5. Issues of identity and change

I am sure, as I already have, that as a researcher, I have changed as a result of my research process as a form of self-discovery.

“Many feminist researchers report being profoundly changed by what they learn about themselves. Changes may involve completely reconceptualising a phenomenon and completely revising one’s view.” Reinharz (1992:194)

A story of a white woman dancing in black culture has been expanded into five separate narrative stories. Each story has been a review of the last and then generated into yet another self-discovered story, only to open the door to another way of viewing the world living between cultures. Thorne goes even further and argues that, “….there is a deep logic to this way of writing, that these personal experiences were neither confessional, minor preliminaries, nor mere ‘how it was done’ appendages to the main study, but were closely tired to and even generative in the study and its substantive findings” (Thorne in Krieger 1991:250). This appears to be the case in my photo story.

Slide 8: Akosua Tweba

Slide 9: Positive Reversion

Slide 10: Realisation

The Epiphany in slide 2 takes place in Story 1, when Illumination in dark places becomes a Realisation (slide 10) in Story 2.  Here, in Shifting between the Blue, marks the recognition of multiple identities in multiple realities, simultaneously experienced (slide, 8 and 9). The Positive Reversion  has manifested through my Akosua Tweba identity. I recognize this significant shift in my being when my son’s beautiful musical composition in Story 3, Children of the Blue Light is delivereded. I feel the healing power of the music holding the dance in the space with the application of time initiated by my son and echoed by Asanti dance theatre. It leaves me feeling ecstatic. All my past and present experiences fall into significant meaning and purpose. The beauty of this moment in sound and movement in relationship with performers and audience within a contained yet expansive space from a time past into the present, makes me feel connected to everyone and everything.

Slide 10: Circle of Strength

This strength felt in Story 4, supports me to acknowledge my sorrows as part of the learning in my life by Dancing within the Dark and the Light, as I let go of time from the past. Finally in Story 5, I am able to release everything in a moment of erupted ecstasy held by the frenzied drumming that grounds me in a calm free flow of peace and playfulness by Dancing with the Blue Light.   

Slide 11: In flow with Rhythm

It is in this last story, where a shift in my perception of my feminine identity is in a continuous state of change. The more I continue to write this paper, the more my identity is revealed.     

Slide 12: Dancing with my multiple selves

I need to feel my own power, hear my own voice and frame my own story within a method of inquiry where I am both the subject matter and the subject. This autobiographical voice associated with feminist reflexive ethnography, (Behar and Gordon, 1995; Behar, 1996; Krieger, 1991, 1996; Richardson, 1997) advocates starting research from, “one’s own experience or by using personal knowledge to help them in the research process” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:741). Stories one, through to five, are where I incorporate my standpoints explaining my personal connection to the ethnographic memoir telling my personal story of what went on in the backstage of the making of my film Children of the Blue Light. Bringing in transcultural voices as healing through music and dance. I am the researcher, collecting the evidence, from the moment of my epiphany and drawing the inferences from my ecstatic state held in the sound and movement of a site-specific space and consequently reaching the conclusions about my feminine identity. I am the one who is held directly accountable to my testimony of personal narrative in the first-person voice. I am the main character and the one who is deciding upon the story of “dialogue, dramatic tension, or plotline, for that matter” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:734).

“In reflexive ethnography, the researcher’s personal experience becomes important primarily in how it illuminates the culture under study” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000:740).

I feel empowered using this method of inquiry into the search for my feminine identity simply because I sing, dance, play music and live between Australia and Africa. Feminist reflexive autoethnography helps me to study my culture between these two worlds. According to Laurel Richardson (1994), the personal narrative within my experimental text, can be validated by employing a “reseeing” and “retelling” sociology (1997:167). This method needs to demonstrate “how transgression looks and feels.”  Richardson’s central imaginary is a crystalline structure which is a prism that “reflects” and “refracts” depending on what angle or perspective you are looking at, from, through. The light can be both “waves” and “particles.”

“Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating different colours, patterns, arrays, casting off in different directions. What we see depends upon our angle of repose” (Richardson 1997 in Lincoln and Guba, 2000:181).

Similar to my metaphors of shifting between the layers of the Blue Light of transformation, I resonate with Richardson’s “light theory.” She purports that crystallization, without loosing structure, deconstructs the traditional idea of ‘validity.’ In my metaphor of the Blue Light where you can shift back and forth and through layers of multidimensions with multiple selves, I can begin to feel that there is “no single truth.” Crystallisation or Blue Light therefore can provide me with a deepened, complex, “thoroughly partial understanding” of the power of transformation. The more I know, the more I don’t know.

“Paradoxically, we know more and doubt what we know”  (Richardson 1997:92)

The properties of the crystal as a metaphor helps me as researcher to see what Lincoln and Guba describe as “the interweaving of processes in research: discovery, seeing, telling, storying, re-presentation” (2000:182). The ‘shifting’ between the Blue Light as a metaphor goes one step further as a “wave” or “particle.” It also guides me to proposition my ‘voice’ and in so doing, brings myself into a transformative state of healing. Ghana’s Sankofa of positive reversion entered my being as I entered her country, led by my ancestral spirit of Esi Tweba. I see my capacity for a healing state of being, as the colour blue (front cover). My ‘capacity’ is my Dark Goddess who brings a new light of transformation. She is my Other that makes me look at myself from anew. A new perspective to look at from ‘within’ a ‘crystalline structure’ that is the solid matter of my body that has now become a temple of the Divine and a portal to the Divine. I have direct access to Kundum, to this transformative power via our ancestors brought through the energy waves of the Blue Light transported on the sound of music and energy particles of the dance. This unfolding self-discovery process is in a constant dynamic state of change.

I have attempted to modulate my academic authorial voice now so that my ethnographic journey of self-discovery can be heard.  In the following pages I invite you as the reader to come along with me on my write of passage as I reveal my stories of self-transformation through the immersion within a Feminist Communitarian Model (Denzin, 1997; Reinharz, 1993). I invite you to share my experience of shifting between the erupting transgressive folds of the Blue Light that reveals my identity as woman.