Storytelling is the Humanist Political Response

I saw Naomi Wolf speak the other day. An earlier book, The Beauty Myth, was lauded by New York Times as one of the most important books of the 20th century. Her work is poured over in feminist studies courses in universities everywhere.

Naomi Wolf has transformed from a feminist to a  humanist. It's hard to tell when exactly she grew weary of polemic and debate, but her two young kids and witnessing 9/11 from her home in lower Manhattan had something to do with it.

Her poet-professor father shares his twelve lessons for a creative, joyful life while in the midst of building of a treehouse for her daughter (she admits she'd never been receptive before). The result is her new work, The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom From My Father on How to Live, Love, and See. This book is about pursuing your mission in life. It's beautifully written. I confess this is the first book since I read Tuesdays with Morrie on a beach chair days before the tsunami that any book has touched me enough to shed tears.

I was once a feminist, an environmentalist, an activist. I don't often try to explain why I'm no longer. Here's the metaphor I'm now living by:

There is another way of looking at the world where you don’t look down from the plane at 30,000 feet and point out the window exclaiming, “Oh, look, there!! See the dotted line separating India and Pakistan?” You simply don’t perceive borders from that vantage point.

I feel Naomi does a superb job explaining why humans matter and why storytelling matter.

Individual human stories on all sides were being swept away under the weight and agenda of rhetoric. Civilians died in the attacks on Baghdad, but their stories were lost;  records were not being kept. Young men and women in the U.S. military were flying to their deaths, a few every day, but the ends of their stories  - the individual coffins  - were coming home in secrecy. What would happen, I wondered, to  the Muslim prisoners who were arrested, their human stories vanishing into secrecy in Guantanamo? "They will be dealt with,"  explained members of the administration. Of course,  history makes clear that terrible things can happen when governments deny individuals their identities,  their stories. There is a reason that after the Holocaust -  a massacre in which names became numbers and numbers became tattoos, human bodies were stacked like cordwood, and Jewish teeth and buttons were sorted like industrial slag - Jews  ultimately mourned their dead not with calls for retaliation but with calls for remembering, for storytelling about each lost individual. There is reason that African-American histories of the slave trade -  which renamed Africans and wiped out their religion and their family lines so that they could be sold as products - reacted to that Holocaust by unearthing the faces, the journals, and the stories of their ancestors. Storytelling is the humanist political response. - Naomi Wolf, The Treehouse

Naomi Wolf's father taught her that "all stories participate in the one human story, and that the life of  individual imagination can stand againsts the isms that divide us and make us into caricatures to one another."  Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Willa Cather said, "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

The real world was not listening, it seemed, to the story of the imagination, which can make  all empathy, and all connections, possible. Commentators and political leaders insisted that we could never understand our enemies, and they in turn, could never understand us. Meanwhile, what I kept seeing was the one human story, and it was a tragedy.  I was starting to see as my father saw,  not in terms  of geopolitical  realities ("a million brown hands under a black sky")  but as the inward universal stories of the heart ("the glass seed in the milk-heart of each word"). An Eskimo, he always insisted ("Not 'Eskimos,' these days, Dad," I would say, laughing; "the term they prefer is Inuit'"), would understand Hamlet.  A right-wing homemaker in Omaha  would understand the Rubaiyat of Omar  Khayyam. - Naomi Wolf, The Treehouse

Comments

[Marilyn]

I can't help but be struck by the beautiful thread I see connecting this post with your last one. Because, truly, is this not why women blog? Simply: to tell our stories.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Marilyn-
Precisely!