Composing Home from Story: Digital Landscapes as Diasporic Sanctuaries?

Arola’s argument that “the seemingly landless place of cyberspace is always already part of the land,” as well as an extension of our bodies and relationalities moved me to look back at my MA capstone project, a multimodal, digitally housed text that incorporated images and audio recordings (212). When I set out to archive my family’s oral histories from Burma, I found sound, image, or text alone to flatten the sensed/sensing way I embody inherited story. Though I’d never been to Burma, those stories became both content and form: vibrantly imprinted in my mind, they were a landscape I could explore from infinite angles, capacious enough to form a sort of sanctuary for my spirit—even though I’d never physically been to Burma. In other words, my family’s oral histories were a home that couldn’t be fully captured by ink on paper.

When composing my capstone, then, I was implicitly trying to design a digital space contoured by my “embodied interactions” with places, people, and times (204). Thus, linearity was ditched for cyclicality: my essay held multiple beginnings and endings, belying the false excision singular beginning and endings require. I also tried to make the heard voices central to the story—not my written recollection or theory-anchoring alone—through including audio clips and images of the faces behind the stories. Finally, since story came before theory in how I’ve come to understand my inheritance of exile, resilience, and diaspora, I elevated my grandmother’s voice as the foremost compass and guide in the digitized text: her words were always in a larger, deep red font, refusing overshadowing by theoretical lenses. (267)

[Arola, 2018]