human experience. It is an art, to the extent that it may not serve our survival instincts (food, shelter, reproduction). And yet, we cannot live without stories. In the great literary/cultural masterpiece known as The Thousand and One Nights, storytelling becomes the very means of survival for the ill-fated Sheherazade, whose stories are often about people who had to tell stories to survive. Much the same is true of the ten women and men in Boccaccio’s Decameron, who tell each other stories as they seek refuge from the Black Death in Florence.

Like any other human activity, narratives are not free of the ideologies implicit in them. In fact, use implies the possibility of abuse. In our own recent memory, elaborately constructed narratives have served as justifications for unjust wars. But if history is the story of the victors, then there necessarily exists somewhere, perhaps suppressed, the antihistory of the victims: the herstory, the non-stories. The alternative narrative is an echo of the anti-narrative. It is a self-conscious narrative effort to talk about, and often against, narratives, both of the self and others. It is an exploitation of the kind of opportunity afforded by 21st century technology, for the blogger sitting at home in pajamas to type away against the system standing outside in all its suits and uniforms.

These are the stories we tell not only to survive, but to undress the emperor, one stitch at a time.