Every once in a while, skimming through an endless scroll of vlogs, video essays, GRWM videos, podcast episodes and Substack essays on my phone, I suddenly realise just how much I know about total strangers. When they met the love of their life, how many times they’ve moved houses, what their pet ate for dinner. There are no private profiles, five victory signs coming together to form a finger star, or sepia-tinted pictures of the sunset on Instagram anymore. We’re all friends here, even when we’re not.
Contrary to how transparent things are on the internet today, there was a time when they were far more metaphorical and ambiguous. The limit of the information Instagram fed us was restricted to the mundane and transient moments our friends and peripheral acquaintances chose to reveal of their lives. Celebrity gossip, screengrabs of our favourite shows on Tumblr and clips of spoken word poetry were treasured pockets of the internet we coveted. Fewer people wrote personal essays and memoirs back then—we were happy to imbibe rather than pontificate.
The memoir was once a genre that spoke truth to power. Be it during periods of intense state repression, world wars, cultural upheaval or institutional pressures, memoirs held within themselves a life lived amidst social, political and cultural turmoil. Within their hyper-personal accounts hid reflections on the political upheaval of that era. From Dalit memoirs like Sujatha Gidla’s Ants Among Elephants and Bama’s Karukku, and Black memoirs like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, to queer memoirs like Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and feminist memoirs like Kamala Das’ My Story and Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy, memoirists used their lives to question the status quo.
The memoir of today, however, gets written before it ever reaches the page, in the form of a self-mythologisation of the creator, a literary equivalent of a heartfelt carousel post. Based on the cultural authority accrued on social media, publishers are padding up influencer-authors with established brand identities that are extensions of hierarchical social identities. So when Yashica Dutt, who grew up in a Dalit family in Ajmer with little access to the resources needed to become a writer, wrote Coming Out as Dalit at the age of 30, it became a tool of defiance not only to reclaim her lower-caste identity but to depict the quotidian life that reflected the resilience of thousands like her. “It was important for me to write this book because it was rooted in the belief that this is not an anomaly,” says Dutt, who received the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2020 for her memoir. “Often, we portray people from marginalised communities through heroic moments of breakthrough. My book shows how common, how unexceptional these narratives are.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
