Critical fabulation

The impossible story

In the heartland of Nova Scotia, Canada, is a very special park called Kejimikujik, a Mi’kmaw word which means, “little fairies.” This area was known for an abundance of the Wiklatmu’j, or mischievous “little people.” We visited this national park in July and took an incredible tour of Mi’kmaw stone engravings, called petroglyphs. The one that is a cover photo for this blog post (click back or go to onlineharbor.org/blog to see it) is of a Catholic missionary. Many of the glyphs are of ships, some are hunting directions. It is hard to say how old they are because they are wearing away, but historians speculate they are 200–300 years old. 

What is the value of an engraving of a missionary with no date, no name, no artist to claim it? All the engraving says is, “I was here once.” Why were they there? What happened? That’s what narrative and storytelling are for.

Before humans recorded history, we told stories. We recorded historical moments through pictures (petroglyphs) as an archive and told stories to pass on knowledge and meaning. Over the centuries, we have come to rely less on narrative and more on fact in order to pass on history or to learn from it. Our archives of primary sources are vast and growing in the digital age. We have first person accounts from a growing diversity of voices. But this was not always the case. 

We all know that history is told by the winners. When we limit history to the factual, we are claiming that the winners only ever pass down empirical, neutral facts, and that is simply not true. Writers and storytellers pass down interpretations, values, and perspectives, and they also have the power to leave stories out of the archive—strengthening their own heroism in the historical record. When we think of historical knowledge as “neutral,” we are imposing a concreteness on it that we insist must be the basis for all other interpretations. 

African-American historian Saidiya Hartman writes history from archives of the Atlantic slave trade, documents primarily written by landowners, legal authorities, captains, and slave traders. The history of those abducted have been erased, yet they are vital to understanding the slave trade and its vast impact on today’s world. How do we find the history of those whose lives are absent from the historical archive? 

Hartman conceptualised “critical fabulation” in her 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts” as a way of opening up the history of slavery to include the experiences of those abducted. Fashioning narratives based on archival research, Hartman explores “speculative arguments … doubts, wishes, and possibilities” to “tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling.” *

This is an exercise not in fiction, but in history—history that relies heavily on archival material but also engages a critical examination of the archive. The task is not to offer closure, or even completeness, but greater speculation that invites us to consider a larger and more important story.

The petroglyph, like so many other artifacts, is not a constraint on what constitutes history. It is an invitation to sit and listen to elders and ancestors as they share their pain, their triumphs, their celebrations, and their wisdom, especially those that did not make it into the histories in our libraries. 

The Bible is a collection of historical documents. An archive, if you will. It contains stories of a historical nature, but very few artifacts like a captain’s log. It is only as complete as those who wrote its books. If the Bible is our text for knowing the history of our spirituality, we must acknowledge it is incomplete. Missing are the stories of enslaved people, women, children, those who were defeated in battle, and those whose existence was not fully understood, such as transgender people. Patriarchy has formed us to only pay attention to the stories we have, thus diminishing the existence of those whose stories we do not have. The ultimate effect of this reading is to hide or erase the existence of all but cis-gendered, heterosexual men, with a few exceptions. 

To include the voices and experiences of others in order to have a fuller understanding of our history, the archive alone is insufficient. We must fabulate critically. We can examine the texts for evidence and build narratives that align with that evidence. Wil Gafney’s A Women’s Lectionary is an excellent example of this type of work. 

All of this is an invitation for you to engage your imagination as you read the Bible. Where do you catch a glimpse of your own experience, either in what is written or what is missing? This is what makes the story of our faith your story.

*Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe. Vol. 12, Issue 2. 2008. 11.