Reflection of event “Family Legacies, Imagined and Remembered” with Desert Diwata - Myra Khan

Last week, I co-facilitated a family photo and memory workshop entitled “Family Legacies, Imagined and Remembered” with the wonderful steering committee of Desert Diwata. The first half of the event consisted of a photo analysis workshop while the second half encouraged participants to engage their feelings based on the workshop and create some sort of reflective art based on the emotions tied to that family photo and story.

As with most of our workshops and events, I came out of the event with a deep feeling of archives glow. Although I had brought a simple old passport photo of my mother, the workshop discussion made me think deeply about the circumstances which had to emerge in order for the photo to be taken and what was not documented in the physical. I began to think about my mother’s journey to the United States and my grandparents’ journey to Pakistan from India. I began to think about what was left behind and what was created anew. I began to think about—and feel—the unspoken, undocumented memories of my family through my imagination.

My family doesn’t have a lot of old family photos or even records of my grandparents and certainly not of my great-grandparents. Most South Asian American families I know are in similar situations. Historically, South Asia did not have good record-keeping methods, neither physical nor oral, and what was preserved was more often than not destroyed through warfare. What wasn’t destroyed during the period of ancient warfare and empire was revised and retold by the colonizers in the way that suited their narratives and agendas, perhaps more pernicious than simple destruction. Our stories were no longer our own, authenticity but a memory, and we internalized the lies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Within archives, there are always gaps, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, embellishments, and fabrications. That is the nature of memory. Sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is unintentional. We are imperfect people documenting our imperfect memories. But when the trauma is so severe, those memories are not just imperfect but wholly incomplete, missing, lost. We feel orphaned from our roots, like we are born from nothing and desperately trying to reach for something familiar to sustain us. The fractured memories take generations to heal.

I don’t know much about my family history and as an archivist, that is something I think about frequently. I don’t know if I’ll ever have children of my own, but I know that someday, somewhere, my memories will mean something to someone. It might be my descendants, it might be a historian or anthropologist, it might even be a young woman searching for her people’s history like me, decades in the future. It is just as important to me as it is for them that I do my part to ensure that they are preserved for them.

Contact me, Jessica Salow, with feedback at Jessica.Salow@asu.edu, as I would love to hear from you your thoughts regarding the work we here at ASU are doing in community archiving around Arizona. We also want your feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. And if you would like regular updates from the CDA team please follow our CDA Facebook page or the CDA Instagram page to keep abreast of the virtual events we are doing monthly. We have also made some changes to our website to better describe the community-driven archives initiative at ASU Library so please visit that page to learn more about our work or to connect with the rest of our team.

See you soon!