As an act of connection, listen out for stories that are hidden, difficult to tell, and yet needful of remembrance.
For some silenced histories are skeletons in the cupboard, domestic stories played out in a home setting. For others they become fodder for public consumption, stories of personal tragedy and loss. And for others they intersect with political actors and global events.
The thing they have in common is their oral nature, rarely written down, and yet passed along a family line; these are the hidden histories which put together map a more vibrant and honest reality of our complexities as humans. Flawed and broke, and infinitely varied.
Over this summer, I’ve had two conversations with women that took a surprising turn. The first on a train, and the other walking on the shady side of a mountain track, in Spain.
The surprising turn? That both women shared family histories that resonated beyond the domestic. But more than that, neither history could be freely or publicly told for fear of the dire consequences that would result from sharing them.
The first was revealed as we talked about the oral heritage of storytelling, held by many cultures, when history was kept by all within the family, the community, the tribe; thus there were many versions of the same event, all true as lived experience.
The penned and set in concrete, the authorised and authoritative, inflexible to change and the weathering of time, carried no weight among these weavers of history, as few had access to the written word.
This first story was the story of a couple, refugees, afforded sanctuary, access to a new beginning, but whose origin and nation of birth could not be talked about within the borders of their adopted state. They had committed no crime. However, their lineage and stories of home, traditions kept, and experience remembered were hushed - no, silenced - because other narratives, other histories, other voices held sway. They were not only refugees, but refugees with a doctored past, imposed and played out in order to be the good refugee.
The second was shared while talking 20th century history and politics. In order to keep a family of seven children safe, a father tells a story that is not only untrue, but the polar opposite of the reality he had lived. The truth kept the children safe, but denied the father his full story, and his children the full knowledge of what their father had done, and how his real history had played out on a wider stage than their domestic setting.
With both stories, I’ve chosen not to give a more detailed or direct account, as neither are mine to tell, and as I’m talking about oral storytelling, it seems mildly contradictory to write these stories in more detail.
However, what they can offer is a question.
What place do spoken memories have in 2022? What are the benefits of stories that are repeated? What is the value of the spoken history over the written narrative?
Ironically, I often say to clients: write it down, make it concrete, almost as if without that pen to paper or fingers and thumbs to keyboard the narrative has no reality. Perhaps it didn’t happen, the figment of an over active imagination, uncensored by logic and critical thinking.
However, I also say, speak it out. Sense-making happens in the act of exploration, and speaking is exploration.
In much of 21st century life, both public and domestic, the democratising power of the narrative is dominant. We are all in control of our story, and our lives are stories. It’s how corporates sell themselves, how millions are raised for cancer research and care, and how employees seeking promotion make their bid for advancement. Storytelling is big business. We are all now marketeers, creating our own brand, without which we and our lives can be judged as disorderly, chaotic and, worst of all, seemingly without purpose.
Allied to Storytelling, as a tool of the democratisation of public discourse and private concern, is honing an argument to 280 characters. This bite-sized written form pays dividends for polar opposites, but not for the 92% of thoughts and ideas which don’t sit as polar opposites, which aren’t part of a binary world view. But are nuanced, and don’t fit into a neat narrative, shorn of all difference and variety.
And this is where oral storytelling plays its part, by creating spaces for stories to be told beyond the boundaries of productive outcome, measured reaction or leverage, be it political, financial or social. The telling and retelling roots them in the collective memory, a powerhouse of difference and variety, one person’s narrative woven into the fabric of a time and place. Without this there would be no future, or the future would be a uniform of constraint divested of all that is unique about us as a species, our individuality, our choices and our truth.
Therefore, as an act of remembering, as an act of connection, listen out for stories that are hidden, difficult to tell, and yet needful of remembrance. Because here, in these stories lies variety and difference. They may not be easy to tell, they might be challenging to hear. However, without these silenced histories, we, as people, are just ‘half formed things.’
What silenced (hi)stories leave behind
La Caminante de Luna
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