Fiction As An Archive For Freedom Foretold
Audiovisual storytellers create the future
“Stories are how we learn to access the moral and emotional resources we need to face the uncertain, the unknown, and the unexpected mindfully.” – Marshall Ganz
Last week I wrote about the first finding from The Fragile Real study, the observation that fiction is realer than real. This week I am writing about the second finding: fiction as an archive for freedom.
Scholars have advocated to move away from thinking of an archive as a noun and instead to focus on archive as a verb that restores value to practices of remembering, collecting, preserving, and transmitting stories and knowledge within communities. When I was synthesizing the data from the interviews I realized that “archive” was all over the interviews but none of the interviewed artists used that word. For an ethnographer and/or grounded theory researcher, that is gold. Moving from data to analysis in research means identifying the emerging themes that are common across data points and the many ways in which the artists were using fictional stories as an archive hung together beautifully, thematically, and pointed in one direction: to create freedom by foretelling it.
Audiovisual makers are using fictional tales to build an archive that liberates us to new heights propelled by the spiritual dynamism of stories as part of fiction’s function. Here are some excerpts from the interviews:
“For me I think fiction is so important especially for a continent where our historical objects have all been extracted. 90% of the objects don't sit within the continent, right. And for me, objects are stories, objects are saying that, you know, these people were here and this is what they valued. This is what they wanted to put on record. And when you take all that away, I think most African countries have a weird gap around the pre colonial and colonial period where you just don't know what was going on, how people felt, who they were. And so, there's no filling that gap now, even if those objects come back. The techniques are gone, the people are gone. The memories are gone. So, doesn't such a continent need fiction, more than any other continent like what else are we gonna fill that gap with” (Interview #10).
“My stories, the ones that I'm doing now are all about questioning the basis of my country, you know, all the fictions that I'm writing are fictions that are questioning every piece of our history. And trying to remember” (Interview #27).
“Someone is always going to be custodian of our own stories and our histories. And we don't even have any particular place where we store our memories…where we collect them” (Interview #35).
“These fictional stories allow us to foretell the future, they allow us to have a record that shows us how to get there” (Interview #19).
“What first comes to mind for me is like an opportunity for, I guess, like an unfiltered reflection, if that makes sense. Fiction is a space where I can be completely free to reflect you know, as an individual and to reflect and it feels like it's also like a space where society can also reflect with a bit more freedom than they can I guess in documentaries. And I can then collect those reflections” (Interview #38).
Liberating Archive
In the Art and War of Story I discussed the continuity between the uses of fiction to create change among the audiovisual makers I interviewed for The Fragile Real study and the pioneers of Third Cinema, the L.A. Rebellion, and the vanguard of independent media. Part of this continuum is how their stories broke free and what the tales inside them reveal about using fiction as an archive for freedom. Building on this tradition, using stories to “make true”, untell lies, fill in missing gaps in our collective archive, and create new subject positions for audiences to consider is how you foretell liberation. This collective body of work, old and new, can be thought of as a “liberating archive”.
This making of liberation from fictional stories is both vision and practice at the same time. The liberating archive is valuable because of how old and new stories can inspire different conceptions of possibility. This practice of liberation is not just a vision but something tangible in the ways stories offer a different understanding of what we think about the world around us. The ways in which stories restore and give life to alternate conceptions of reality beyond a neoliberal worldview is gold in of itself.
These uses of storytelling as foretelling the future and as a means of redressing history’s omission is also what the scholar Saadiya Hartman coined as “critical fabulation”. Hartman’s work responds to the limits of the official archive in the lives of enslaved people. Hartman developed critical fabulation to address the absence or marginalization of African American lives and experiences in historical records. Her method acknowledges the limitations and biases in traditional historical archives, particularly regarding the lives of enslaved people and their descendants. Critical fabulation blends rigorous historical research with imaginative reconstruction. Hartman uses it to fill in the gaps left by incomplete or biased historical records. By doing so, she creates a narrative that, while grounded in fact, also incorporates speculative elements to give voice to those who were silenced or overlooked in traditional histories.
This method challenges the authority of standard historical narratives, especially those that have traditionally excluded or misrepresented marginalized groups. It's a way of rethinking history from the perspective of those who have been left out.
Critical fabulation shares an ethical imperative with the ways in which the audiovisual makers in The Fragile Real study use stories as archive to include often ignored or excluded accounts as well as correct misrepresented observations. Both give voice to those who have been historically silenced or overlooked as well as complicate what we take for granted.
Connecting methods like critical fabulation and bringing them into conversations about narrative change widens the aperture of methods, forms, and tactics we can deploy in our work and reminds us that our professional community shares a spirit-led kinship tied to what my mentor, the late great Dr. Paul Farmer often referred to as a need to “resocialize”.
This work to resocialize is about contextualizing the ethical dilemmas inherent to fields like ours, storytelling, where unequal power dynamics have largely shaped what we know about the world, often unchecked. It is why I started the discussion about fiction being realer than real with history’s silences as told by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. His observations are also relevant for the archive.
“Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”
Liberating archives restores the political roots of our stories, the same ones that dominating forms of power often erase, and all the artistry that comes with that. This art centers unsettling settled “truths” and/or breaking silences that are made.
Grounding our understanding of how stories do things in a historical approach to social change also makes it harder to depoliticize what we do. Connecting the progenitors of movements of storytelling and creative thinkers whose hallmark was social change to our work today also safeguards against turning the field of narrative shift into a technical discipline with no teeth.
Positioning fiction as a reservoir that replenishes and restores distorted worldviews also directs our attention to versions of “official” stories we may have inadvertently taken for granted. Official stories that unbeknownst to us may have hidden effects on how we see the world. At worst these hidden effects corrode our spirit, at best they impoverish our imagination, making it difficult to soar.