The Power of Storytelling

typewriterSeveral recent bloggers have raised the question, “Why do we write?” I want to respond to that question. Mainly, I think we write because it’s therapeutic and exhilarating. Also, as humans we desire communication with those around us. But I’m also interested in something else. Not only why we write (Step 1), but also why does it matter (Step 2)? What’s the point? Does it change anything about who we are or the world we live in?

Step 1: Storytelling can be empowering for the writer, a form of self-expression, or a way of figuring out the truth. When a story is told, it can initiate change in a community or improve communication about a life experience. Stories have immense power in communities, connecting people to things they may not hear or see on their own. Stories, ultimately, can be archived for future generations and communities. We write because stories can find a way to truth or understanding, raise difficult questions, and spread awareness about experiences.

Step 2: Does the act of storytelling matter? What’s the point? Our whole society revolves around the written and spoken word: the building blocks of storytelling. We go to extensive effort to teach children how to read and write. I am going to be an English teacher next year. How can I explain to my students that storytelling really does matter?

I have recently been thinking about the power of storytelling because of a project I am working on called The Facing Sexual Violence Project, but first I am reminded of a TED talk that discusses the danger of a single story. Chimamanda Adichie, a lover of stories and a storyteller herself, speaks on why it is important for stories to provide multiple perspectives of life. There should not be one story, but many. According to Adichie, “The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” Without a variety of stories, Adichie argues that we fall into the trap of believing what she calls “a single story”, a limited understanding of whatever it is we tell stories about.

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http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-4699

Multiple stories, however, give individuals and communities a chance to think about things in a new way. Individuals who truly listen to multiple stories open up their minds. They begin to think for themselves, considering the perspectives they encounter in stories and developing ideas about how to move something in the world.

Adichie talks of stories as if they have volcanic power. She says, “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Adichie’s TED talk inspired me because I also believe in the power of storytelling, which brings me to The Facing Sexual Violence Project, the inspiration that charges electricity through my fingers as I type this blog.

Why do I write and read stories?

Because I want these stories to change the world, advocate for social justice, entertain a young girl or a busy parent.

The Facing Project (http://facingproject.com/) is a national non-profit organization that works with communities to connect through storytelling over a particular challenge or social issue. Facing matches community members who wish to anonymously (or not, if desired) tell their stories about the issue at hand and ultimately publishes them in a book or in some other expressive form. The Facing Project has reached communities dealing with poverty, human trafficking, and many more.

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So, what’s our issue?

Sexual violence in Rockbridge County.

W&L student Noelle Rutland brought The Facing Sexual Violence project to Rockbridge County. Storytelling, it seemed, would be the best way for the community to speak for itself. Why does storytelling matter? To me, it matters because it inspires things like The Facing Project. Storytelling propels individuals to share something and it gives communities opportunities to communicate with each other.

As the project grows, I am lucky to participate as Noelle’s co-manager, and I am inspired by the stories we have received so far. Washington & Lee Professor Deborah Miranda shared an excerpt from her story, Silver, with our project that illuminates the importance of storytelling.

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W&L Professor Deborah Miranda (Blog: http://www.badndns.blogspot.com/)

For years, Professor Miranda kept her story silent. She confessed, “Most of all, I can’t tell because there is nobody who wants to hear…My husband asks what’s wrong. I don’t have the words to tell him. He doesn’t really want to know.”

Silence.

For anyone who has a story to share, silence can be petrifying. The longer you are silent, the more you convince yourself that your story should not be spoken aloud. If you speak it aloud you may disrupt the peace, you may upset someone, and you will certainly make yourself more vulnerable.

Storytelling defies silence

It yells doggedly at the settled earth and the status quo:

“LISTEN. I have something to say. I cannot keep this inside of me any longer. I have a story. We all have a story.”

Miranda says,

“I write this story by waking up each morning and writing until I feel myself begin to change the truth. Then I walk away from the work till I can face reality again…I walk away from this story for nearly a decade; walk away with its false ending: the warm old house, the husband, the fiction of a healing that doesn’t cost, but doesn’t transform. I fight transformation tooth and nail. At last, I recognize change as my old friend, Truth. I stand still, and embrace her.”

Professor Miranda’s story shook me in the best way – like when you’ve overslept and your benevolent roommate wakes you abruptly so that you’re not late to class – it pulled me out of my dream-like state into the world urgently awaiting these stories. We have to face them.

(Quotes from Miranda excerpted from: Silver, by Deborah A. Miranda. First printed in Bad Girls/Good Girls: Women, Sex and Power in the Nineties. edited by Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry, Editors, Rutgers University Press, 1998.)


Shakespeare Lives Here

Last Sunday, I attended the first session for a one-credit course I am taking called Cross-Cultural Theatrical Experiences. Professors Holly Pickett and Shawn Paul Evans both taught classes abroad last spring term studying theatre and developed this new course as a reflection on our experiences abroad.

My class, Shakespeare In Performance, travelled to Stratford-Upon-Avon and London, UK to study several of Shakespeare’s plays and see them performed at some of the most prestigious theaters for Shakespeare in the world. Some might ask, why is it important to see Shakespeare’s plays in performance? Why not just read the plays? Before the course, I found myself wondering how it would feel to walk the streets Shakespeare walked in Stratford, see the home where he was born, and walk across the Thames towards Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

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Students from Professor Pickett’s “Shakespeare In Performance” in front of the Globe Theatre in London

Our reintegration Cultural Theatrical Experiences course seeks to reflect upon the experiences we had abroad and especially how theatre can still be relevant to our lives. After our conversation in class on Sunday, I started thinking about what it was like to see Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre in London. Really, I shouldn’t use the verb “see.” It was an experience. As a groundling at the Globe, the play is really more like a rowdy sporting event. This was especially true for Titus, which is Shakespeare’s most gruesome and violent play. This week I have been thinking more about how written works translate into theatre, and ultimately how they relate to our lives and the world. To read Titus is one thing – you see violent descriptions and stage directions revealing murders, rape, and mutilation – but to see it, to be there amongst the victims, is an overwhelming and shocking experience. I was struck ultimately by the role of women in Titus Andronicus, and how the performance amplified the written word in this particular play.

The Globe’s performance of Titus Andronicus certainly opens up a lot of questions about society, especially war and violence. I found the role of women particularly important and extremely shocking in this production. Women in this production are almost always victims of violence, sometimes participate in violence, and are almost always sexualized in Titus Andronicus. In Act I Scene I of Titus Andronicus, the Romans sacrifice Tamora’s son’s life. Tamora, Queen of the Goths, begs Titus for mercy and pleads with him to spare her son’s life. Indira Varma’s performance in this role highlights the immense pain that haunts a mother after her son’s slaughter.

Tamora’s sons, Demetrius and Chiron, attack and rape Lavinia. Following this act, the brothers cut off Lavinia’s hands and cut out her tongue so that she could not speak of her attackers. Flora Spencer-Longhurst’s performance as Lavinia was extremely traumatizing, but also moving. It was incredible how shattered Lavinia’s character seemed when she came out onto the stage, mutilated, unable to move, unable to speak. It was not even the blood coming from her body that disturbed me, but the pure emotional trauma that Lavinia endured. Her innocence destroyed, her body ravished. The physical manifestation of this pain was apparent, despite Lavinia’s inability to vocalize the brutality of it the way that Tamora does in the first scene.

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Flora Spencer-Longhurst as Lavinia at the Globe

Although these violent events are the same in the written play as they are performed live, it leaves the viewer with a completely different feeling in her gut. Several audience members fainted and many of us felt sick to our stomachs watching the gruesome acts performed in this play. There’s something different about seeing things on an actor’s face and in her gait and her voice (or for Lavinia her lack of voice) that shakes your bones and gnaws at your heart. Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance for a reason – he knew that they would have more power to influence the audience when they were acted, lived almost, rather than only read.

While literature can have powerful implications and reactions, I find something valuable in a dramatic experience that is very different from reading the words on a page. We still relate to these issues in life today: the power-hungry characters, the violence, the tragedy, the treatment of women – that’s the reason so many people felt faint or actually fell to the ground in the Globe Theatre that day. Shakespeare wrote a play that meant something to his audience and continues to mean something to us today. Seeing this on stage and putting a face to a name and seeing a real woman as a victim makes us feel these implications on a grander scale. For now, I’ll continue to read what I can and see literature performed whenever possible to gain that extra perspective.