Textual Reorientation Training

History is often celebrated as a way of bringing the past into the present, as a guiding beacon for future practices, as a way of avoiding old mistakes. It’s also a way to celebrate national identity — we all have a shared history that connects us. It’s a way of spreading national values by teaching the same patriotic mythologies to every school-aged child. Those values inherently become the judge of each newly occurring myth, deciding whether it should take root in our collective social consciousness or fall by the wayside. Only what is selected as “History” becomes a part of our social consciousness. The rest is simply actions, events, ideas. Not really worth paying attention to. Not a part of “Us.” It might have happened in our society, but it’s not what makes our society. It is not Our identity. Not our “History.”

And yet.

The mythologies that are handed down do not suffice for some. Many feel lost even within the “Us” of our cultural history. For these people, the histories that would have made an impact have been cast aside, ignored, invisible. There is no connection to the past and no way of avoiding past mistakes. How do we learn from a history that has been forgotten? And perhaps even more importantly, how do we connect to society knowing that our actions, our ideas, our lives will be systematically excluded because they seem alien rather than familiar? How do we connect to each other if our realities are so erased that there isn’t even a vocabulary with which to articulate it or to write it down? With the death of the individual goes the death of their history, and each new wave of unconnected people are left to relive these silent(ced) cycles.

When the written evidence of sexual slavery forced onto the Japanese Comfort Women was destroyed, all that remained of that history were the individual testimonies of the victims themselves. These testimonies were not believed by friends, family members, and government officials because they seemed to be outlandish, unsupported, and spoken only by “dishonorable” women. To speak about the experience brought further shame and mistreatment upon the women. They were not allowed to write about the experience because it would be slander against the Japanese government. The women could not organize because they did not have a way to connect to each other. Their stories went against the national mythologies. They were cast away and forgotten. It took over fifty years for these women to find a voice and a vocabulary that would allow them to speak of their experience. Now that they have it, they ask that their experience be recorded in text books, in official government documents, in the social consciousness. They ask that others who feel outside the realm of the traditional History can connect to the Comfort Women’s struggles as an aid to their own.

H/histor(ies) are always selective. No single history can ever emcompass the whole of experience. We will always orient ourselves to certain texts over others, and we will always gleam our understandings of those texts based on how we orient ourselves to their contents/contexts. But the writing of social histories gives us the chance to Re-orient. Rather than orienting ourselves to the same traditional texts and/or from the same traditional positions, a Re-orientation allows us to bring to light what might otherwise have been cast aside, to forge connections between people, cultures, and lives that might normally be rejected from the traditional History, to aid those struggling to find a voice and a vocabulary for their own experiences.