Pop 89: What if you told me a story?
By Madonna Hamel
What if, instead of arguing our points, asserting our opinions and finding flaws in each other’s world-views, we just just told each other our stories? We reveal ourselves to each other - and ourselves - when we tell our stories. Stories vary - but in every true story lies a common humanity. I recall the days when browsing through bookshops, looking for a great new read, I’d scan the back covers of books, looking for mention of an author’s talent for an understanding of “our common humanity.”
But literature praised for an insight into a common humanity is becoming harder and harder to find, replaced by a focus on a common enemy. I suppose the world has always been this way, but the polarities seem to be insanely exaggerated and weighted with all-or-nothing outcomes.
For myself, this fact hit home for me when I began my monologue-performance career in earnest. It was in 1994 when I was invited to share the stage with two other women artists. The invitation followed a hugely successful performance by the same three of us a year earlier. The new piece we called: “Reinforced Wings”. For me, the title would refer to a series of stories about “certain angels”, regular folks, who lighted on my life and repeatedly saved me from certain catastrophe.
This time the audience reaction was predominantly one of outrage: Where were the people of colour? Where were the lesbians (although how they would know who was gay was beyond me)? Why should they listen to us white chicks? I suspect I was the problem, my work employs old-fashioned story-telling. And although I was a known voice for abused women and children, that night, I chose to tell a story of a miracle, centring on a man who recused two men - one of them my fiancee - on a stormy sea. When the men he saved realized they didn’t even know his name, he told them: “I’m Norman Angel.”
Perhaps the audience resented a reference to angels. Perhaps the idea of two men in a sailboat brought to mind privilege, more whiteness, the pastimes of the upper class. (The two men were med students who pooled resources to rent a boat for a weekend.) To a post-modern deconstructionist audience, my story was filled with evidence of “exclusion” and “victimization” and void of “representation.” My story was deconstructed into rubble.
People have always taken sides, but the vast gaps between “my side” and “your side” seem to be widening. And the content of the hollering doesn’t seem to matter. Throw whatever burns into the fire, the thinking seems to be. Keep the animosity burning.
If the stakes weren’t so high, I would compare this behaviour to the rebellious phase of teenagers claiming “nobody understands me” and “everybody’s full of sh*t! It’s also the behaviour of adrenaline junkies - addicts hooked on stimulation, arousal, and high-octane energy. Some people get a hit from hurt. They’d be the last to admit it. But people are dying from sustained extreme behaviour. And extreme language. Whenever you hear language like “everybody” is crazy, “nobody” gets it, whenever “never” and “always” are used to describe a situation, you are hearing the language of people who fear looking for solutions because they only know how to fuel their rage. I’m not saying there aren’t victims in this world. But, perhaps if we lived in a world where wounds were not as celebrated and televised as healings, we’d be less tuned to slights and damages.
My brother, struggling with overcoming the trauma that comes with a stroke, keeps reminding himself - and us - to look to the small and simple Beauties of life. I capitalize the word “Beauty” because it, too has been held suspect over the last decades. But that is only because, in a world where soul seems to have gone missing, beauty became a product. We see beauty as something acquired through plastic surgery or a tube of the latest anti-wrinkle cream shilled by attractive actors in lab-coats and great hair.
But that’s not the kind of Beauty I am talking about. That’s commercialized small “b” beauty, That’s glamour, artifice, and trend subject to the whims of fashion. That’s a list of criteria to be checked off on a dating website. The kind of Beauty I am talking about happens right in front of you. Of me. Of each of us. It’s the sudden burst of laughter in the schoolyard. It’s those leaves drifting from the tree in front of your window. It’s the birds singing after the storm. It’s the undeniable common humanity we all share - the capacity to be filled with wonder and awe. To be as a little child filled with that most-maligned word: Hope.
What do we have in common? Fear, grief, anger, yes. But also: the capacity to be moved by Beauty. What do we all want? A place to rest our heads at night. Food. Shelter. Company. How can we come to a place of compassion -with a passion for life and love that is as strong as a passion for revenge and blame.
As a journalist, the best piece of advice I got was from a veteran reporter who told me: Don’t ask people, “why do you believe that?” But, instead, “when did you start believing that?” Because, then, instead of them giving you a statement in their defence, you get an invitation into their story. We are the story-telling animal. The animal searching for meaning.
Whatever makes us vulnerable, mysterious, confounding but, inevitably, brothers and sisters, is what we share: Birth, death, love, loss, mystery, story.
Maybe we don’t see eye to eye with even our family members. But we share a world with them. What if we didn’t lead with our differences, but our similarities, instead? What if instead of trying to force our viewpoints we just told each other our stories?