In order to problematise how the definiteness intrinsic to marginality overwrites the interpellated and enforced essence of those demarcations, the paper brackets the yearning from denied belonging in the researcher-collaborator and responding-collaborator. The fallibility of boundaries sprung up unexpectedly, when a life story collaboration on spatially (dis)figured identities of an Eritrean-Italian-American who spent her childhood in Sudan, blended into my own as an Indian-Tamil-Malayali who studies Eezham. The scope of this unintended convergence as an alternative modality of experiencing marginal(ised) experiences is the crux of this paper. This unintended sense of belonging with each other presents itself as an unexpected form of solidarity as it is generated as a response to witnessing the other’s and our own subject position as daughters bracketed by our subjection as “halfsies”. This unimagined outcome, thus a radical sense of belonging by carrying the potential to disobey the the boundedness of our interpellated marginalities also subverts the seeming non-relationality of our marginalities.
In other words what is otherwise an alienable grief of denied belonging is witnessed as an inalienable co-experience. The differences in our marginality leak into shared interstices transforming them into a site of radical care. I use auto-ethnography to contour, present and respond to our collaboration, with the aim of moulding the plasticity of the genre as a critical tool that relays the poetics of this coming together, which is otherwise lost in the noise of the observable phenomenon. I propose auto-ethnography as an alternative modality to trace out or trace in silenced co-experiences such that marginality emerges as a site of radical care from intentionally practising ethnography as an act of witnessing and critical positioning.
