AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

16 What’s Yours is Mine 183
Special Report: A Life Revealed, featured in National Geographic’s
(NatGeo) April 2002 edition.
Situating Myself
I remember, as a young girl, the day I turned the NatGeo page and saw
the famous photograph popularly termed ‘Afghan Girl.’ I cut out the
arresting photo and hung it on my wall, where it remained until I moved
away. I was just one girl, ignorant of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
and the impact on Afghani people: attaching my own specific meaning to
the photograph. The act of cutting out her picture and looking at it for
years, however, is where the analysis of ownership and objectification
begins. The ‘Afghan Girl’ was utilized to operate within a storyline representing
specific Afghani refugee populations to the West, and commercialised
to sell everything from calendars to coasters. The character
Chacko from God of Small Things articulated imperialism as, ‘What’s
yours is mine, and what is mine is mine also’ (Roy 1997:57). This verbalization
expresses the problematic role of media as a holder of representations
along with media-consumers’ ownership of publicised images and
experiences. Only later in life did the historical role of images, articles
and particularly the function of NatGeo as an ‘educational source’ for
developing ideology in Western adults and youth become clear. I situate
myself in this essay as a participant in this Western ideology; Iranian-
American raised in the Netherlands, sitting in my middle-class apartment
bedroom gazing at the green eyes of the ‘Afghan Girl,’ allocating my interpretations
of her reality and feelings to a photograph – a photograph
that now, as a graduate student, I am critiquing through a reflexive process.
Interest in Piece
Johnstone’s exploration of the function of narration (‘talking about the
past is apparently something all humans do’) was elaborated by Rosen’s
‘autobiographical impulse’ – the ‘urge to make our lives coherent by telling
about them’ (Johnstone 2001:640-1). Linde further expands their
ideas: ‘In order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of
being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to
have a coherent, acceptable and constantly revised life-story’ (ibid). If
stories are living and changing as products of social life, what then is the
power of discourse in arresting development? Examining NatGeo’s role