2005-03-16 - 2:18 p.m.
What I'm listening to: something by Le Tigre.
I'm on the 3rd draft of my conference paper that's due on Friday. This has not been an easy paper to write. I'm beginning to realize that more now. I'm writing on autobiography, post-colonialsm and photography. The stories of how my father's family fled Amritsar are surfacing, in the paper as well as in my own memory. I was listening to some family history from my mother's side of the family just now. Couldn't do it. Couldn't listen to the comfort of my then healthy grandparents' voice, and write/edit productively at the same time.
But on the other hand this project is so rewarding. These stories need to be told. They need to be thought of as stories, they need to circulate in academic discourses. Stories of trauma, pain and suffering need to be told. It needs to be known that human lives are affected by political decisions and activity. It needs to be known that these decisions affect happiness, identity, the ability to negotiate ideas and concepts of socialization later on in life. These events have profound effects on the personal lives of those involved. It affects their ability to get along with other members of the human race.
A concept that I've been struggling with, academically, is the idea of equality and marginalization. It was inherent that all human beings are equal, until the world trade center fell. After that, I was constantly reminded, implicitly, of my difference, of my hertiage, of my skin colour.
As such, if we consider that all human beings are in fact equal, are we negating individual experience, and the experience of different lifestyles? On the other hand, if we acknowledge difference, and discourses of the marginal, are we immediately adopting a dominant standpoint, by prescribing certain social groups as marginal, or different?
In my personal life, I do believe that all human beings are different, but equal in their own right.
