I screwed up. Hardly surprising, given the horrible conditions, and nobody will notice, but nonetheless. It's never a good feeling.
It's been raining for days, and I've been post-Christmas hibernating, gradually disappearing under the piles of seasonal detritus (books, DVDs, packaging: soft plastic, molded plastic, cardboard everywhere. Not to mention the food). Today's one and only task was to clear the rubbish out of the house and the car. The final related errand was a trip to Oxfam Home on Frances St.
The one way system in the Liberties was confounding, so I ditched the car halfway between my house and the shop, and walked to Francis St in the rain. Arrived, with 2 coats on, drenched, with a soggy box full of soggy tat. And the nice beardy man in the shop is being interviewed by a lady and a man with a very large camera. The lady sprang on me, delighted; the spongy bit of her microphone says 3. They're filming a fluff piece for tonight's news about charity shops. Oh shite. Do I mind if they film me arriving (again) with my box of tat? They have lots of shoppers, but no donors. Sigh. When will this be on? I don't want my Aunty seeing me on the telly giving away all my Christmas presents from the last 3 years. Ok.
I walk down the steps again, still dripping, with a box of junk that I've never owned. Hand it over. That's great, now can we interview you? You know, the irony is, I work for Trocaire. Ho ho ho and out with the mic.
I made a show of myself. I said daft things like "it's all for a good cause", and "we bought our wardrobe here." Here was the perfect opportunity to express, articulately, in the guise of an ordinary Irish person, the importance that international development has to me. Here was my chance to use the meeja as a worthwhile mouthpiece, to talk about the connection I feel with my counterparts in Africa, to explain how important I think it is for Irish people to continue to fund development aid, even in recessionary times. And what do I do? I open my mouth and say exactly what I would expect any eejit on the telly to say. Utterly dumbfounded, I blew my chance.
It will air at 5.30 on TV3 news tonight ("and finally...") Hopefully nobody will see me. Oh god. Hopefully nobody from work will see me.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Stories of Africa, stories of dignity
Lately I've been regularly running into questions about how to tell stories, and of whose stories to tell. My good friend Bryan Mukandi in a recent blog gave the perspective of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, who gave a talk to Ted.com about the danger of the "single story" of Africa which makes people in the West unable to empathise with African problems because they have such limited, immutable ideas of what African problems are.
Apart from writing prize-winning, Oprah-friendly, book clubbish novels about African lives in all their joys and complexities, how can we make people leap from that single story to something more reflective of reality? Adichie's experience of being Nigerian in the US was that what people expected of her was some mix of grinding poverty, tribal dancing and mysticism, and a Lion Kingish relationship with nature. Not universities, pop music and hair dos. I'm perfectly familiar with this limited view of Africa: I'm more than a little prone to it myself, since at this time of year my favourite song, for all its political incorrectness, is still Do They Know It's Christmas.
Working for a development NGO, I encounter the problem of the single story regularly, and I'm not always satisfied by how we address it. Enough with the negativity: here's where I think we got it right: three audio-visual stories from Sierra Leone told in the words of the individuals who received our help. What's lovely about these stories, I think, is how transparently they show rural African life in all its simplicity and complication.
If I could only achieve one thing as a result of working in "development" for a living, (and I'm not convinced I can even do that much) it would be this: illustrate to Irish people how communities in the rest of the world are not unlike communities here. That means messy, close-knit, politicised, bitchy, determined, self-interested and endlessly resourceful. Is that more negative adjectives than positive? Well, I'm fairly cynical. That's pretty much how I view humanity, but it's also what I love about it.
The Sierra Leone stories got me thinking a lot about how badly we usually communicate something as simple and as incommunicable as Rural African Life. I found myself in a series of email exchanges, with wunderblogger/ wunderkind Jane Ruffino, and with miracle filmmaker-photographer Michael Kelly Kelly. Michael Kelly made a beautiful video about a community Trocaire supports in Malawi recently, which achieves much the same effect as the Sierra Leone stories, and so makes me equally proud. Which brings me to what I'm really thinking about: more than just African stories, but stories generally, stories that are hard to tell, and hence, oral history.
I've spent this evening wandering the internet guided primarily by Jane and Michael, and half memories of my own, looking for tales that are similarly dignified and motivating, that can make us connect with the lives of others. I was incredibly moved by this one: a Ugandan man who had been abducted as a child, told with spirit and hope through (his own?) child's illustrations. I was touched by this story of a teenage mother in New York: beautiful photos tracing the difficulties of a girl who thought that she had no alternatives when she got pregnant, because this may be her only opportunity to have a child. I was enchanted by this tale of a lesbian woman who confronts the fact that her family is racist, that the Klan is part of her own personal heritage.
The idea of oral history isn't exclusive to the audio-visual media. It's ancient, and one of its best proponents (thanks so much to Jane for this insight) was Studs Terkel, an American broadcaster who broadcast interviews with the ornery people of Chicago for more than 45 years from 1952.
What these stories have in common is that the subject of the story controls the tale. So often, particularly in the NGO world, we won't let go of that control. I'm guilty of it myself; so delighted by my own desire to storytell, to wordsmith, that I can't allow my ego recede into the background. And I am conscious that I've told Nana's story over and over, but I never worked out the technology to let her tell it herself.
I'm a fan of The Hub, a forum for sharing videos about human rights; but I think it highlights a problem that we in the development/ human rights community run into all the time. In our advocacy, in our campaigning, but most of all in our fundraising, we're pretty urgently required to communicate how awful life is for poor people everywhere. (This is true whether you're the Simon Community in Ireland or Unicef in the Ivory Coast or Amnesty International talking about Zimbabwe). It's not always constructive to give the voice to individuals, who invariably find themselves sorting out their own problems. And yet, to overcome the single story, that's what we need to do.
And that's what I'm most interested in doing right now. I don't often do this, but on this occasion, I'd really like to ask for comments on this (overlong) blog post, and more importantly on the links. Am I on my own in thinking that these are the stories, the insights, that might change the world?
Apart from writing prize-winning, Oprah-friendly, book clubbish novels about African lives in all their joys and complexities, how can we make people leap from that single story to something more reflective of reality? Adichie's experience of being Nigerian in the US was that what people expected of her was some mix of grinding poverty, tribal dancing and mysticism, and a Lion Kingish relationship with nature. Not universities, pop music and hair dos. I'm perfectly familiar with this limited view of Africa: I'm more than a little prone to it myself, since at this time of year my favourite song, for all its political incorrectness, is still Do They Know It's Christmas.
Working for a development NGO, I encounter the problem of the single story regularly, and I'm not always satisfied by how we address it. Enough with the negativity: here's where I think we got it right: three audio-visual stories from Sierra Leone told in the words of the individuals who received our help. What's lovely about these stories, I think, is how transparently they show rural African life in all its simplicity and complication.
If I could only achieve one thing as a result of working in "development" for a living, (and I'm not convinced I can even do that much) it would be this: illustrate to Irish people how communities in the rest of the world are not unlike communities here. That means messy, close-knit, politicised, bitchy, determined, self-interested and endlessly resourceful. Is that more negative adjectives than positive? Well, I'm fairly cynical. That's pretty much how I view humanity, but it's also what I love about it.
The Sierra Leone stories got me thinking a lot about how badly we usually communicate something as simple and as incommunicable as Rural African Life. I found myself in a series of email exchanges, with wunderblogger/ wunderkind Jane Ruffino, and with miracle filmmaker-photographer Michael Kelly Kelly. Michael Kelly made a beautiful video about a community Trocaire supports in Malawi recently, which achieves much the same effect as the Sierra Leone stories, and so makes me equally proud. Which brings me to what I'm really thinking about: more than just African stories, but stories generally, stories that are hard to tell, and hence, oral history.
I've spent this evening wandering the internet guided primarily by Jane and Michael, and half memories of my own, looking for tales that are similarly dignified and motivating, that can make us connect with the lives of others. I was incredibly moved by this one: a Ugandan man who had been abducted as a child, told with spirit and hope through (his own?) child's illustrations. I was touched by this story of a teenage mother in New York: beautiful photos tracing the difficulties of a girl who thought that she had no alternatives when she got pregnant, because this may be her only opportunity to have a child. I was enchanted by this tale of a lesbian woman who confronts the fact that her family is racist, that the Klan is part of her own personal heritage.
The idea of oral history isn't exclusive to the audio-visual media. It's ancient, and one of its best proponents (thanks so much to Jane for this insight) was Studs Terkel, an American broadcaster who broadcast interviews with the ornery people of Chicago for more than 45 years from 1952.
What these stories have in common is that the subject of the story controls the tale. So often, particularly in the NGO world, we won't let go of that control. I'm guilty of it myself; so delighted by my own desire to storytell, to wordsmith, that I can't allow my ego recede into the background. And I am conscious that I've told Nana's story over and over, but I never worked out the technology to let her tell it herself.
I'm a fan of The Hub, a forum for sharing videos about human rights; but I think it highlights a problem that we in the development/ human rights community run into all the time. In our advocacy, in our campaigning, but most of all in our fundraising, we're pretty urgently required to communicate how awful life is for poor people everywhere. (This is true whether you're the Simon Community in Ireland or Unicef in the Ivory Coast or Amnesty International talking about Zimbabwe). It's not always constructive to give the voice to individuals, who invariably find themselves sorting out their own problems. And yet, to overcome the single story, that's what we need to do.
And that's what I'm most interested in doing right now. I don't often do this, but on this occasion, I'd really like to ask for comments on this (overlong) blog post, and more importantly on the links. Am I on my own in thinking that these are the stories, the insights, that might change the world?
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