Autoethnography

A Manifestory

Christopher N. Poulos

Abstract Asked to write a manifesto for autoethnography, I find myself

writing, instead, a manifestory for auteothnography—a cry for scholars to
engage the vibrating force of story-craft in service of our life-enhancing,
knowledge-constructing, world-building praxis of the autoethnographic
craft. I write to expose. I write to shine light. I write to open up the world
to a new way of seeing, feeling, thinking, reflecting, smelling. I write it into
a story of a life, a story of a human working like hell to navigate this choppy,
murky, oddly human water we’ve all been shoved into. I write to build
bridges, to probe and make meaning, to start a dialogue, to bring memory
to light, to write relationships into being.

Keywords: autoethnography, memory, narrative, story

I write the light fantastic.

I write the heart of darkness.
I write the spaces in between.
Along the way, I suspect my life is a story, waiting to be written.
This is a manifestory for autoethnography.
A story.
My story.
Tuesday, 4:45 a.m. I climb out of bed, driven by the insistent urge to write. I walk
down the hall, flip the switch on the coffee, and before I can come to know better, I sit
down at my keyboard and start writing this manifestory. The words come slowly,
decaffeinated, like consciousness at this hour. They will build momentum, and speed,
soon enough.
The coffee is brewing.
The words are brewing.
Out my window, the world is dark.
Out there, I sometimes wonder if darkness will just descend one day, never lift.

International Review of Qualitative Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 33–38.
ISSN 1940-8447, eISSN 1940-8455. © 2017 International Institute for Qualitative Research,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or
reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page,
http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2017.10.1.33. 33
34 CHRISTOPHER N. POULOS

Out there, all around me, there are people who want to end what I’m doing here.
Because what I’m doing here . . . is dangerous.
Out there, they scarcely understand it, but they do know this: Poets and artists
and writers and autoethnographers—we stir people up.
We caffeinate their decaf consciousness.
We are dangerous.
Out there, they are trying to stop us.
Out there, they do not want us speaking truth to power.
Out there, they have gerrymandered their power, and they are dead set on
keeping it. They have chosen a path of darkness. They have chosen to hold their
power by instituting means of control—mostly fear.
It began subtly, with little sallies. Now, they sow the fear, like a farmer sowing
crops. They plant this crop everywhere they can, hoping it catches on.
And you? And me? They want us to ingest the fear. They want us to chew on it,
like a cow chews its cud.
Cud, you may recall, is the food that returns to the mouth of a ruminant (like
a cow) to be chewed for a second time. The cow eats, swallows, vomits a little bolus
(mass or lump of food) back into its mouth, and reeats this food, fermenting it along
the way to its next step in the digestive process. And, it turns out, rumination is how
cows convert energy into milk. Of course, there are other, less desirable by-products
of rumination, including methane. A single cow can produce up to 280 liters of
methane a day (University of Waikato, Department of Biology, n.d.).
Cows also produce an awful lot of manure. I know. I used to work on my grand-
pa’s dairy farm.
OK. Let me get this straight. What’s the bottom line here?
Cows are gassy drunks.
Like you, the morning after. Like that moment when you realized you had one
too many and you feel that fermented acidic burn as a little comes up into your
mouth, unbidden, and you don’t have time to react before you swallow it back, and
your head weighs a few pounds more than usual. And all you want is for it to end, and
for someone to turn off that light.
That’s about it.
And that, my friends, is what our farmers of fear want for us.
They want us to stay gassy, half in a stupor, dead drunk or at least hungover,
while they sow their fear and work their corrupt magic on the world.
Which brings us back to the world outside my window, still dark these 40 min-
utes later.
 AUTOETHNOGRAPHY 35

It might just stay that way, though the frogs are slowing down their morning
song, indicating at least the possibility of dawn.
You see, I live in North Carolina. You may have heard of it lately, in the news.
Recently, the gerrymandered powers-that-be called an ‘‘emergency’’ special session to
ramrod a bill through the state Legislature. In a matter of hours, they had crafted and
shoved HB2 down our throats. And they hoped, I think, that we would just spit it up
part way, then chew it like cud, swallow it, and fall back into our stupor.
This, of course, did not happen.
Those pesky poets and artists and writers took up the cause.
And the ones who bring money to the state, the Bruce Springsteens of the world,
took up the boycott.
You see, these gerrymandered powers-that-be had engineered a bill that is pat-
ently and blatantly bigoted, singling out the LGBTQ community for scorn, shame,
and outright discrimination, and along the way, frothing up fear of predatory perverts
lurking in public restrooms, waiting to pounce on your women and children. While
the face of the so-called ‘‘bathroom bill’’ is the requirement that transgender people
‘‘use the restroom corresponding to the biological sex on their birth certificate,’’ the
dark underbelly of the bill is the removal of all legal recourse for the LGBTQ com-
munity in cases of discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Chew on that cud for a moment.
While Governor Pat McCrory has repeatedly insisted (and continues to insist)
that ‘‘it’s just common sense,’’ we who write and think and sing and spit the cud onto
the ground, refusing to ferment it, refusing the stupor, know better. I’d hang my head
in shame for being someone who lives in this backwater haven of cracker-bigots, this
once shining light of the progressive ‘‘New South’’ that they’ve now twisted and
distorted into a bad 1950s B-grade horror movie, but that is the path toward fear,
toward paralysis. And that is just what they want.
Instead, I educate. I speak truth to power. I write. And that is just what they don’t
want, which may explain their attempts to dismantle our education system too. The
cud business is tough when the cows have all fled the pasture. The ruminants get too
smart, and cud will no longer be on the menu.
Meanwhile nationally, we have Donald J. Trump declaring that, if his ‘‘hot’’
daughter wasn’t his daughter, he’d, you know. . . . And the same people who engi-
neered the bathroom bill support him as leader of the free world, because, you know,
he says what’s on his mind. Never mind that what’s on his mind is a series of
abominations. We have to protect the women and children from the ‘‘real’’ perverts.
So, why don’t all you brown people go back where you came from?
36 CHRISTOPHER N. POULOS

YEAH! BUILD THAT WALL!

And why don’t all you religious fanatics—you know, the WRONG kind of
fanatics—go back where you came from!
YEAH! BUILD THAT WALL!
And why don’t all you gays just pray away the gay?
YEAH! WALL! BUILD A WALL!
And why don’t all you transconfused people just be the boy or girl God intended
you to be?
YEAH! WALL!
And why don’t all you women folk go back in the kitchen where you belong?
Don’t worry your pretty little heads about nothin’. We’ll protect you.
YEAH!
Wall?
So. In the face of all this, I find myself writing. I write my way into, and through,
the darkness. I write to expose. I write to shine light. I write to open up the world to
a new way of seeing, feeling, thinking, reflecting, smelling. I smell the stench of the
byproducts of my fellow ruminants. I smell the brimstone stirred up by our cloven-
hooved fear-mongering ‘‘leaders.’’ And I write it toward something beyond the
stench. I write it into a story of a life, a story of a human working like hell to navigate
this choppy, murky water we’ve been shoved into.
They want me to stop, but I’m not having it. I will not chew my cud. I will not
swallow the bolus of semidegraded, fermented, and regurgitated fear these shilling
shysters are selling.
Like I said, they want me—they want us—to just shut up. We are dangerous.
To their way of thinking, I should probably be silenced, even if it requires
violence.
But I will not be silenced.
As long as I’m drawing breath—no matter how deeply and horrifyingly the
oxygen that gives me life is degraded by the pollutants spewed into our atmosphere
by the puppet-masters of the shills who campaign for office, who gerrymander power,
who write abominable laws, who corrupt our democracy, who treat good people like
so much cow manure—I will not be silenced.
I will not stop.
I cannot stop.
I see the darkness for what it is.
A friend thinks I spend too much time staring into the darkness, sometimes
falling into it, often railing about it, always writing about it—writing, writing, writing.
 AUTOETHNOGRAPHY 37

Maybe my friend is right. But, in my defense, I’ve spent the last five years fending
off the death of my very livelihood at the hands of capricious assholes in the Legis-
lature. I’ve spent a fair portion of my career calling out injustice, ferreting out liars,
speaking truth to power, calling out abominations perpetrated upon the vulnerable.
But maybe my friend is right. Maybe I need to get my balance back.
For now, I’m writing into it, and through it, and against it, hoping against hope to
regain that balance.
You see, I have been down this road before. I was, after all, raised by a band of
nomadic wolves in human clothing—wolves willing to eat their own young. A single
misstep, and the wrath would come down on me. Any weakness, and you might be
breakfast.
To put it bluntly, when your earliest life experiences involve fear for your own
safety in your own home, you develop certain defenses.
Early on, I started writing. I wrote to build a new world. I wrote to defend myself.
I wrote my way into a castle, guarded by my own band of loyal dogs. I wrote my way
through trauma and pain and fear and anger and frustration and . . .
Sadly, along the way, I have fallen into a darkness. I can’t really see how much of it
came from others, and how much of it was of my own making, but nevertheless,
I have tripped and stumbled into a moat of despair that I’ve sometimes struggled to
crawl out of. There have been times in my life when I didn’t know if I would make it.
Although I have crawled out of the moat, I have felt the weight of it. The weight of
a dark, murky, muddy past.
I have carried this burden alone, mostly. I have walked in solitude, head bowed,
the weight of it all on my shoulders. It has not been an easy journey.
So, you see, I could use a little light.
And I know my darkness is hard for others to take. I get it. Too much darkness
is . . . just too much.
Still, I think, you can’t just shrug it off.
You have to work it off. You have to story it off.
And then, it hits me. Just like that.
I know what this situation calls for.
Autoethnography. When I write autoethnography, I somehow know where I am.
I know who and what I am. I know. I lean into it, and I know just what to do.
So here it is: A manifestory for autoethnography, which is a cry, really, for life itself.
It goes like this: Why should we write autoethnography? Here’s why.
I write the light fantastic. I write the heart of darkness. I write the spaces in
between. I write the dance of being. I write the moat of despair. I write the ladder
38 CHRISTOPHER N. POULOS

leading back to the sunlight. I write the glimmer of hope that lights my way in the
darkness. I write the castle with the flaming hearth. I write characters showing their
courage. I write the deep sadness of loss. I write the pain of injustice. I write the joy
of it all. I write the hurt of it all. I write the dialogue that opens up possibility. I write
worlds into being. I write clouds hovering over the broad, green country. I write
mountains looming in the distance. I write the light playing on the leaves, and I
write the dark shadows under the tall trees.
I write secrets into stories. I write the fist crashing into my face. I write that
memory, and I still don’t know why it happened. I write memory into life. I write life
into memory. I write the way toward truth. I write truth to power.
I write to dance, to enhance, to take a stance, to romance. I write to seduce my
reader, to draw you into my world, to bring you with me on a hero’s journey or just an
everyday moment. I write to bring it alive for you. I write for you. Not for me. I write
autoethnography so we can be a ‘‘we,’’ to bring union, to speak to and with us all, to
embolden us, to build a community, populated with people like you and you and you
and you and you . . . and me. I want to be there too. I cannot write the disembodied
academic voice, not now, not this far in. I can only write the ‘‘I,’’ which implies the
‘‘we,’’ which is at once the plurality of me—and, at the same time, my very reason for
being.
I write so I and you and we can BE.
I write so the darkness cannot win.

Reference
University of Waikato, Department of Biology. (n.d.). Animal structure and function. Retrieved
from http://sci.waikato.ac.nz/farm/content/animalstructure.html

About the Author

Christopher N. Poulos is professor and head of Communication Studies at the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro. He teaches relational and family communication, ethnography,
ethics, dialogue, and film. His book, Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry Into Family Secrecy,
was published by Left Coast Press. His work has appeared in Qualitative Inquiry,
Communication Theory, Southern Communication Journal, International Review of
Qualitative Research, Qualitative Communication Research, and in several edited books.