Identity

Smith and Watson suggest that one constructs his/her Identity by re-interpreting their experiences and memories and then writing about them with a certain degree of new insight or altered perception. In the Tool-Kit they also articulate that people choose to leave some experiences out while writing about others to illuminate some aspect of their lives they felt was significant. This freedom to choose what one includes demonstrates agency in their text as individuals carefully construct their identity through a conscious creation of an identity molded by the experiences and memories they incorporate in writing about their respective lives. Smith and Watson also talk about a ‘collective identity’ in which individuals identify themselves as part of a larger collective whole through religious, cultural, social, ethnic, or other forms of commonality. The autobiographical texts of the Puritans function as a great example of a collective identity as most identify themselves as a community of god’s chosen people. However, Smith and Watson provide a more complex mode of identity that shows the fluidity of the “multiplicity of identities [that] are not additive but intersectional” (RA 41). One’s identity is almost always complicated by conflicting voices, resistance to the collective, or overlapping and contradictory tropes of self-representation.

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is a great example of intersectional identities because his self-representation contains numerous complex nuances that show the intricate reality of one’s supposed ‘identity’. Rather than identifying with a collective cultural or ethnic group, Whitman identified himself as a member of the human race as a whole when he wrote “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman 27). However, he then goes on to complicate this notion by writing “I am not an earth nor an adjunct of earth (33)…clear and sweet is my soul…and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul” (29). He identifies himself as something (or someone) that does not exist alone, nor is he a part of something else when he wrote “nor an adjunct of earth” (27). The conflict in his quest for finding the ‘song of one’s self’ is expressed in the line “I am mad to be in contact with me” (27). Whitman’s “Song of Myself” demonstrates Smith and Watson’s intersectional identity, and the fact that defining one’s identity is a slippery slope that often leads to generalization that do not capture the essence of the individual.

Personal Take:

It’s a funny thing—identity—mankind has built fences, persecuted each other, and waged wars over perceptions of identity. It is my opinion that it is impossible to identify yourself…period. Yes you can claim you’re a Christian, but are you not also a human being that is a member of particular nation or ethnic group with different beliefs and customs than other Christians. No one can capture one’s own identity, they can only throw out endless amounts of their personal experiences, thoughts, memories, and ideologies; the final result is that someone else can combine all of this, and come up with their own interpretation of that person. As a kid growing up I used to identify myself as a skateboarder. In my middle school there were the skaters and the jocks, as well as a dozen other groups that we had labels for, but this is how my friends and I identified people. We would ask ‘do you skate?...oh…no. then that must make you a jock or something.” I just think its funny how much time and effort is wasted in trying to identify yourself or others. We should just take people for what and who they are in the moment rather than trying to slap a label on them, or even worse, engage in psychological profiling way of viewing other people.

-Joe Fleming