In order to reconstruct my personal narrative, I asked two of my closest friends who have known me for over a decade to retell my experience back to me from a third-person point of view. This is to allow me to fictionalise the incident to write the story of Tamar from a different perspective rather than my own. I use autoethnography as a research method here to further understand the social experience of this particular journey.
Autoethnography can be defined as “an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)”
Auto = self
ethno =culture
graphy = scientific study of
Here I create a fictional entity that represents my personal experience. Through Tamar I explore myself further. Tamar is not only testing my own perception and behaviour towards a particular event but also cultural experience of it.
Tamar allows me to break the linearity of an experience, they allow me to deconstruct a single event and see it with multiple facets.
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Worldbuilding - Tamar written from the perspective of friend 1
It was a sombre Friday evening, the redshank migratory birds had just passed through the ominous clouds hovering over Dvaita that day. As usual, I was in my room contemplating over and over about what could be the reason behind my dearest Tamar’s absence. I kept wondering whether my ill-mannered and self-loathing habits created the massive crevice that exists between us now. In my decade long friendship with Tamar, never have I seen her mask despondence with rejoice, pain with pleasure. Like every night before this, I found it difficult to fall asleep as my mind was being consumed by the same cycle of confusion and doubt. Even though we share the same living space, at that point I felt like we were divided by an impermeable wall.
With the constant dubiety in my mind, I decided to confront Tamar. What she told me next left me devastated. My loving, sweetest Tamar had been raped. Every particle of my body and mind was consumed by rage. Pacing around the hall I decided to devise a plan to avenge the man who raped my Tamar. However, after much deliberation to not continue the cycle of pain. I sought to discover novel ways through which I could get my Tamar back.
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The story above is inspired by a voice note sent by friend 1 who narrated the incident from her perspective, fictional elements are added in, this was the initial trial of worldbuilding for Tamar's character, an act of transfer a real event into the virtual world.