Reframing the Self: Schizophrenia, Identity, and Digital Narrative in 'Fallen Standing' by Reshma Valliapan

Abstract

Narratives of self-representation have the power to engage subjectivities. They focalise the subject point-of-view interspersed in gesture, voice, body, and the self. The global recognition of personal narration post World War II gave rise to many autobiographical genres dealing with holocaust, identity, exile, displacement, and disability. Autobiography emerged as a multimedia site that connects itself to the body's materiality. It attends to the issues of the narrator's body and the cultural meanings attached to it outside the text. This makes the body a site of knowledge and knowledge production (Smith & Watson). Disability Studies address that narratives enable the destigmatisation of illness and disability, and they lead to the extension of identity politics that provoke further disability narratives. 

Fallen Standing: My Life As A Schizophrenist by Reshma Valliapan explores the newness of “life text” in the digital terrain. She writes about her experience of coping with therapy and medication, she also discusses her struggle to understand her illness, surviving suicide attempts, discovering support groups, and finally coming into her own. The scientist-subject equation of this narrative enables scrutiny of Schizophrenia through self-reflexive articulations; emails and journal entries. We are forced to ask ourselves how to engage (or disengage) the pre-established narratological conventions to place such texts. And seek the role of focalisation and narrative voice to create a nuanced perception of the mental health narrative of a woman. This paper explores how digital textuality has a world-making ability that becomes a deeply personal realm to reflect upon thoughts, memories, and perceptions of self and the community.