While a student, and at the encouragement of my mother, I recruited my grandmother to help me collect ghost stories from her oldest sister, Julia, the most renowned storyteller and tamale maker in my family. In addition to learning a little bit about linguistics and a lot about transcribing interviews I also heard for the first time the tale of how her family came to Texas from Torreón, Coahuila. In honor of Diez y Seis and with all due respect to the still precarious status of immigrants and refugees in the United States I am retelling it to you today.

Special thanks are due to my mom Janis, Grandma Pauline, and Aunt Julia who guided me to that kitchen in south central Austin, January 1997, where I first heard this tale.  I had to exercise a little poetic license to weave that conversation into a single narrative but its really Julia’s story. Believe me, when its family holding you to account you’re going to do your best to tell the tale right!

SPOILER ALERT I hesitated to put this next paragraph ahead of the narrative, but disliked placing it at the end of the post. Go read the story first and then come back, I’ll wait… Okay… At the climax of the story the captain of the Villistas spontaneously decides to spare Julia’s father’s life announcing that Frank is his guardian angel. There’s some interesting symbolism here that might have been clearer had Julia’s ordering of the events been more linear, but then she was already quite elderly when I recorded the story. First, the soldiers had already rounded up all the men and locked then in a warehouse, although Frank was just a boy he should have been with them but somehow they missed him and he slept through it. Second, he is wrapped in a sheet because he rolled off the bed when the raiders stole the mattress. Thus, not only does he appear out of nowhere but he is literally clothed all in white, hence why he is like an angel.

NB. At the end of the story, after the family has risen from destitution to some degree of stability, Julia describes herself as being in a house where “we felt like we were okay.” Being that she and her friend have easy access to the river that is only a short horse ride away this is probably the Deep Eddy house, which is where the ghost stories begin.

The Castruita Family Flees to Texas to Escape War in Mexico

by Aunt Julia, with a little help from my Grandma and me

When I was little, you see my daddy would live in a big hacienda. I don’t know how they call it (laughs). Hacienda. And do you know it’s all big and round and all the people sleep all the way round, it’s adobe. Las casas. The houses were made of adobe. Adobe, yes. And it was a big, high wall all the way round the hacienda. Like a village. There was just one gate.

And we live there, my daddy was the el gerente. Manager. There was a water tank beside the house. There was a big windmill that pulled out the water. And a vegetable garden. On one side was the produce for the people, the vegetables and stuff. But over here on this other side, the other side of this huge water tower. It’s as high as the house on the other side, is where they had the fodder for the animals. And they plant oats and alfalfa.

See the man that brought my grandfather over here to Texas is the one that owned that big hacienda. He had a restaurant and one of the biggest hotels in Torreón. They had a warehouse where they had all the stuff that they produced from farming.

In the middle of the night. They were all asleep. And remember now they’re little houses, the hacienda is all these little adobe houses. The rooms all connect. That’s where all the help lived. The people who worked the fields. You see it go around like that and all just rooms together. My father is one that managed it all, he oversaw all the help that worked there.

They were asleep. About two in the morning. There was one guy who was the watchman. And he made the rounds. The Villistas came. They forced their way in.

It was the summer. They were sleeping outdoors.

They pointed their rifles. They put a noose around my father’s head. Everybody got up. They wanted my father to go and open all the warehouses, they were going to loot them. They looted the horses and the mules. They had the wine, the beans. Everything. Cheese.

They took all the men and put ‘em all in one room and locked it. It was an empty warehouse. They locked ‘em in there, just the men. They only left my mother and me, and then everybody else, all the families and everything, they were locked. I cry and cry. But daddy gave ‘em a lock that really didn’t lock. He knew that, but he gave it to ‘em. So they locked it.

My mother, they insisted that my mother give ‘em money and they went into the house where my mother lived. And here I am, a little girl grabbing onto my mother’s skirt. And they tear me away from her, from mama. And I’d come back and then they had a gun, a rifle pointed at my mother all the time. They came in. They took all their clothes. All the bed linens, everything. She had an old sewing machine. And her purse with the money. My mother’s purse with money was inside the sewing machine.

“Give us money!”

They never did find the money cause she had it locked, her purse was locked inside. They don’t find the money. And I was crying and screaming! And my mother would hold me. The soldier were trying to take me. He tried to kill me. With the, you know, turn of the gun. Tried to hit me. And my mother’s arm is all bruised where they hit ‘em.

So then he went and take out my daddy. And you know, Frank. He wrapped in one the sheets. They took the mattress, everything. They went out, take out my daddy. They tied him up.

Down the road from the hacienda was where the Chinese lived and they had orchards, okay. They wanted to know where the China-men lived.

So my daddy walk behind there. Tied up with the rope. He was walking behind the horses. They were going to hang my father. Frank, they went behind him. He was nine years old. He follow him. They were going to put the noose around his neck. They were going to hang my daddy.

Frank he ran and grabbed my daddy by his leg, and then the captain said, “That’s this man’s guardian angel.” And so cut down the rope. And they let him come back.

Frank slipped out. He roll in one of the sheets. And they took him (laughs). Yes, because they take the mattress and everything. But he roll to one corner they don’t see him. Cause it was dark.

And do you know, my mother make coffee right away. And they put some alcohol in their cafe. They were drunk when they left there. The soldiers. They insisted that my mother make coffee, and then they just poured this liquor in. It was 100 proof! (laughs)

They had big cans full of well, it looks like curds and whey. Ready to make cheese. The soldiers just reached in there, would eat the cheese. The cheese, what they need to do was to strain it you know. But they would just eat it. It was a big mess, where they had, you know, all stuck their hand and it was dirty.

All right, when they released my daddy and Frank they came back and because he put just a false lock on the door he opened it and released them. All the people from the hacienda, including me and mama (laughs), just night clothes. We don’t have nothing. Next day my daddy had to come to town and buy some clothes for us to use and everything. The soldiers stole them all. Yes, they took everything. They tore down the place.

They did leave after they decided not to kill my daddy. Yes, yes. They went to the Chinese and kill all the Chinese. And took whatever they want. This was very common. And they, cause that men just live on the mountains. They were guerrillas, more or less. But they’d come, it was very common for them to raid whatever little hacienda was close.

Oh yes. And then, and they told my daddy when they come back they find him there they gonna kill ‘em! So we stay about two weeks there and then my grandfather Anacleto, my daddy’s father say, “No you don’t stay here nomore. Go to Estadio Unido.” Go to U.S. Cause they gonna kill him and his whole family gonna be awful. So my daddy left, he had to go to Austin. He know somebody in Austin.

Yeah, the brother of the man, Mr. Lewis’s brother. This one named Carlos? Charley? Carlos. We stay there for six months, then my daddy went back and bring us to here. To Texas. He came here first, alone. And then he established himself, and then he went back in six months. And brought us back. My daddy went on a train. We went on a train, yeah.

Whenever these guerrillas, they took everything. Nobody go out. And no food, nothing. There wasn’t anything left so what we did was to grind corn, dry corn, and from that she made like a porridge. And that’s what we ate. Just little-bitty cups. One each.

On top of the roof of the house they put the machine guns. So nobody go out. They don’t sell nothing. The stores was close and everything. After the guerrillas would go through the government would send train loads of food. But then all the people, you know, didn’t have anything so they all mobbed the train. And they pass out wheat, flour. Each family would get just a little box which was equal to about a quart of flour, beans, rice.

Okay, see, my daddy after this raid, you know, when they cleaned out the hacienda the owner of the hacienda said, “You better go because they’re going to come back.” And in fact they told my daddy that the next time they came, if he was still there they will kill him. So he, that’s when he came to Texas.

My father’s cousin wrote him and said, “You’d better come back for the family cause, see the rations, your family is starving. You better come back.” So that’s when my daddy went back, six months later. And he brought us.

So we come. We stay in Piedras Negras. One week, because my daddy you know he didn’t have no passport. Well they detained ‘em. While the whole family had a passport, my daddy didn’t. He had only a tourist pass and it had run out. We were a week there, in Piedras Negras at the border. Doing the paperwork.

When we came over, it was Augustine. Mother. Maggie. Frank. Me (Julia). Four children and my mother. And we traveled alone, because see my daddy came the other way around. They traveled alone. I remember that picture of my mother, she was so skinny. But we had had hardship for six months. Down there.

When we first got here we lived in this big ol’, this empty store. And it was just one big, you know, hall. And behind there was this big water tower with a metal tank because it was a windmill pump. And it was so cold that year that in the morning there’d be a huge icicle on the side of the tank. We had no bedding.

In the evening, when we went to bed my mother would wash our clothes and hang the clothes to dry inside the building. There was one stove where she did the cooking. Wood stove. And we all slept around it. But because she had to wash the clothes, cause that was all the clothes we brought what was on our back.

And there was a little black woman that lived near there and she gave my mother some old rattly-tattly blankets and we wrapped ourselves in it to sleep. And the kids wake up in the middle of the night, they’d be so cold, they’d be crying. My father would wake up in the middle of the night, add wood to the stove so it would stay warm. He’d kill birds and coons and possums and squirrels. And that’s what we used to eat when we first come to Austin. And next to the house it was a big field of cabbage (laughs), steal the cabbage from the guy next door. It was so sweet to steal cabbage like that (laughs)!

For 25 cents a day the boys were hired to spinach. Turnips, big turnips. Now my father was working in the dairy already, but this man that hired him would give him breakfast which my mother cooked. She would fix for each one of the hired hands, bacon and biscuits. And my daddy would eat one egg and one slice of bacon, and give my mother the other egg and the other bacon and the biscuit and she then took that divided it among the four kids.

See for a whole year we were there with that man. Then after the end of the year this other man hired him and he gave us a house to live. And then we were no longer hungry because we have everything there. There was a lady she would give us eggs and bacon. And my mother had a vegetable garden. Peach orchard. Grapes. You know every weekend they go fishing, perch. The lady had two sons and one daughter, and they’d climb up and cut the grapes. So see we felt like we were okay because they had all this to eat. They put netting around the trees in the orchard. Plums and grapes.

The little girl was my same age and we would get on the horse and go play on the beach near the river. We go on the river and play there.

Okay. We’ll cut it there.

Julia was born in 1911 on a hacienda in Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico, the fourth child and second girl of eleven. Fleeing the Mexican revolution her family settled in Austin, Texas, in 1918. Julia never attended school, but instead as one of the older children was in charge of the house and it was here that her skills as a cook and storyteller emerged.

Many in my family would single out her tales of the supernatural as her most memorable stories. I think Halloween makes for a fine occasion to share them and I hope you enjoy!

The first two take place when the family lived on a dairy near Deep Eddy in the 1920s, this house and all the land around it was haunted. Julia attributed these unexplained events to the remains of old barracks built by the soldiers of General Santa Anna. The second two stories take place in a haunted house on East 6th Street that the family lived in from the 1940s until sometime in the 1950s.

The Headless Man

So, one day me and my sister Maggie went out. You know, the outhouse is what, half block, back, way up top near the pasture.

So we turn on the lantern to go out in the middle of the night, between 10 and 11 is when we go to bed.

My mother had a little baby, Leonarda. Leonadita. And she was sick and my mother, she was rocking in the chair because she never stopped crying. Cry and cry and cry.

And we finished clean the kitchen, me and my sister, and we say, “Let’s go out.”

And I had the lantern. And just behind us was a little tree. And we had a goat there. Because the baby milk, it drank goat milk.

And I saw the goat because, you know, the light flashed her, and I saw the goat standin’ up and go round and go round.

And then I turned around and I see a man. With black suit, white shirt, but no head.

(dramatic pause)

And I scream! And I say, “Mama there’s a man there!”

And my sister Maggie, she went in and close the door. And lock the door. And it don’t let me in. And I stand. I freeze.

(laughs)

And Mama stand up and “Go Maggie, and open the door.”

And I can’t talk I was so frightened. And my mother, “What’s wrong?” And I can’t tell ’em. I can’t tell ’em cause I can’t talk!

When finally, you know, my mother prayed for me. Finally I talk. And she say, “What happened?”

I say, “Its a man standing back where the goat is, with a black suit, white shirt but no head.”

And my daddy say, “Aaagghh!” He got the rifle and went out. And look at nothing. The goat was calm. Chewing, chewing, chewing.

And do you know? I saw the man walking, cause I was standin’ like that and he walking where that old foundation. Is the place where the chimney, you know. And he get there. Disappear!

Mm-hmm. Yes. And so my daddy went around, don’t see nothing. And the goat was lay down. Chewing. Chewing.

And he say, “No, is your imagination.” I say, “No! I saw it! I seen the man, I seen the man! And he walkin’, he out there and he disappear.”

Well, and that thing pass.

Buried Treasure

Oh. And ooh, we had lots of things.

Until my daddy tell Mr. Guildard, “We don’t live there, because they don’t ever sleep.”

And night you could hear on the roof that something fell on the roof!

(slaps her hand on the table)

And roll down. And my daddy go out. Nothing. Real quiet. Nothing.

And my daddy say, “We cannot live no more there! They don’t let us sleep.”

And from the dairy we can see, you can see a little flames, green, go like this.

(makes flickering motions with her fingers)

Go like this. Because they say, you know, Santa Anna bury money or something.

Well one day me and Arto, Arto was I think three years old, and we went to play there. And we dig. Soft, soft! The dirt was soft. And we started to dig and dig and dig.

And we find, we find so many little tin circles. Like that, we got a bunch!

And we come and tell to my mother. And, “Don’t dig there. Go and put it up, and fill up that gap.”

So we do that. And then my daddy talked to Mr. Cisneros. And he say, “Is money in there. Let’s go dig.” And he went and dig. And dig and dig. But the ground is hard, when we dig it was soft.

And then, another friend to my daddy say, “Why don’t you leave the things that she find and maybe they turn into money.”

And then we tried to go dig again. It was hard like a rock. We could dig no more.

Is when my daddy tell to Mr. Guildard, “We don’t need to live there no more.” Because we see so many things in there and hear things and everything.

So they moved us to the big house, they move there. Until we move to Del Valle.

Ghost Dogs

And, do you know, before that when we still there, my sister Trinny, we work in a donut shop. And we close at nine o’clock, I think.

We lock up and, and the corner of, well now its 35th, at the time we called East Avenue.

And right on the corner there is a little stand, they sell tacos. Well, and Trinny say, “Let’s go get some tacos, so we can go drink coffee with the tacos.”

“Okay.” We went and bring the taco. And we went home. And I tell Trinny, “Set the coffee while I go to the bathroom.”

So I went to the bathroom and then she say, “Aaaaahh!”

I say, “What’s wrong?”

“Two dogs come in!”

(she laughs)

“They went to the other room.”

Because we had the bed there, to sit there, me and her, and then on the dining room. I say, “Trinny you makin’ it.”

“No I see two dogs. One brown and one black.”

Well we turn off the light. And we went and looked with the flashlight under the bed, under the things. Nothing.

Well, let’s sit down and eat the tacos and coffee. We were sit down when…

(raps knuckles on the table for the sound of dog’s nails)

The two little dogs come in running! And go out. And I say, “Well!” One black and one brown.

You see the dogs, you know how many dogs that have the little feet? [dachshunds]

(laughs)

And you know they have a screen door. How can they go in? We don’t see nothing, you know, and the back is just sand. And next morning, when I wake up, I went out. And I say, “This is dogs. I can see tracks.” Nothing.

That’s a ghost house!

(laughs)

The Curandero

The back porch, it was a big sleeping porch and right on, it have two steps.

The curandero come to our house. We sit all the way round and we start to, you know, put the hand like that. And he start to pray. And then he say, “Here in this house something is buring there, by the steps.”

Because, you know, Luisa, Augustine’s [3rd] wife, she come and go outside. She miss the apron [it had disappeared off the clothesline].

And my mother, “I don’t know what, she missed it maybe. Something.” And she said, “Now Frank and Augustine. Go and dig under the steps. Pick up the step up, and dig.”

But it had to be at night. At 12 o’clock in the night. And they dig back there, it was a tin can. And they bring it to the table cause we saw it. It was full of black wax. She cut the can with the scissors and all the little, you know, little dolls make it out, out of the material of the apron what Luisa lose it.

And do you know, everybody we have somethin’ wrong. I think he say in my stomache. So what we have, the dolls have the pin in there.

So he take care of pullin all them parts and put them again in the can. And then he told Frank and my daddy to go, cross the bridge, the Montopolis bridge. And he say when they go in the middle of the bridge just drop it, on the water. With the scissors and everything.

And you know, cause Augustine when Bertha die, he got married with Prado. He say that lady is the one that do all that thing. We she pay somebody to do it. She pay the witch to do all that.

You know how the house was two rooms here. And we sleep in this room and one night. I can feel that somebody digging. You know, I can hear digging. And we, I stand up and I run to my daddy. I tell him, “Somebody’s digging in the back.”

So he went took flashlight, he didn’t see nothing. “Naw, maybe you dreaming.” But I can hear. You know somebody dig, you can hear. I hear.

That day when that man get all this, he say, “That’s when you hear all that.” Everybody was well. No pain, nothing. Because he took all the pins out the dolls that she made.

I’ve used this last story in many magic and ritual lectures, and occasionally I will have a student become very disturbed by it. There is a lot of profound symbolism going on.

Present throughout these storytelling sessions was my grandmother Pauline. She was there to elaborate and explain, jog Julia’s memory, and translate Spanish. About this last story she explained that Augustine had caught his second wife, Francis Prado, in the act of cheating on him, he “knocked her around” as she said, and that was the end of the marriage. Prado was seeking revenge when she hired a witch to place this curse.

Later in the interview Julia would mention that at the time, in their neighborhood, she knew of “a black woman” who was familiar with Voodoo. This woman had warned her that the appearance of the ghost dogs was a omen that something was buried at the house. A very intriguing natural symbol! Dogs like to dig and bury things, even ghost dogs.

…

Creating and telling a story is a time consuming process, so it follows that if a person is going to commit enough of themselves to a project, such as the creation of a new story, they would have a reason to do so. The reason for bringing a story into being is commonly referred to as the author’s intent. What does Julia intend by telling these stories? What purpose do they serve?

I think to answer this question properly we must consider the setting of where Julia performed these stories, the kitchen. The audience would have been the children that were constantly in Julia’s care. To pacify the children while they wait for dinner to be done Julia would tell all the stories she knew, fairy tales like Cinderella were standard.

But by telling stories that were already a part of her, a part of her history, Julia made herself a part of the work she engages in. This makes the otherwise endless task of being a domestic more special. From one point of view the purposes of her stories are to entertain, which they do wonderfully. But on a deeper level these stories are what made Julia into the special person she was for her family. The purpose of Julia’s stories are that they give her a purpose. And like her delicious tamales they brought her great renown.

Non-sports fans, let me set the stage.

Over the course of the basketball season the teams play each other and develop reputations for their skill (or lack thereof), and the culmination of the season is a tournament in which only select teams are invited to play. There’s a lot of drama leading up to the tournament as a convoluted selection process decides which teams will play and in what order they will meet. As the anticipation builds and the media hype machine goes into overdrive we often hear the basketball tournament marketed as “the Dance” or “the Big Dance.” In this narrative the selection process is likened to a courtship ritual, with the teams as available women each of whom wants to make herself appear as desirable as possible in order to draw the most attention from suitors.

The selection process results in a numerical ranking for each team that represents their quality. The contest begins by pitting the weakest against the strongest. In theory this should give the strongest teams the best chance for advancing, but every year their are surprising upsets in which the underdog beats a heavily favored team.

If an underdog wins twice in row it is said to be a “Cinderella.” In this well known folktale, Cinderella, a girl in a structurally disadvantaged position in her family, undergoes a transformation in which she is revealed to be more beautiful and powerful than her mother (and sisters) who had previously tormented her. In the Disney version of this tale, the version most popular among young people in America, Cinderella goes to a dance with her identity masked and while she’s there she is courted by a Prince as her sisters and mother look on powerless to stop her.

Note how the tournament proper begins with 64 teams. The games commence and the winners advance to the round of 32. After the conclusion of the second round of the tournament there are only 16 teams remaining and these are said to be the “Sweet Sixteen.” Sweet Sixteen is also the name given to an American coming of age ritual, typically for girls.

Thus it is possible for a college basketball fan to say something like, “Well at first it didn’t look like we were going to make it to the Big Dance but we had a Cinderella season and made it all the way to the Sweet Sixteen.”

Isn’t it interesting that the success of male athletes, who are celebrated for performing a particular kind of masculinity that emphasizes physical prowess, would be heralded in a narrative that prominently featured feminizing metaphors! What is going on here?

I came up with two ideas.

One. What is feminized about the team is all of their emotions, their hopes and dreams of success. This part of the team is delicate and vulnerable like a woman and thus in need of protection. By winning in their sport the athletes are full of glee and their emotions run over like girls at a dance. These pleasures are even more special to Cinderella because once she was below her sisters and mother, now she is in the spotlight enjoying things denied to those who would presume to be her betters. Victory at sport keeps this precious girl safe and at the dance a little longer.

Two.The teams are feminized in the way that men might name a car or a boat after a woman. As objects women can be desired the way that cars are desired, they’re beautiful and status symbols. They make other men envy you. Similarly for the basketball teams, the more they win the more their fans can celebrate them by possessing them, they’re victory makes you superior to the fans of other teams. There is some overlap here with first interpretation because desirable objects are also in need of protection, particularly from theft.

The tournament champion then has the chance to be remasculinized and its the tournament itself that is made feminine. The losing teams then become like failed suitors who must leave the Dance rejected, while the champion team is the one that has been chosen by the prettiest girl. At the end of the last game the winning team gathers to have their picture taken with the trophy and give it a symbolic kiss.

Tell me I’m not crazy. Y’all analyze random stuff in your minds all the time too, right?

The idea of a decision is a decision.

We build arguments around impermanence

But are not the sort of people to admit

To inconstancies.

—Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, from In the Absent Everyday

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of the “unreliable narrator” these days, and what it might mean for us ethnographers, careful raconteurs of others’ stories, intertwined as they are with our own. The idea of the unreliable narrator emerges in literature, theatre, and film as a tool of craft that plays with senses of credibility or believability, sometimes to trick the reader or the audience, other times to push the boundaries of a genre or challenge the cognitive strategies a reader might employ to make sense of the story she is being told. Although unreliable narrators may materialize through a third person frame, they are most commonly first person renderings. In the most facile sense, an unreliable narrator is biased, makes mistakes, lacks self-awareness, tells lies not of substance but of form. The device can also be used in a revelatory vein: to twist an expected ending, to demand that readers reconsider a point of view, to leave an audience wondering. Like our anthropological propensity to classify, literary theorists have done the same for the interlocutors of our imaginations. Types of unreliable narrators include the Madman, the Clown, and the Naif, to name a few. Others posit that the unreliable narrator as a device is best understood to fall along a spectrum of fallibility, beginning with the contours of trust and ending with specters of capriciousness (Olson 2003). This is the shape of a character as she defies the expectations of a reader, who then may well pass judgment on this scripted self.

In medicine, the figure of the unreliable narrator emerges – perhaps too often – as the patient: that suffering middle-aged woman whose pain seems to be located at once nowhere and everywhere; the veteran who describes his sense of displacement upon return from battle in ways that fail to align with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s latest definition of PTSD, but simply must be that. Equally possible though sometimes more difficult to capture is the physician as unreliable narrator: the resident, credentialed as culturally competent, who presumes an immigrant family is “clueless” as they take in the diagnosis of a rare genetic disorder as it presents in their toddler; the oncologist whose strives for optimism in the face of the latest clinical evidence, suggesting aggressive, experimental chemotherapy against the evidence that his patient is preparing for death. Each presents a distinct form of unreliability that has to do with the vulnerable spaces that arise in narrating suffering.

***

I have known Karchung (a pseudonym) for twenty years. Still, her quick wit arrests me. Over spiced tea and biscuits, we chat about the past and future of her high Himalayan home. In speaking of migrations and the transformation of local lives as many decamp to the global village that is New York, she remarks, “I remember visiting a cousin in Brooklyn about ten years ago. She was fresh from the village and couldn’t read in any language. In giving me directions to her apartment in Brooklyn, she told me to go in the direction of the tap je, the frying pan! She meant the ‘Q’ train.” We laugh, seeing a cast iron skillet emerge from the contours of a foreign alphabet, handle and all. I marvel at the brilliant absurdity of this human skill to not just read signs but to read into signs and, in the process, to make sense of an unfamiliar landscape. In other words, far from being an unreliable narrator, she is providing a reliable interpretation of an unreliable world.

My phone rings. The number signals Nepal. It is another friend who happens to be from the same village as Karchung and who I have also known for many years. He and his wife live comfortably between Kathmandu and his rural village. All five of their children now reside in the United States. He knows that Karchung and I are about to gather with other people originally from their Himalayan homeland, a place that is culturally and geographically contiguous with Tibet but home to Nepali citizens. Although he would not frame it as such, he has called me now, knowing that Karchung and I are together, to assert his own reliability as a narrator of social change in the face of Karchung’s assessments of cultural disorientation, emptying villages, plays of power and influence between Nepal and New York. “There is no place like our place in the whole world,” he says, passionate. This is the tail of a speech whose body is the need to support a local nunnery not just by renovating its structure, but also by supporting the nuns. Once we are off the phone, Karchung quips that he is disingenuous: “His own daughter was a nun, and he helped her escape those obligations to come to America.” True enough, I note. But does this space between lived reality and ideals undercut his reliability, his narrative and affective claims?

The following morning I gather with a group of Himalayan friends now living in New York, in part to share data from a recent stint of fieldwork in Nepal – an effort at my own reliable narration, this looping back. The conversation moves from feelings of identity confusion to claims to citizenship. Some people from this region essentially pretend to be Tibetan exiles, either those born in Nepal or born in Tibet, as a strategy for seeking political asylum in the US. Even though there is truth to their figurations of Tibetanness – they speak a Tibetan dialect, practice Tibetan Buddhism – and to forms of oppression this can produce in present-day Nepal, they sometimes risk becoming unreliable narrators as they spin stories of exile. This move can make them more believable in the eyes of state authorities familiar with this particular plot line of political suffering. But when a person finally claims a paragon of US citizenship – that blue passport – things come full circle. Where once there was a Nepali citizen with land to his name and a country to call home, the reliable unreliability of an exile story becomes indelibly marked on official papers. Place of birth: People’s Republic of China. In his efforts to claim a new land, America, he who once lived between this river and that mountain, who belonged to a village and to a nation-state, has become a new kind of refugee, narrating a history that has been split open and pieced together again. Yet we might also ask different questions about narrative unreliability here. Do a small number of falsified political asylum claims come to generate a larger collective truth through being told and retold? Do assertions that asylum applicants “lie” come to circulate freely as truth even when they might just as easily be gossip? Here, too, we find unreliable narrators of a different sort.

***

As the child of a contentious divorce, I came to see my parents as unreliable narrators. Perspectives that felt too fraught, too invested, troubled me. And yet, I was also asked to believe such perspectives as evidence of allegiance, if not expressions of love. Speaking of vulnerability, I think this childhood work has shaped how I have come to cultivate an anthropologist’s sense of truth as deeply felt, emotionally charged terrain that is as real as it is unreliable. Those visceral question of who to believe and what to rely on has framed many of the deeper senses of self that, when cloaked in my academic costume, fashions me as an ethnographer. Beyond the mantle of my profession, though, I acknowledge that residual ache of personal history – the desire to be a generous listener, to resist taking sides – which has coaxed me toward the use of dialogue, irony, and shifts between first, second, and third person as strategies for trustworthy storytelling. But does this make me an unreliable narrator more than the cultivation of critical distance might?

To be clear: being an unreliable narrator is not about being unbelievable. Nor is it about faith, or a loss of faith, in the most catholic (small c) sense of this term. Rather this notion of unreliability raises questions about what we can count on. Whether a reader or a patient, a key informant or a collaborator, a new immigrant or those at the other ends of place and kin – or even each of us as we perform the work of writing culture from one day to the next – we want to know we are supported. By “count on” I don’t just mean a predictable show of support but rather a more exposed investment in the possibility of someone’s truth, however shape-shifting that truth may be. Perhaps this is what Veena Das (2007) means when she talks about the work of acknowledgement against the pretense of understanding. What can we come back to? Where do we hold on?

References

Das, Veena, 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Olson, Greta. 2003. Reconsidering Unreliability: Fallible and Untrustworthy Narrators. In: Narrative. 11: 93–109.

Winner of the SVA’s Jean Rouch Award in 2012, Stori Tumbuna is the only ethnographic film I can think of for which one has to watch out for “spoilers.” Indeed, what starts off as a seemingly generic ethnographic film soon turns into a Blair Witch-esque horror film. Despite the title of this post, I don’t intend to write any spoilers —I really don’t want to ruin for anyone the pleasure I felt watching this film the first time — but there really is only so much I can say about the film without giving too much away… The story is so well crafted and shifts gears so subtly from ethnography to horror that the discerning and suspicious viewer will likely find themselves caught up in the excitement without even noticing the switch.

What is worth saying, however, is that this film is made with the utmost respect for the community and that it is a truly collaborative production. As the film’s webpage says: “Stori Tumbuna: Ancestors’ Tales was conceived as an opportunity for the Lak to tell their stories in their way.” And the DER website has this quote by anthropologist Michael Jackson:

“I know of no more successful or ingenious film that draws the viewer into another life-world while keeping faith with the tenor of its traditional narratives and respecting the lived experience of his/her interlocutors.”

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say that it is the most successful film to do these things…, but it certainly does them well. For this reason I think this film is perfectly suited to any introductory anthropology class, or classes focusing on ethnography or narrative form.

(Please don’t post any spoilers in the comments!)