From Electric Lit:
Sometimes the only way to approach history, particularly a history that has excluded you or one which you felt trapped inside, is to deface it. Defacing—like a form of graffiti—can take the form of literally writing or collaging on top of the record so that your words are visible, but so is the history you are reinscribing. The two interact to create a third space. Similarly, sometimes when going in search of a specific history, you can’t help but research your own. Your history creates another layer to the original, adding to it and permanently altering the way it will be understood or interpreted by others.
In my debut essay collection, Curing Season, I contend with the history of a county in eastern North Carolina where I moved when I was ten years old and to which I desperately wanted to belong—hello, adolescence!—but I could not find a space for myself. As an adult, obsessed with the county’s book of self-submitted family histories, I approached it as an opportunity to write my own history—on top of theirs.
Nonfiction books leaning against the borders of the genre—which is to say, in that expansive and exciting category called “experimental nonfiction”—continue to illustrate the ways we can work with history while including our own narratives. No one flinches when fiction alters, reshapes, or dismantles historically-agreed-upon narratives. But there are also some incredible experimental nonfiction books doing the work of defacing history, sometimes in a very visceral and visual way, by scratching off the paint, keeping the ghostly outline of what came before, and then making history anew.
The Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist, translated by Saskia Vogel
The Bear Woman traces the legend of Marguerite de La Rocque, a 14th-century French noblewoman who was taken to North America and, as punishment for a love affair on the voyage over, abandoned on an island in the St. Lawrence River—a fascinating tale on its own. But Ramqvist’s own motherhood and womanhood are interwoven atop and between Ramqvist’s discoveries (and dead ends) as she combs the brittle archives to learn more about Marguerite, reflecting on how much control a woman has historically not had about the legends of her own life. Ramqvist notes that each person who recorded the details of Marguerite’s story had “their own motives for why they had chosen to tell her story at all, and for how they told it,” acknowledging that she herself must imagine into Marguerite’s narrative as Ramqvist navigates the stormy channel between what is her projection and what is her unveiling of Marguerite’s truth.
Link to the rest at Electric Lit
PG notes that every historian decides what parts of history to leave in and what parts to leave out, the people to describe and quote and the people to leave out. Invariably, the vast majority of what happened is left out. Contemporaneously-written autobiographies, news articles, diaries and other accounts can help provide different perspectives, but, invariably, the large majority of the events and happenings are left out.
When done poorly or with pre-formed opinions on the part of the historian, histories can provide a completely misleading account of an era. When done well, histories can provide a glimpse that allows us to understand how lives differed and how events developed, as influenced by individuals with goals that sometimes were achieved, or partially-achieved and often were not.
PG doubts that human nature has changed a great deal, however. He is always reminded of a comment made some time ago by an attorney friend, “Thank God for human nature. Without it, lawyers would have nothing to do.”