Lived Experience: My Truth
“After 30 years as a woman of colour, she has written about her lived experience as a political commentator.” This is from a recent book review.
Since only this person can have lived her particularly unique experience, she is accorded the voice of authority; she cannot be challenged. To say it another way, it is an example of “Speaking My Truth.”
But do we all not have our own “lived experience?” Isn’t that what we use when we write our own autobiography or memoir? There’s nothing really new here, but the term “lived experience” makes it seem like so much more. No one else can have that one person’s experience and therefore it must be considered authentic and beyond questioning. It is her truth. Or his.
However, for something to be beyond questioning denotes infallibility. Before we became a secular society, the only infallible being was God. To be human was to be fallible. Thus our lived experiences were not necessarily reliable beyond ourselves because we were imperfect beings.
Similarly, our truths are personal, but not necessarily “The Truth.” They are not universal. But our secular society and postmodern world says that there is no universal truth. Thus our truth becomes The Truth. So here we are, elevating ourselves – or at least some of ourselves – to godliness: our lived experience, our truth, is our godhead.
People sometimes do get things wrong. As finite beings, are we not subject to misunderstand things, even in our own lives? Our senses frequently deceive us: we think we saw this or heard that, but it turns out that we were wrong. What we heard was not what was said; what we thought we saw was not actually what we saw. Mystery stories often use the staple plot device of the unreliable witness, and police detectives carefully question witnesses because people are not infallible.
Should our lived experience then be the sole criterium for a job posting or being the new guru of wisdom? To say that one’s lived experiences are not up for debate in terms of accuracy, consistency and reliability is to limit inquiry and critique. Perhaps more significantly, it means that we are all solo beings, each one a sun to himself, or herself, which is ironic in this age of group thinking and tribalism.
Ultimately, lived experience, experience that is uniquely and solely ours on an individual basis, means that we cannot identify with any other life because it is not our own. If I didn’t have another person’s lived experience as an immigrant, a person of colour, someone with a handicap, then, apparently I can’t comment or have an opinion because I did not have their “lived,” experiences.
This defeats the entire purpose of the study of the humanities and literature, of reading an autobiography or memoir or creating fiction. They all rest on the principle that although each of us is unique, we share in our human commonalities. That we share in 99% of the human gene pool should make us far more similar than different. We see the truth of this in our common responses to hearing or reading someone’s story, or when an audience in unison cries or laughs at a movie. That’s because our particular lived experience does not isolate us from humanity despite the particulars of our race, gender, religion or nationality.
The converse of that is that someone in the skin of another can likewise identify with your experience. Remove that possibility, and you remove empathy, which might well explain why democracies have become so intolerant these last few decades, why people can break into a restaurant and look for Jews or Trump supporters, why places of worship get burned down and people shot for no reason other than we no longer connect the dots between human lives and ours. It explains why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to the truck drivers who protested in Ottawa as homophobic, racist misogynists just because they came to Ottawa to grieve his policies. (Calling them misogynists was kind of funny because there were women there as well as men, so were those women, women haters?)
How can we possibly empathize with someone whose lived experience is something that we can’t understand because it didn’t happen to us? The answer is because the lived experience mantra is negated by the universality of life. We all are born; we all feel happiness and hope, fear and despair; we laugh, we cry, we live, we mourn those we love, we die.
If you write about your life of poverty and the incident when you were bullied for being Black, I can call upon my own resources, my memories of being poor, and if I am White, and perhaps don’t know what it is to be Black, I can certainly recall incidents when I was bullied for being Jewish, or just because I had freckles.
And if I don’t have such life experiences, then how will I find out, unless I take the time to find a comparable story, read and inhale it, and then I will learn something of your lived experience that I can add to my own and perhaps burrow so deeply into your mind that I can walk in your shoes, see with your eyes, feel with your heart. The human imagination, coupled with empathy, make this possible. You, the writer, have a role in this process – you need to make me feel what you felt, the happiness, the joy, the anger, the fear, and together, we create a bond. That’s literature; that’s the basis for the humanities. We are not separate islands floating in a sea of isolation. We can relate with one another. If not, why are we writing?
Scenario one:
Two teenagers riding on a motor scooter pull up to a red light and stop. A police officer, or cop, as you will, across the street motions for them to come to him, which they do when the light turns green. The cop tells them to get off and asks to see the driver’s ownership, insurance and license. The driver is nervous, drops the papers, picks them up and shows them to the officer. All is in order. The two boys repeatedly ask what they possibly could have done wrong, but are ignored by the cop. He then examines the double seat and tells the driver that he’s getting a ticket for having two people on a scooter built for one. When the boys point out, as politely as they can, that there are clearly two seats, the cop counters by saying that the second seat is homemade. The boys are incredulous: the material is the same leather, the two colours, red and black are the same, the stitching is clearly from a machine and matches the front seat, and the two seats are joined. How could anyone mistake this for a single seat? And so he must have malice in his heart. He is prejudiced and a bully, out to get someone.
If I were Black and this happened to me, I’d conclude that the cop is a racist. What other explanation could there possibly be? If I were Jewish wearing orthodox clothing and hair, I’d conclude he was an anti-Semite. And that would be an episode in my lived experience: Riding a scooter while Black. (or Jewish, etc.)
But those two teenagers were my friend and myself. We were not Black, and though we were Jewish, we had no tell-tale religious signs or appearances. So how can this cop be explained? The truth is, I don’t know. The best I can do is to suggest that maybe he hated teenagers and is a bit of a bully taking advantage of his badge. But if I were a religious Jew or Black, I’d come away thinking otherwise. I’d be calling it systemic racism for sure. And my lived experience would be wrong.
Scenario two:
When a movement such as climate change captures the public zeitgeist it becomes the dominant truth, or narrative, another fashionable expression. To question it is to be a heretic in the same way that those who once questioned the Church, or any dominant religion, were considered heretics. In today’s parlance, a heretic is a racist or a denier. Have the temerity to suggest that climate change might not destroy the earth by 2050 and you are a climate denier. Suggest that the ground behind a residential school might not actually contain 215 unmarked graves of first nations children, or that many of them died from tuberculosis rather than being murdered by priests and you’ll be called a racist. Last year, 40 year career teacher, Jim McMurtry explained this to his students, informing them that this was accredited fact by authorities. Unfortunately for him, this acknowledged truth was in contradiction to the truth or the narrative insisted by the Abbotsford School Board, that the Church was guilty of murdering these first nations children in their residential schools. For the crime of historical, truthful accuracy and educating his students accordingly, McMurtry was fired. His truth was, according to verified sources, historically and objectively correct, but the actual transgressions of the Church were not enough for the Abbotsford School Board: apparently the Church had to be guilty of absolutely heinous crimes. And so McMurtry’s factual explanation ran counter to the official narrative – to what the Abbotsford School Board decided was going to be the truth.
It is extremely worrisome when ideology trumps the pursuit of justice and honesty. This takes matters to an entirely new and dangerous level. The genie is out of the bottle: how do we put it back?