Storytelling is “activism 101.”
At least according to Annie Leibovitz, who with Gloria Steinem, has embarked on a global tour hosting “talking circles” with people attending her installations of “WOMEN: New Portraits.” In Mexico City, for example, Leibovitz and Steinem sat with a group of women and discussed topics ranging from the installation to sexual violence against women. Leibovitz emphasized, in talking with those at the installation, that “there’s all kinds of women up here, and the point of this is really that there are all kinds of women.” (Click here for a video of the installation and talking circles).
Her installations welcome attendees to sit, surrounded by photographs of “all kinds of women,” and talk to each other. Leibovitz’s photographs, then, are just the beginning, making space and carrying forth the stories themselves as well as the journey that both the story and the telling will begin.
I believe that we all have a story to tell. We all are on a journey. We all need space – for silent reflection and for connection – to nourish us on our paths.
I find healing in telling my own story, one which straddles time and space – the birth and death of my daughter Eliana, life without her, and belief in a world unknown in which I’ll see her again. I need to say her name, see it in print. And so I recall, in conversations with family and friends, on paper, and now here, my seemingly normal pregnancy with her, and re-live the thirty seconds of pure bliss after she was born, but before we knew something was wrong. I recall her sparkling eyes, her vivid expressions, her gurgles and screams. I remember, honor, her pain and suffering too. I pray out loud that her story, mine, was different, knowing that we parted ways too soon, with her now on a journey unknown to me.
And somehow, I recall how I woke up the day after she died, and my journey continued. It continues as I share her story, my story, with others, weaving together the telling and the daily rituals of living. Her story, my story, ended, and began anew the day she died – when my world fall apart, my heart broke, my body screamed, my daughter silent, and I kept on living, “the world spinning.”
I am reminded of Colum McCann’s novel, Let the Great World Spin. The novel traces the lives of people that appear to be so different, that move in circles so varied – women from Park Avenue and the Bronx, two Irish brothers, a mother and daughter, both prostitutes, the daughter’s young children – and yet, through their own agency, fate, or inevitability of shared human experience, their stories intersect. The characters are as complex as are the circumstances that life throws at them – each plagued by demons, buoyed by dreams, and each tied to the realities of being human. The novel ends where it begins, with these words: “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough. . . . The world spinning.” Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2009), 350 (public library) (emphasis added).
How these words ring true to me, particularly at this stage in my own journey. I appreciate, most of all, the complexities McCann presents, without any effort at trying to solve them. Let the Great World Spin acknowledges the limits of our own humanity. And that there is beauty in that.
Because sometimes there is no solution. Sometimes it’s important to sit down in a room together – to talk, to listen, to share – without trying to fix anything. The “talking circles” at Leibowitz’s installations create this space – the activism is the simple task of sitting down together, speaking, sharing, and listening. The activism is in opening our hearts in the world that keeps on spinning. I hope #eightstrong provides a similar forum.
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