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Do you Swear to Tell The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth? |
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On Fridays, I have been attending the Osler Literary Roundtable at Duke University Medical Center in Durham. This is an opportunity for patients, staff, and community members in a roundtable discussion forum. On Friday, we had an Open Table, where we could read our work or the work of someone else to discuss. At the end, we had this fabulous and heated discussion of poetry, memoir and nonfiction.
This came about through the article recently published in The New Yorker entitled “But Enough About Me” by Daniel Mendelsohn. The article discusses why memoirs have become so pop-culture and the nature behind false memoirs (like James Frey with A Million Little Pieces). The discussion lead to the question of poetry. Should poetry be assumed by the reader to be non-fiction?
Most poets will proclaim no, that they may write poems from the point of view from a character. But assuming the poet as character has lead to many reviews leading to mis-information about the poet. How interesting that the exact same discussion has popped up with haiku. Should haiku be strictly autobiographical by pure experience or is haiku acceptable from what is imagined and created?
I am fascinated by this controversy surrounding memoir and poetry. Why would someone write a “memoir” of something they clearly have not experienced? Yet a more fundamental question is what is truth, personal truth, historical truth?
My father and I sat down a couple of years ago and talked about my childhood- I had memories of many negative aspects while his memories were of positive and happy experiences. Clearly both of our truths happened- to us. We were able to blend these perspectives, each of us creating a more whole picture than the one we had.
Similarly, when I was in Australia, I visited land that was an Aboriginal School both as a tourist with the white tour guide talking about the benefits of the school and then later with the Aborigine who took me behind the school and talked about how severely abused and starved he had been as a child. How few opportunities we have to see different perspectives clearly, creating a truth that is beyond our own.
Writer Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of the single story or the single perspective on Ted TV. She talks about the assumption of the single cultural story can lead to misunderstandings about different cultures or how a writer must write from only their cultural perspective.
One thing is for sure, as long as there are storytellers, in whatever form they may manifest, the controversy over truth is far from over.
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