a serious essay on funny.
August 16, 2010
Adam Linnard

I promised, at the conclusion of my previous blog, that my next would be apologetic. I won't presume that you thought I was going to apologize to you, charming blog reader. I won't. Not yet. No, the apologetic nature of this blog is directed rather abstractly, but also specifically to the people and places I've written about.

I feel uncomfortable with the blog format, like the mass email format, or the newsletter format, for its necessary reduction of context and its undemocratic voice. Blog entries are short anecdotes, and they are true in so far as I experienced them. But they are vulnerable, too, to that lens, because my lens is only one of those present at each encounter. This is especially true when the encounter is as divergently cross-cultural as those I am presently experiencing and writing about. To be the solitary author of a shared experience is to appropriate the encounter by defining it, disguised as an objective event, according to my own construction.

Mine is the only version of these stories that you will ever hear. And that matters because someone else would tell them very differently, and would give you a very different understanding. That's what the postmodernists mean when they argue that there exists no objective reality, claiming that everything is socially constructed. I don't agree entirely, but I know that the telling of an event in a short format such as this will always tell you more about its author than it will about its subjects. This blog will tell you more about me than it will about Sierra Leone, or about the fine people and other life forms who live here. Only their anecdotes could do that with due authority. But only mine are here, on your computer screen and mine, inadequately speaking for them. That can easily be a misappropriation of voice, a misrepresentation of the views and experiences of people who deserve their own representation. That's a violence against their own subjective truth.

To write this way laughingly increases the likelihood of incorrectly ascribing the absurd to the sincere, de-legitimizing what is legitimate, exoticizing what is everyday. That is to paint a self-legitimating, self-regulating society as a humorous stage for my own amusing experiences. We speak of serving the most marginalized, but this process can easily push these people - this society - to the periphery of what is thereby demonstrated to be normative: me, my culture, my language, and other such definite possessives.

That's the opposite of what I want to do, and of what these experiences actually and consistently teach me, which is that I am not normative. We are not normative. My assumptions, hidden from me by their assumed nature, are thrust into the open for dismantling and, in the process, are found themselves to possess the absurdity we find easier to designate to another. In no way does that mean these experiences and interactions are devoid of sense or value. Instead, it is what makes them so funny.

It's funny that the Chief has a xylophone theme song that plays very early in the morning and then for hours. It's funny because my cultural assumptions are that a xylophone is a children's instrument and theme songs are for cartoon characters. And those assumptions are entirely as absurd as having a xylophone theme song is if we accept those assumptions and live within them.

It was funny when we were on top of Middle Hill in the pouring rain and Saio requested a photo of him and Melissa on their knees, looking up at me with remorseful eyes. It was funny because our cultural assumption relates that position to begging, which is an odd thing to do on a mountain top, while Saio's cultural assumption was that it's a prayerful position, one through which we praise God for His evident abundance. Saio's assumption is one of beauty; ours is disparaged. It is we who laugh.

I don't want to misappropriate the voice of another, much less do that voice the indignity of doing so by displaying it like an anthropological curio, a deviation that I can point to and say, "Look how weird this is!" To do so is a very intimate colonialism.

My request, then, is that you, noble reader of blogs, continue to read my anecdotes with this in mind, so that when I highlight the humorous we don't allow our laughter to rob other people of their inherent and practiced dignity.

…were these supposed to be 250 words?