I read this great quote about the power of stories the other day from Shami Chakrabarti, who was talking in an interview about a biography of Eleanor Marx
She says
“My career has been about being a grim and worthy lawyer and political campaigner, but I always thought that it would be stories that shaped the narrative, the campaigns and the agendas. This book proves my point. I believe more people will be moved politically, women in particular, by reading Eleanor’s story, than by reading a thousand Comment pieces from me about how our rights and freedoms are important, and how internationalism is important, how feminism is important.
….We’re storytelling creatures. It’s Aesop’s Fables and fairy tales. This is how we listen and how we learn. And the great political campaigners are those doing storytelling. In the modern world everything goes into silos: we have fact and we have fiction, politics and the arts, it all gets compartmentalized, but actually we are a bunch of relatively basic creatures who want to sit around the camp fire with a drum listening to stories. It’s not about facts, but progress and our values.”
In a week of sometimes overwhelming impotence, rage and despair at world events – the Uk’s decision to go to bomb Irag yet again, propaganda and the misrepresentation of truth in the media, the proposed scrapping of the Human Rights Act and the government asset stripping of our NHS reading this was a tiny beacon.
All week I’ve been thinking
What can little I/we do in the face of this? How should I be spending my energy? Direct action? Lobbying? Demonstrating? Is what I do as an artist of any use?
After reading the Chami’s comments I was reminded of Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful book The Faraway Nearby which is a kind of anti-memoir, about, among other things family, stories, empathy and activism. I read it a few weeks ago, in the space of a day. I felt like she was talking directly to me, and I wrote so many passages down that I may as well have photocopied the whole book. Solnit talks about us as being ‘leaky vessels’- (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/847270-listen-you-are-not-yourself-you-are-crowds-of-others), our identities are made of stories – past present, real, fictional – which are continually being made, and remade, according to our needs.
“Stories migrate, meanings migrate, everything metamorphoses’
Solnit also talks about storytelling as a means to understand and feel our connections with others, to expand the boundaries of the self. Empathy, in other words. My favourite writer, the late David foster Wallace, says fiction gives us an opportunity to “jump over the wall of self and inhabit somebody else.”
Back to Solnit:
“Empathy, solidarity, allegiance – the nerves that run out into the world – expand the self beyond its physical bounds”
I think about the Coffee Morning group I’ve been working with at Midland Road Nursery School in Bradford, a group of mothers who meet every Thursday. The group, who mostly live in close proximity to each other in Manningham, has been going for a couple of years and in that time they become a very strong community. They talk all the time on whatsapp, they go shopping together and out for lunch, they do fund-raising projects together. They are one of the liveliest groups I’ve ever met, with a strong group identity, pride and sense of belonging. Being in their presence is like being in a bright full sun – I leave feeling warm, dazzled, and a bit giddy and befuddled. On Thursday, as we made instant books together, I listened to their banter and stories -plans for Eid, what they were going to cook and bring round to each other’s houses to share. A beautiful, strong thing, this sense of belonging, community, ‘us’.
The power of stories, strengthening us as individuals and groups. Creating space to share these – over the making of a zine or a collage or a cup of tea – to make the ‘I’ a ‘we’ – a powerful thing.
