Purple Jacaranda - Narrations on transcultural identity development

Stephan Wolting & Claude-Hélène Mayer

“There’s something I wanna tell you …”

All memories are profane

and all memories are holy,

but that’s all we have,

we haven’t anything more.

– Ferdinand von Schirach, What remains …

On 10 October 2014 the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Indian child advocate Kailash Satyarthi and to Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot in the forehead by the Taliban because she had insisted on going to school. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel called her the “Identity of Pakistan”.

This could be considered as a concession to the significance of an intercultural or transcultural background. In spite of the recent cautious approach, the strongly Hindu-inclined India and the Muslim Pakistan – two nuclear powers – are still age-old enemies; however, in our context it seems more crucial that, along with her story, Malala travelled all around the world, showing how autobiographical stories can influence the world – maybe even how they can change the world.

Many people were deeply moved by her fate and by the willingness to tell her story, so much so that they were listening, captivated by the description of her life. What has happened in this widespread political context can be applied in a narrative-structural way to the microcosmos of the lives of many other people.

Telling stories, listening to autobiographical stories and sharing stories have particular importance in society. “Life stories” have the gift of complementing one another, they can be interlinked and, at best, they can inspire other stories or generate new narrations. A quotation from the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel, when he spoke at the end of a series of lectures in Frankfurt (“Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen”), further emphasises this position:

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I thank you very much. In the beginning I was very afraid of you, but you were lovely and I was getting close to you, because I recognized that you do like listening to my stories. You did something we all should do more often: to allow to me my stories. The world would look much better if we would allow to somebody his stories, allow to our friend and to our girlfriend, to our wife and to our husband, to our children – and to our sick neighbours, too.1

People are authors and people’s biographies are what makes them. There is a very close connection between the creation of a lifestyle and a literary work. The term author or female author has always been tied very closely to the biographical identity, according to the German writer Martin Walser, who wrote the following sentence in his diary: “The human being is a writer (better said: a storyteller), and if he isn’t still a writer, he isn’t a human being any longer.”2

We would like to inspire you with this work and to give you the opportunity to identify somewhat with it and, in the best case scenario, for you as the reader to write down your own story too. Stories have the power to help us to live and to keep alive our memories in our special way.

The researchers of American Creative Writing Studies, notably among them Alexander Steele3, have pointed out the close connection between autobiographical and creative writing, without focusing too much on the influence of the sentence or a definition of aesthetic taste. Teachers of writing, such as Gary Snyder, have given their students an idea of the creativity, inventiveness and high level of aesthetics with which students or participants of their workshops are able to develop and write stories about their own lives under professional guidance.4 In this way the perception of the other, the empathy, the role distance, the tolerance of ambiguity and eventually the way in which metacommunication takes place could be trained and taught.

Theoretical reflections referring to the “construction of otherness”, specifically “one’s own growth” are the force behind the project: the theories and conceptions about the discourse of brain, commemoration and memory, the psychology of development, the narratology as well as conceptions (concepts, scripts and patterns) concerning the trans- and intercultural development of young people. We understand the discourse of memory and what the brain does as put forward by Daniel L. Schacter: “We ARE Memory, our identity is memory.”5 In addition, Jean Piaget reflected on the idea that the psychology of development draws attention to the diverse and heterogeneous development of an individual on the one hand, and to the medium of memory and how memories can adulterate memories, on the other, as he illustrated with a short story:

One of my oldest memories would – if it would have been true – have taken place in my second life year. I see the following scene vividly happening exactly in front of me. I was sitting in a pram, which was pushed by my nanny to the Champs-Elysées, when a guy came and wanted to kidnap me. The leather strap held me back, but the nanny tried to resist the man and to defend me (therefore she got some minor scratches in her face which I remember and “see” until today). A crowd of people was gathering immediately and a policeman with a small pelerine and a white stick came up, whereupon the guy fled in panic. I can see, until today, the whole scene, how it took place close to the metro-station.

But when I was fifteen, my parents got a letter from that nanny, in which she informed us about her accession to the Salvation Army Counters; she was expressing her wish to confess her former mistakes, especially to give back the watch, which she had got for this – including her self-made scratches – completely invented story. As a child I was supposed to listen to this story, in which my parents believed. In a way of visual memory I did project it into the past. So the story is a memory of a memory, however a wrong one. Many “real” authentic memories are of this kind.6

This quotation already suggests that there is essentially no difference between the “work of remembering” and the shaped and fictionalised memory, which is shown in the work “99 ways to tell a story” by Raymond Queneau, a collection of 99 retellings of the same story.7 The narration or the presentation of something that has happened is always structured and literalised.8

Accordingly, we have tried to inspire the authors to tell a story based on their memory which is itself still fiction. This was to be connected to the focus on the development of an intercultural identity, as set out, for instance, by Davis S. Hoopes,9 indicating that there is a development of identity/personality from ethnocentrism to an ethnorelative multicultural personality.10

There is an essential contradiction to this purpose, which could hopefully lead, in the best case scenario, to a constructive and productive way of dealing with the memories in these stories. The contradiction is that on the one hand literature aims at an individual approach to memory; however, cultural studies or research about intercultural communication tends to be geared towards collective or ethnic participation. Referring to a quotation by Goethe that the specific nature leads to the general nature, and vice versa, the general to the specific, we hope that it still works in this volume.

The final focus is shifted in the sense of a narratology of the world according to fields of research and living. In his latest work, the social-psychologist Harald Welzer points out the significance of new stories or the retelling of stories, to get new ideas of cultural and newly constructed mentalities and to escape from the old patterns, frames and scripts.11 In doing so, we can believe we are going to change the conditions and the situation of the world. Welzer was the founder of a new foundation called Future 2, where people try to tell small stories from alternative points of view to the world. According to Welzer, this is how we can survive and save the world. It begins with the individual story, and so everybody should try to tell his or her story.

We hope to present you with an entertaining and educating mix of different stories/narrations of intercultural encounters, developments and special situations.

Berlin, Pretoria, Oktober 2015