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Marginalia (1/13)

9/29/2019

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Marginalia. (plural. noun.) denoting marginal notes or embellishments

~ Anna ~

I want to offer a structure in and around the margin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the way my mother’s creativity never stopped. She was endlessly looking for new ways to solve situations and bring more color and new insight to basically everything she touched. And she knew this about herself. But she hasn’t had a word for it. Until I suggested one.

Marginalia. 

I like this word. I like marginalia in a similar way that I like the word marginalized and the framework each word can offer in seeing our marginal experiences. The 1960s concept of marginalizing people and groups helped generations confront a world that pushed some to the edges of society. Since then we have centered these stories in order to achieve social change. But what happens in the margins matters, has always mattered, and will always matter. My mother happened in many ways the margins.

Here is the opening of the essay my mother started in 2005.

Imagine a sheet of paper with text written on it. The edge is where the paper stops and begins. The margin is the space between the edge of the paper and where the text begins. And the complexity, if it is there at all, is in the text. 

Where is the edge of the world? I believe the place where I was born is part of it: just north of the Arctic Circle, not quite north of the tree-line, on a rugged coast facing the North Sea. The poverty ravaged fishing and farming community was home to a deeply religious population and was occupied by the Nazis during World War II. The town was so far out on the edge of the world that I have often thought of it as belonging to the nineteenth century. I surely was surrounded by thoughts and ideas from the nineteenth century when at three and a half I contracted polio. My parents were told by their neighbors that they must have done something horribly sinful and that God had punished them by giving me polio.

My mother was trying to center her own voice — in academia, within her family, on the written page. In a world that had marginalized her for decades, she understood that the complexity of life was only widely visible to others at the center of the page. But all of the hidden meaning of her life — her having been asked to submit a chapter in the first place, my clumsy attempt to support her English grammar, her whole life story edited down to several pages of stark but true sentences about her incredible life journey so far — was there all along in the margins, unfolding rapidly and beautifully and mysteriously. Her story has never been a center of the road story. From the beginning, she had to fight her way from the edge of the world into a mainstream setting in order to gain a marginalized identity. 

And that is where I want to meet her — still encoding the meaning of her life in the marginalia, the creative content that my mother is still making for herself around the center of the page. She is going through her old papers again, trying to figure out what to throw away. Which poem is an important footnote to her childhood? Which drawing deserves an asterisk? Which ideas merit further definition?

I am a white, nondisabled person with an increasing range of lived experience. But I carry a lot of middle of the road privilege and can still sometimes forget how much everything changes and be rapidly humbled again by a personal tragedy. My writing lives in the middle of the page, and my mother knows it. When she asked me to help her write the story of her life, she knew that I could get her onto the center of the page where people could see her. I can and I will, for as long as she wants me to. But the center of the page is not her story. Her story lives in the marginalia of life. And our story meets in the margin in several ways that are important to reading this book and understanding her story.

After many deep conversations, my mother and I have come up with some categories of marginalia that are important to how we live and how this story is written. All of these categories are offered as overarching concepts with some concrete implications that I will outline.

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Marginalia (1/13)
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Introductions (5/5)

9/15/2019

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~ Karen ~

You know, during my first twenty-seven years, my whole time when I lived in Norway, I did not really comprehend how many privileges I had as a human being, privileges that put me in the center of most of my life situations. My internalized disability oppression overshadowed my sense of self, eclipsing many of my other identities and taking me away from an ability to use my privilege responsibly. I was strongly identified with this early experience of betrayal by my world — a world that stopped welcoming me to the planet at age three. In Norway, I thought you were either part of the world or you weren’t, and in many ways, I thought that I was the second one. When I came to the United States I began to understand what it meant to be marginalized. It was really a time when I was discovering the margins, even though I had already been living in them. I woke up more. And I lived in and traveled through many margins with more awareness and respect for how those places took hold in myself and in others.

Once I started living in the margins, living with the framework of being marginalized as a way of understanding my experience, I was quickly able to see the margin as bigger than me, something outside of and surrounding me — around and beyond my individual identity as a marginalized person. It has since occurred to me that every individual person is a copy of the universe. We all have edges and margins and centers within ourselves. And I believe that what you and I are doing now, telling our stories to each other, writing down my oral history with your creative help — what we’re doing is overlapping our margins, taking turns seeing how our own centers shift in the dance of relationship. We can invite more people, the readers, to come and overlap their margin with our margins. To me, it’s a different way of thinking about margins and this whole project. It comes to me as a new framework where people are never all inside or all outside the margin, but both places, many places all at once. Being part of the margin is inhabiting many places.

But those
 places aren’t a given either. Some parts of my identity are never going to be clear to me unless I do something more about looking at them critically, like my whiteness and my class. And I can see now how taking responsibility for these parts of my life is honest and important to me. I see myself being more responsible for what I do with my life and less taken down by the world. I am changing how I see myself in these ways by telling myself my story again, but this time with new ways of thinking about what the margin even is.

There are social and cultural forces that create centered and marginalized experiences and spaces. That is a historical fact that continues today. But how the margin and the center and the edge live inside us are not fixed realities. My center might be your margin. Then again, even when you push me into your margin, pushed out of your buildings and laws and art, I will find a way to make that space my center, and in time, I will use my power to put you in my margin. And any of these situations might only be true today. Or in this location, and for a specific reason. Or this pattern might endure. But no one story tells the whole thing, and my story is one part of the way the world has marginalized people, one part of many, many people’s marginalizing ideas, and that’s maybe why it’s important for me to shake things up and make my presence known to as many people as I can.

​
My name is Karen. I am a part of disability history. I was here. I was on this planet. I left a mark. And I want the world to know and remember that.

Introductions (5/5)
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Introductions (4/5)

9/1/2019

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~ Karen ~

I’m not flowery when I write. I also want to start there, Anna. I think being plain is the best way I can stay honest in telling my story.

Ok, so my name is Karen.

I also love carbonated water.

And ok yeah, you got a lot of the rest of that right, Anna. I love what you write. And I love that we write differently. 

I agree that our stories are connected, and I see how telling my story to you and to the world can be part of what I need to do and part of your creative life both, as you say, at the same time. 

I have loved watching you find your way as a creative intellectual through your life. And I think it’s great that we both wrote something for the Oral History Review. We both found a home there for something important that we each had to say. We didn’t try to make that happen. But somehow we met there on our own. And I love that you and I have that together.

And it’s important for me to speak to you directly here, Anna. I know that you are speaking to the reader in your introduction. But I am speaking to you. 

In the Oral History Review essay that you published with your grad school friend, Claire, you said that your intention in bringing oral history and creative writing together in your studies was — let me get this exactly — to “explore possible overlaps so that we might benefit from a place of new understanding not yet imagined.” Yes. That’s what you and I are doing. We are trying to understand something new together that can only be understood through our coming together — our overlaps.

We are overlapping our thoughts and feelings, together exploring this space between us, here where you have largely taken the role of creative pioneer — or at least the person making all the Google docs for our writing drafts. You have started all of our to-do lists, made outlines, put interview notes with me into the different sections of our writing project, helped shape the telling of my life story, and planned a way to share our co-written story to a wider audience. You are looking into the dimensions between us and creatively interpreting what you see, so that others can see too.

I am taking another role — finally telling my story, my whole story. In the Oral History Review essay that I published, I challenged oral history researchers and readers to include oral histories by people with disabilities, because I thought that to form a full picture of social history we needed to include disabled people. 

In 1995, I argued that “Compared to the impact of historical studies of the Black freedom movement and the women’s movement, however, the disability rights movement has so far had little effect on historical scholarship.” A quarter of a century later, I still believe there is work to do in capturing the history of disabled people. I know because I am just now telling my story.

I don’t think of my story as the best story to do this — well, I didn’t until you and I started talking about writing my story down. You helped me see that I do want people to read my story and think about how I am a disabled person who needs to be part of world history. Many disabled people have told their stories. Many  more have not. Some of my friends have written books. Many who need to be remembered haven't yet. I have been hoping they would, encouraging them. And I think I need to finally listen to myself.

But when I try to think about a more granular impact that I want to have by telling my story, I struggle to think about the legacy I want to leave. You know, I find myself wondering What did I contribute just from having been on earth? I doubt my impact. I still often feel that I grew up in a very small, narrow setting, and that I spent the rest of my life being too timid because of my upbringing. I understand that this doubt is exactly the symptom of the trauma of my childhood, and I am working with my therapist and with you to see beyond that trauma. And it is hard for me. The church and my parents’ religious and cultural convictions were my boundaries with the world for so long, decades. Even half a century after I left, many days it seems to me that all I did was run away from those problems. I still worry that I wasn’t very brave.

But I know I did do something. I have a poem somewhere, Anna. I need to find that. It’s in English. It’s about how my father’s house had a closed door, and I had to use my free will to decide to go out that door. And once I got outside, the world did not look the way it had looked through his windows. I say it very well in that poem. I need to find that somewhere. 

So, yes, I see now that part of what I want people to understand is how I struggled as a disabled woman to leave my parents’ world behind in order to see the world more like the way it really was. And that’s a challenge for every person, to grow up and be themselves. Everyone becomes an adult in part through finding their own way, their own place in the world. I got big support for that when I found the disability rights movement, where I found what I considered to be the right side of history. 

But I do not feel that I stand out too much. I am part of a big movement. And that’s all I think I need or want. And the history of that movement is what I would like to help people see in my story. Though I also understand better now how my history, like other disabled people, with all the different parts and intersections is that bigger movement history. 

So yes, Anna, we are both writers here where we overlap, and we are both historians. We are both storytellers and we are connected as family. But I am telling the story of a long life, and you are coming into that story and helping me share it. And I am bringing my story forward with you because your creative energy and understanding of me is also a part of my story. And you’re helping me see new things about my life in new ways. You’re helping me have more understanding of myself and how I was caught up in a lot of big things in life. You’re helping me see more of myself, and that is helping me be kinder to myself and more responsible to the world. Telling my story is a responsibility I have to myself and to the world. It’s a responsibility I have to the other people in my life who were marginalized, and came up with that framework of understanding, and built their own world in those spaces, and when I came to this country, gave me a home there.

​

~ Anna ~

By choice and by circumstances larger than her, my mother has lived most of her life in the margins. And while she has fantasized that the juice of life must be happening in the center, my mother’s own vitality is scribbled all over the blank areas of her long life where others shut her out and where she was making it up as she went, arguing with the center, and armed with the liveliness of the margin’s own dialect, sensibility, and mystery. And my mother, after all of these years, is still open to inviting people in here to meet her in her marginalized life. And she has learned through firsthand experiences that she is also a traveler in the margins of society, going places where she has had the opportunity and ability to connect with others’ marginalized experiences and creative expressions, using her privilege to bring people in the margins forward, and getting clearer with each encounter that there’s audacity and real love in the people here.

Heck. There is audacity and love in my mother. And in me. We have been dancing around the edges of this project for years. And we’re prudent enough to finally make this shit happen.

In 2005 my mother was asked to submit an essay proposal about her life as a disabled person to possibly be included in an anthology of disability experiences. She wrote me that year and asked me to help her with the writing of that essay. I look back on the edits I gave her, a young twenty-something, and today multiple thoughts race through my head: Why was I being sort of mean? Why was I picking on individual words and not allying myself with the social justice framework? Why didn’t I know how to say more about the overall premise of healing and the joy of what she was working on? I understand now, that I was still integrating the lessons she had gifted me by raising me, in particular by choosing to raise me as a Jew. I was still healing my own wounds in my own marginalized places, still making sense of how my privileges fit into the whole person I wanted to be, and one way my process came out at that time was in needing to sound important, to sound like an authority. Her essay was not accepted to that anthology and was never published, and more than a decade later when she reminded me of this, I didn’t remember it right away. She told me then that she still felt the writing was not good enough. In that moment and at that time in my life, I could feel myself racing to mount a defense for her inside my own thoughts. I see you! I see us! We’re amazing! Why are we both still so unsettled about our place in life?! 

I hate this place where she feels unseen.

I cannot stand this doubt any longer, for either of us. We are out of time. This uncertainty is bullshit. She is a great writer, and so am I, and no internal or external authority can dictate that any longer. I’m putting my foot down. 

I’m putting my foot down, and I’m opening the page. You, reader, are the lucky one.

Come. Meet me in the margin with my mother. We will visit together. We will go through the center of the page, out beyond the edge, and back in to the many margins of a long and good life. There is so much meaning in our meeting here.

Introductions (4/5)
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    The Project

    An adventure in homegrown oral history making, Meet Me in the Margin takes the reader on a ride through radicalized Norwegian, American, disabled, mentally ill, queer, polyamorous, interfaith, and intergenerational landscapes, weaving together stories of love and transformation between worlds and across psyches.

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    Authors

    Karen Hagrup

    ​physical disability
    immigration

    bisexuality

    ​As an anti-Skinnerian educator and mother, a disability studies pioneer, and a staunch Obama supporter, I have spent my life fighting for people's rights and joy, my own included.


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    Anna
    ​Hirsch

    mental illness
    interfaith

    polyamory

    As a feminist movement writer and as a relationship-focused psychotherapist, 
    I have come to believe deeply in the power of intersectional, intergenerational, joy-focused storytelling as a powerful act of resistance. 

    Read more . . .


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