What sustains me: Nostalgia
Today I don’t have an audio version to offer, but you can use text-to-speech function on your device (here’s how OS/Android) or in your browser (here’s how).
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As we watch the Muppets Christmas Carol I give commentary to the four-year-old, explaining the story in age appropriate language and answering his questions. He is fearful of the ghost with no face. I’m curious why that was the one designed to be most feared. I ask a friend about this and somehow to him it’s obvious that the future would be the most frightening thing.
I was hoping for some comforting nostalgia. But it’s not been working for me. In its history the word was more to do with pain. “Morbid longing to return to one’s home”. As I age I realised I live in that kind of nostalgia a lot, but the home I am sick for is not one I have lived in before.
The culture I lived in as a child was not a comforting home. My family did a good job of giving much a home needed, but the emotional legacies were too much. We all swan in a culture that could not guide or pass on certain knowledge and experience that I needed in order to be a vital human. The culture was ravaged by racism and misogyny, leaving too much out of its histories and canons of stories and thought.
The ghost of my Christmas past is there in Miss Piggy and the narrow confines of what the one central female character is allowed to do and say. Once again Sara Ahmed assertion that to be a feminist is to be a killjoy sustains me through the process of questioning the sacred texts of my generation’s nostalgia. I have learnt to keep quiet in groups where everybody is joyously recalling how important Roald Dahl was to them or how brilliant the Harry Potter series is. I’m happy to hear that my father faced the same problem, recognising the misogyny and class hatred that was written into Matilda and its siblings. I had such a pang of nostalgia when I read my first ever Harry Potter book that I had to fling it at the wall. Once again the central female character was given such a narrow, obvious and sickening familiar option for how to behave that I couldn’t bear to return to the confines of the so-called home that was my origin culture.
I understand that Hermonie represents something very different for other people because stories are interpreted texts. We need a range of stories to reflect back a range of experiences. But I come from a culture that believes in mono stories. It believes in a Canon, it believes that it knows what the truth is. It believes it’s worth arguing about which is the better film.
My home is in a different culture, one which I think exists amongst a collection of subcultures and buried stories, it emerges now as the less known histories of the place and the people that I come from begin to be told. Colonisation wounded our DNA, as a culture we allowed systems of capitalism to dictate how we think about different groups of people based on their race, class and gender. It part of a project to control and rape resources. I don’t believe that there was a person/persons with this plan in mind — making it happen. It’s a system situation, a system designed to make it possible to rape resources, buy without question of what it costs and who it costs. It’s become a habit, disassociated from its origin.
The wounds are written in to my body, the knowledge I carry from my time in my mother’s womb and within her womb, when I was an egg inside my pregnant grandmother. The scarring of what we are part of materialised. And with it came all of the adaptions required to survive and to thrive. I inherit the ethic of questioning authority, the practice of asking where things come from, the experience of being a religious minority, the experience of being people that didn’t think like others thought, the experience of losing fathers to self-violence, the lessons every violation of my female ancestors taught. I inherit a responsibility to rest in this home instead of the childhood movies and stories, to discard the the empty version of nostalgia that like so much else I was given by capitalism.
