CREATING ROOTS: A Postmodern Approach to Identity Construction Using Objects, Personae & Mythology

Kelsay Myers, MFA, MFA

Writer | Artist | Teacher

myers.kelsay@gmail.com

www.kelsayelizabethmyers.com

Basic Schools of Thought. . . • A “hero’s journey” and Mythology

• Existentialism and Identity Construction

• Persona and Creativity

• Dialogical Self Theory and Re-framing the notion of “roots”

In the Beginning. . .

• Everyone wants an answer to the questions: “Who am I?” and “Where do I come from?” Adoptees, without knowing our beginnings, are “thrown into the world.”

“My identity as adopted has always involved a ‘desire to know...’ such that my being adopted, my experience of myself as an adopted person, has been defined by and in relation to this desire.”

-- Kimberly Leighton, “Being Adopted and Being a Philosopher: Exploring Identity and the ‘Desire to Know’ Differently”

The Quest for Roots. . .

• The “primal wound”

• The “phantom” life

• The “abandoned” or “lost” child trope in folk tales and comic legends• Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, Cinderella, Hansel &

Gretl, Snow White, Once Upon A Time

Re-framing the Questions. . . • Existentialism

• “Who am I?” I create who I am.

• “Where do I come from?” I write my own story.

Self/Object Identification

During the process of deintegration (or “unpacking the self”) the baby mind:

— Would substitute things for people, especially when they offered comfort, safety, and reliability.

— Would feel narcissistic depletion, emptiness inside with intense longing. This state leads to severe distress, and to harmful interference with a basic loving investment in one’s own body image and the development of object relations.

— Would not depend on anyone else in a close way. This includes the perfectionist need to do everything by herself without help from others.

From Renaldo Maduro’s “Abandonment and Deintegration of the Primary Self”

The Bowler Hat Persona

Self Object

“We all need someone to look at us…the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.” — Milan Kundera’s, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Reflection Creation

“The black bowler hat is your story, Sabina. It belonged to your father, and his father before him, the mayor of a small town in Czechoslovakia. You were a rebel, who betrayed your father when he destroyed love. You betrayed Communism, another father, and when your father died, he left everything to your brother, and you declared the bowler hat your “sole inheritance,” and then you met Tomas, and he saw the bowler hat as a mark of individuality, and it became a sexual symbol when you looked into a broken mirror as you undressed down to your underwear and laughed at the image of stark femininity violated by the pure masculinity of the bowler hat still on your head. But then, the Russians invaded your country, you emigrated to Switzerland, and years later, met Tomas in a hotel room in Zurich where you made love for the last time and wanted to cry because the bowler hat was a relic of a time and place that no longer existed. Or was it the person you were with Tomas who no longer existed? By then, you had Franz, the man who called your name when he died along a foreign border years after you left him, too, because you despise duende. To you, darkness is an end, not a beginning. To you, music is the incessant noise that shuts our eyes to beauty. To you, Sabina, being buried in the earth is unbearable because it is the final weight that will prevent all flight. The bowler hat has traveled from Prague to Zurich to Geneva to Paris to America. It is your history. It is my archetype.”

From “The Aesthetic Blitz”

Dialogical Self Theory

“The voices of the self speak passionately about the endless quest for love and the struggle for power. They debate and dispute among themselves the moral basis of the hierarchical social order in which they find themselves positioned—as if thrown by fate—in a nexus of unequal relationships…Each individual develops a unique set of positions that especially shape all he or she thinks and does, and represents them in the form of cultural stereotypes: personages in whose gaze one is always seen and to whose opinions one always listens. The structure of the positions, personages, and arguments that make up this dialogue constitutes the system of self-representation—and thus is the self.”

— Gary S. Gregg, Self-Representation: Life Narrative Studies in Identity and Psychology

Re-framing “Roots”?

• Synthesizing DST with Fairy Tales and child psychology to explore what it really means to have roots.

• Becoming more interested in genealogy and actual “roots.”