The courage to name
Wait! Just Listen is a weekly Sunday newsletter on living a purposeful and meaningful life, in a digitised world of opinion polarisation, gratuitous commentary and click-bait. Subscribe with one-click to receive my musings right in your inbox.
Through a recent work assignment, I had the privilege of speaking to an Iranian writer, on the “Women, Life, Freedom” revolutionary protests that galvanized a broad swath of Iranian society to rise up in one of the most significant political movements since 1979. Her anguished lament was clearly identifiable, wrenched out of her by the brutality of the world and its injustices. She told me that, for her, storytelling remains the most potent force to blow a hole through the edifice of patriarchy. Those words left an indelible impact on me.
We’re often in awe of ordinary people who brave the darkest side of life with a certain hardiness and commitment to thrive and create positive change no matter the circumstances, casting eternal light among the darkest shadows. But underneath this portrayal of resilience is a courage to name. Because, to name is to see. To cast away the veil of blindness and expose things as they really are, reconfiguring the world according to ones’ own reference points and resisting the dominant narratives that go unquestioned.
The stories we tell are the worlds we end up building. The narratives we attribute to our life experiences, wrongs and betrayals, unweaves the fabric of the status quo. For many this is the first step towards liberation when deeply entrenched power systems start to crumble, giving rise to the irrepressible urgency of truth. We reside in an age of alternative facts and misinformation, when language is often used as an insidious weapon of oppression and manipulation both by institutions and people. As Nietzsche famously asserted, language can erase, distort and misguide. It can throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the most tragic conditions of humanity or uncover them.
Those who possess the gift of storytelling have a responsibility to tell the world’s truths, with telescopic clarity and precision, as way of reclaiming a sense of agency not only for themselves but also for those who have, through no fault of their own, been rendered voiceless. Rebecca Solnit, one of the most poetic writers of the century, elegantly captures the profound significance in the deceptively simple act of storytelling. She writes:
There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those “dominant narratives” or “paradigms” or “memes” or “metaphors we live by” or “frameworks.” However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions.
For Solnit, every story rests on a bedrock of other stories, each indiscriminately layered over another, providing liberation for some and perpetual imprisonment for others. It is only through the act of naming - exposing these narrative geologies - can the lulling stories of the status quo be critically examined. This is how alternative landscapes and new pathways of possibilities are imagined.
Because reality isn’t always straightforward or pretty. Those who have the courage to unearth this complexity will be privy to the misreading, excluding and embroidering, that happens to supposed facts and ‘cardinal truths’. Only through calling out what we see - naming - can we humanise the world events around us and within. That is how we learn to be human.
To name is necessary and honourable work when it’s done with sincere passion and guts. It is the only way through the gates of hope - an assertion my dear Iranian colleague resolutely and rightly lives by.
Oh this so resonates just now... I'm just finishing off an article for a magazine of a feminist organisation the Association of Radical Feminists (ARM). The piece focuses on a recent publication 'How can universities promote academic freedom?' My title is 'In praise of debate: feminist consciousness and ARM'. One of the aspects I talk about that I see as specifically feminine, is the way women connect and share through story telling; we sit in circle and talk. In our case it is a midwifery and birthing women's group (primarily - but open to all), but it could be a knitting group, a book club, a health group or class, or support group, but the key factor tends to be women sharing experiences in a personal narrative to educate - antenatal groups are classic in the birthing world along with other mother's groups for this kind of story telling. Your words on 'naming' are pertinent in many debates - if we can't/don't or fear naming, things escalate. I quote Andrea Dworkin - “Ethical individualism needs a particular kind of culture – a culture of independence – in which to flourish. Its enemy is the opposite culture – the culture of conformity, of Khoumeni’s Iran, Torquemada’s Spain, and Joe McCarthy’s America – in which truth is collected not person by person, in acts of independent conviction, but is embedded in monolithic traditions or the fiats of priesthood or junta or majority vote, and dissent from that truth is treason. That totalitarian epistemology – searingly identified in the finally successful campaign of Orwell’s dictator to make his victim believe, through torture, that 2 and 2 is 5 – is tyranny’s most frightening feature.” (Dworkin 1996) I may well quote you Josh...? Great post - wish it was longer.
Very nice piece! Naming things is a divine act. By naming a set of patterns or events, we speak them into existence. For to name something one must first see and understand it. There’s so much mythology and stories around words, like the idea of having power over someone/something if you can name them (Rumpelstiltskin). Anyway good stuff!