By Sonia Cancian
This is one of a series of responses to our Exhibition Unsettling Certainties: Emotions Exhibited. For a taste, please click here.
Unsettling certainties, meaning the forcing out of a settled condition; to deprive of fixity a certainty, defined as “the quality or state of being subjectively certain; absence of doubt or hesitation” (OED), have mobilised hearts and minds, single and collective over the ages. From the unsettlement of certainties, creativities in various forms have emerged in the arts. These unsettling certainties are what Freud refers to as the uncanny, the “unheimlich,” the “unhomely”, that is, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
How can unsettling certainties, or rather, the uncanny, be expressed, mitigated, and assigned to a place where creative outlets are envisioned or even possible, in the wake of fears, injustices, oppression, violence, and voiceless-ness integral to the emotional universes evinced in contexts of war, displacement, oppression, and ecological plight? In what ways might we imagine the correlation between creativity and that uncanny feeling of unsettling certainty?
enquiries as to the wellbeing of enlisted graduates and students. The replies from family members are held in the University’s collection. Series 73, Item 0119.
Creativity signals the capacity to generate original, flexible and effective ideas, insights and solutions. Dubbed by Einstein as “intelligence having fun,” creativity has been shown to facilitate adjustment and growth while contributing to a person’s well-being by promoting self-actualization, self-confidence, resilience, and better coping mechanisms for improving well-being (De Lorenzo et al. 2023). Creativity also promotes resilience, a dynamic developmental process that encourages positive adaptation to stress, adversity, and traumatic circumstances. With resilience, creative people tend to be more flexible, resourceful, adaptable, and original in their approach to problems and life challenges. They also tend to cope better with anxiety and stress.
The letters of Nelson Mandela, written while in prison, demonstrate this kind of resilience enmeshed with creativity in the face of unsettling certainties. For instance, in a letter to his young grieving daughters concerning the death of his son, he writes: “now that he is gone, we must forget about the painful fact of his death. Now he sleeps in peace, my darlings, free from troubles, worries, sickness or need; he can feel neither pain nor hunger. You must continue with your schoolwork, play games, and sing songs” (August 3, 1969). That uncanny feeling of death is juxtaposed here with the reveries of sleep, absence of troubles or difficulties, and the exhortation to continue to feel joy, curiosity, and delight in life. Since at least the beginning of World War One, writing and particularly, writing letters, became for all social classes, the modus operandi for staying in touch, and for communicating across distances news, aspirations, and emotions on paper, in which a delicate dance of meanings emerged between the correspondents.
The poems of Max Harris, are a notable example of creativity and resilience in the face of the uncanny. In writing “Your Eyes Content Me” in 1957, barely a decade after the end of World War II, the feelings of loss, love, sorrow, and dying are evoked, as distinct traces of the devastations of war. Here, the commentary by Lee Nichol on David Bohm’s On Creativity (1998) appears particularly significant, in which the poet is, in this case, in “the unique position of perceiving the dynamism and movement of the world around him, while at the same time realizing that the means by which this perception takes place-one’s own mind–is of an equivalent order of creativity, participating intimately with the world which it observes. To the extent that our perceptions of the world affect “reality” – and the evidence for this is considerable – we have a corresponding responsibility to attempt to bring into being a coherent relationship between our thought processes and the world they emerge from and interpret” (vii).
Within displacements and migrations, the biographical oral narratives of refugees and asylum seekers offer a window into the multiple forms of creativity and resilience resonating in their voices as they approach the unsettling certainty of deportation. Among the numerous films or videos on the subject, the documentary, “When Home,” on Devraj Singh’s emotional appeal for residency in Canada is both an act of creativity and resilience manifested through a combined aesthetics of colour, texture, and voice. The film evokes the injustices and voiceless-ness that asylum seekers are frequently subjected to and the uncanny feeling of living in Canada while dreading a future with or without his family in India.
References
Bohm, David. On Creativity. London: Routledge, 1998.
De Lorenzo A., Lattke L.S., Rabaglietti E. 2023. “Creativity and resilience: a mini-review on post-pandemic resources for adolescents and young adults.” Front Public Health. 2023, May 24.
Venter, Sahm, ed. Prison Letters. Nelson Mandela. New York and London: Liveright Publishing, 2018.
When Home. The Story of Devraj Singh. Roxton Media Original Productions and ASCOLTA Cultures & Therapies Productions. 2023.
Sonia Cancian is an Independent Scholar affiliated with the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism and the Society for the History of Emotions. Her latest book, With Your Words in My Hands: The Letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2021) features the Italian correspondence of two migrant lovers writing between Montreal and Venice in the mid-twentieth century.
Histories of Emotion 