“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” – James Baldwin
This week I am discussing the fifth finding from The Fragile Real study, the way stories clear out a path to return to yourself. One of the interviewees put it this way:
“What if our own desires are colonized or repressed before they even have a chance to come into full expression. And that then, got me into just delving deeper into story and memory and the ways in which we can find channels and pathways to open up those desires to find our ways back to ourselves, back to our power, back to our spirit, back to our source.”
Stories as an antidote for self-alienation was a strong theme across the interviews. The idea that stories are a way to find yourself when life unmoors you from who you are means there is a common harmful exposure in the environment that generates a disconnect. Another filmmaker put it this way:
“We have in all of our systems, been trained to be dispossessed from our own self and our own story and to not trust our own voice, the voice of our elders, the voice of our family, the stories that are told and the things that are shown to us”. The separation of one’s voice from truth is a pressure to deny lived experience which can be toxic because it generates loss that is self-imposed.
Many of the interviewed storytellers frame their work in using fiction as a response to the pressure to dispossess their voice. One filmmaker explains this sentiment futher: “I am trying to shift the way in which we see ourselves in relation to the world around us. And by shifting that sense, we embrace our power. We're not taking our power. We're not finding our power. It's right there. It's like air. And we have people who are gasping to breathe in. That's what storytelling offers - fresh air. That's what it means. That's where the power comes from to me.”
Using air as a metaphor for the ideas about ourselves we can take in from the outside world, the air we all breathe isn’t exactly clean. What we breath in can cloud what we think of ourselves and make it difficult to see what lays ahead. At the extreme, the ideas we are taking in pollute the possibility that we are in control of our own lives. This is where storytelling comes in.
Finding our way to stories or from them is a process whereby fiction helps us find healthier ground where we can be in control. This focus on stories that return you to your own driver’s seat is not new. Griots of African cinema like the Burkinabe director Gaston Kabore have channeled the same focus to use fiction to elevate the consciousness of Africans and others.1
Kabore instructs: “Citizens must be given alternatives through images of self because it will give them the option to form their own views on life around them. In that way they won’t lose hope that they can be actors in the transformation of their own realities. This is where image plays such a capital role. The entrenchment of African Cinema and Television on local soil is an emergency which nothing must divert from upon which Africa’s cultural survival depends.”
Another filmmaker interviewed explains that, “A lot of us have lost our way which makes it hard to direct the future. That is why it is so important for an element of our stories to have foresight. So it can connect those who are lost with a vision of what our future could be. Sometimes you have to see your story in someone else before you can recognize it in you. ”
Using fiction to work on ourselves is indeed what many artists have always done to get past harmful norms, ideas, and beliefs from an outside world that sows seeds of doubt, fear, and insecurity in the deepest parts of everyday people’s psyche. However, the history of colonialism complicates the return to self for some people. Whether your ancestors were enslaved or enslavers, the hidden dimensions of this history has the potential to corrode your spirit if it remains unexplored.
The conquest of consciousness which Frantz Fanon has so eloquently written about is the primary obstacle to imagining a new future for oneself and everyone else. It is ground zero. Using stories to return to this ground zero positions cinema as a corrective lens, a compass that returns us home.
This wayfinding function of stories stems from the way stories call out to us. They find their way to us because stories ring bells inside of us that connect to experiences we are having in our lives. The late great filmmaker Kathleen Collins attributes the impact that stories have on us to “some little bell” that gets rung between a story we are listening to or watching and how it maps onto what is going on in our lives. She explains that “the stories that have mattered to you are because some little bell got rung between what you read and what was going on in your life,” and claims it is no coincidence that you read certain books at certain points in your life and never again.
This metaphor of stories ringing bells is useful. Something in us, in our psyche, attracts which stories call to us. And the same is true for the audiovisual makers interviewed. Something in their own obsessions, feelings, and concerns, calls the stories they write. As one filmmaker put it, “[I am] inviting through fictional stories an examination and exploration of reality, what it means to live in my country, an African experience… It doesn't matter what the genre is, you can absolutely make fiction that creates a sort of hunger for a better reality because it is through me and the characters I create that this hunger comes through. It is my own hunger.”
Characters pass through us as storytellers and if we do our job well, we capture some aspect of that character’s humanity that makes sense to us and render it accessible to others. In the wise words of Collins, “The impulse in any human being is to reach out to someone’s humanity that makes sense to them. That is where change happens in the psyche… It happens out of an internal longing for a feeling from the inside of a character. That is where change happens.”
Collins shared these words as part of a lecture on narrative structure that she gave at Howard University in 1984. In the lecture, she describes the subtext that she tells stories from as a refusal to create mythologic (read as stereotypic) black characters. Her stance is an antidote to the pressure of creating black characters that don’t ring true. I have watched the video several times. Her brilliance and clarity looms singular. I urge you to watch the whole lecture. In the lecture she describes the geography of cinema as being composed of space and light. In that way, fiction in this medium is about light work, either mirroring the light hidden in us or magnifying it when it dims.
The findings the makers shared about using their stories to return to themselves reminds me of Collins’ directive and that cinema can be medicine - a lifeline to hold on to when we are lost. I often say it’s the only medium that can make it crystal clear how to know what you don’t know. The discovery of new perspectives is where cinema shines strong. It is exceptional in its ability to place you in someone else’s view of the world and help you see what you may otherwise not be able to. It can also correct the distortions in our mind’s eye created by our blind spots.
This makes cinema an ideal medium to explore humanity and showcase the light within all of us. And that is how we get to understand who we are instead of who or what the world says we are. Minding the gap between who we are and who the world says we are is perhaps the most fundamental of challenges we all face as humans. It is where the “myth and the truth separate” to use Collins’ words. The secular and painstaking work of reconstructing a character from a place of truth in the shadow of the myth is sacred work. It may also represent the sharpest point of the narrative spear by carving out a place for lived experience to shine and possibly transform everyone else’s.
Martin, Michael T., and Gaston Kaboré. "" I am a storyteller, drawing water from the well of my culture": Gaston Kabore, Griot of African Cinema." Research in African Literatures (2002): 161-179.