In Every Old Photograph Lurks a Catastrophe
In a recent essay in the Literary Review of Canada, historian and writer Christopher Moore remarked on innovations in history writing by women, who demonstrate a personal engagement with their subject matter and a willingness to depart from the tradition of impersonal scholarship and objectivity.
Writing about the 2022 Cundill Prize winner, Tiya Miles, Moore observed that she studied marginalized people through “marginalized fields of research: material culture, genealogy, oral history, family lore.” Her methods are expanding the boundaries of historical scholarship. Using the objects that accompanied a young girl sold into slavery in South Carolina as the starting point of her research and narrative, Miles’s work shows the value of examining the past through the meagre objects left behind by those who were the victims of oppression. Although her research is scrupulous, her aim, according to Moore, “is to break a reader’s heart, to guide one to imagine, to weep, to pound the desk, to look into the abyss. This work is the furthest thing from detached, objective, or “scientific” history. Not long ago, it might not have been accepted as history at all. This year, the Cundill jury thought it was the best history book published in English anywhere in the world.”
Like Christopher Moore, I think that writing the history of marginalized people requires different methods, and is particularly suited to the use of the narrative techniques of literary nonfiction. So I was especially grateful to see that Moore observed a similarity in the narrative approach of Wanda’s War with the methods used by historians like Tiya Miles. In a recent blog post about the book, Moore mentioned that it was dedicated to precisely the same task as Miles’s book: writing the histories of marginalized people who left no record of themselves, but whose stories tell us much about the world that is not recorded in conventional scholarly writing about the same events. That’s history too.
In the case of Wanda’s story, an old Life magazine and a cookie tin of photographs of Wanda’s postwar journey from displaced persons camps in Germany to a Quebec politician’s factory were the catalysts for my investigation into her past. The philosopher Roland Barthes has observed that “in every old photograph lurks catastrophe”. As I examined the photographs in Wanda’s cookie tin I realized how little I knew of the world she came from. The few pre-war family photographs that survived the war showed little foreboding of the catastrophe that scattered Wanda’s family across the globe. I quickly realized that I couldn’t tell that story without understanding the historical setting of Wanda’s early life, which turned out to be much more complex than I first imagined. In the result, the book touches on a multitude of events and themes. In Moore’s words, “Marsha Faubert has pieced together a remarkable amount of information both about (Wanda and Casey) individually and about the world-historical events through which they lived. From family genealogy to pre-war Polish rural society in Eastern Europe, to gulags and slave labour camps, to the military history of World War II, to the intricacies of postwar immigration and adjustment, to the politics of memory, she has got it all in one story.”
