I was going to begin my blog post with something along the lines of “While participating in the work, Bury Me, My Love I found that…” but then I realized “participating” may not be quite the right word. I think of participation as an active thing, a way we contribute, perhaps with some degree of intentionality. In some important ways, the user does participate in Bury Me, My Love; we receive the messages on our phones and then we have to choose how to respond to Nour. Our replies in turn influence the trajectory of Nour’s journey.
Although we participate in the game through our responses, I felt as though this contribution was mediated in certain ways. Or, if not our participation, perhaps our full-immersion in the work. For example, I found myself distracted by my assumed identity as Nour’s husband. While I may not have made different choices if I were playing as a female friend of Nour’s, I did have to remind myself that I was supposed to be participating as if I were sort of responsible for Nour because of the nature of our relationship. I also felt that my participation was mediated at the level of the text(message). Sometimes I felt like neither of the options were what I might say myself, mostly because of tone or word/emoji choice. Additionally, when some texts were sent without my decision, I felt as though my active participation waivered. However, some of these instances seemed to try to mirror human behavior. For example, at one point, we send a typo, “Hang in tree!” instead of “hang in there.” Could we view such events as instances of dysfunctionality? How else is Bury Me, My Love an example of the dysfunctional? Perhaps political in its individualized depiction of the refugee crisis, which disrupts the popular portrayal of nameless masses far away from us.
What remains a topic of international conversation now takes place as a dialogue between two imagined people through an app for a small fee. Although the work’s intention may be to expose a wider audience to the experiences of refugees, I’m curious if others felt vaguely voyeuristic while interacting with it? Is there a danger of essentializing the refugee experience through these generated text messages? Can an argument be made that the work commodifies the experience of a refugee?