HIV,
Art, and a Journey toward Healing: One Man's Story
by Julia Kellman
Some of the territory is wilder
and reports do not tally. The guides are good for only so much. In these
wild places I become part of the map, part of the story, adding my versions
there. This Talmudic layering of story on story, map on map, multiplies
possibilities, but also warns me of the weight of accumulation. I live
in one world—material, seemingly solid—and the weight of that
is quite enough.
I have just reread anthropologist Ruth Behar's essay, "Anthropology
That Breaks Your Heart." It started me thinking about several things—the
outer limits of psychic pain, for example, or the relationship of the researcher
and the researched, of bearing witness and giving testimony, and of the
"ethnographic experience of talking, listening, transcribing, translating,
and interpreting" that forms the core of enquiry about people and their
lives. What can I say, I wonder, to touch readers in such a way that they
see the indispensable truth in the individual stories that develop from
such enquiries? How can my role as interpreter and witness lead to the understanding
that the buffeting winds of lived experience (those of the researcher and
of those who are researched) are not inconveniences but an essential quality
of humanistic research? How can I use the accretion of stories that make
up my research and my life (as if there were a difference), I muse, as I
sit at my computer screen reading a text as "it in its turn reads me,"
as the writer Jeanette Winterson describes this experience. For over the
years, I, too, not only have come to feel this pulse of the systole and
diastole of telling and being told, but I have also used this alternating
relationship to develop insight into the nature of the connection of researcher
and researched, teacher and taught.
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