Struggle #1: Drawing and writing

LBoro, December 2020

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The irony is that I always end up writing about why I started drawing. I started drawing to avoid writing. And here I am, once again, tangled up in words and explanations.

 

This is a struggle already, isn’t it? One of the many struggles of doing anthropology: how we write is how we (mis)represent others and ourselves. I wish I could write like Joan Didion, but that doesn’t seem a realistic goal for my life. Not just yet. 

 

Not that drawing solves the struggle of (mis)representations, I am aware of that. Drawing in anthropology has an eerie aura: kinship diagrams and anxieties of categorisation, reminiscent of salvage ethnographies and orientalising representations of otherness. Fortunately, I am neither Paul Gauguin nor Paul Claudel.

 

I just draw. Sometimes I deliberately decide to misrepresent others. I just want to see how bold I can be and how far I can go.

No one takes drawings seriously, do they? I mean, even when we try hard to make drawing sound theoretically meaningful, we just end up being deadly auto-referential: despite endless methodological speculations on why drawing is good for ethnography, we just speak for and about ourselves. We, those who can draw.

 

Over and over again we return to how insightful drawing has proven for us, we the “gifted” ones. We are compelled, enticed and invited to make grand methodological arguments for ethnographic drawing out of very random personal experiences. To be honest, I hate that, though it is what I do all the time, too, and I also love it.  Why can’t my drawing just stand there as they are, as they look?