The truth is important, but the truth needs help
This is an excerpt of a conversation between Lucila Sandoval, Āryā Jeipea Karijo and Ishtar Lakhani held during the launch event for the Global Narrative Hive on 13 September 2023. Together they discussed how they came to the realisation that they were doing narrative work, what it means to them and how narratives are all around us as part of our day to day lives and organising. Bringing lived experiences and stories from sex workers’ rights movements in South Africa, to student and reproductive justice movements in Mexico, and LGBTQ communities in Kenya, they challenge conventionally held notions of narratives as an area for comms ‘experts’ and broaden our understandings beyond often prioritised Global North perspectives.
How did you come to narratives?
Ishtar: I’ll be honest. I don’t think I came to narratives, I think Narratives came to me. I was busy minding my own business doing activism in South Africa working for the rights of survivors of sexual violence. The advocacy work we were doing was centred around the principle of “nothing about us without us”. We realised that there were guides and other resources written by lawyers, but none by survivors. Maybe we should write our own guides? Why weren’t the people at the centre of the issue telling their own stories? So that was the work we did. Because in our instinct that produced the most powerful advocacy.
Then a few years later, someone came along and said “Ishtar you guys are doing such powerful narrative work!” And I replied “Oh, we are!? What do you mean?” They told me: “This is narrative work, because you are creating stories, sharing them, centering the people whose issues they are.” So if I’m perfectly honest, yes, narratives came to me far more than I came to narratives.
Āryā: In my context, a lot of people are told “You’re not African.” And you’re told your life is “Western” or something of the sort.
I started digging into the African cultural past, including my own peoples of origin. I heard that queer Africans really existed here before colonisation. We’re trying to push back against all the negative stories that are being told about us by anti-rights movements and fundamentalist Christian groups. For me, it came full circle by being a part of building what has become the Global Narrative Hive, and recognizing what narratives were.
I realised that for my people, even without using the word narratives, the way our culture moved from one generation to another was through the use of things called narratives.
I guess narratives were here way before us and now we’re rediscovering their power! This is also decolonization in itself.
Lucila: I love the idea that narratives existed before us, because that’s how I got here. My parents were both activists, my mum still is. But my dad was part of the student movement in Mexico in 1968, they experienced a lot of repression, killings, and violence. There was a strong notion of the student’s movement, and I grew up surrounded by that. When I was 19, another student movement emerged. The interesting thing about that was that we didn’t fight to enact a law or do any more direct advocacy. Instead we were concerned about the media and how it pushed specific narratives. As very young people, we felt that this was wrong and that we should be able to tell our own stories. We shouldn’t all get our news or information from just one or two sources. This is not democracy.
It was well timed, but it might seem strange that it was so focused on communications and democratisation of the media. These things maybe don’t sound like the sexiest activism, but they were in the moment. We started working on what it meant to have the means to represent ourselves and to tell stories from where you’re at.
It was someone from the Global North who told me that I was doing narrative work. That’s how I realised that’s what I was doing. I think that really speaks to something we’ve talked about, which is that a lot of people who work with narratives and are doing storytelling don’t necessarily use the jargon or these concepts. That’s a big barrier that all of us want to break.
Let’s talk about what narratives are to us and how we live them.
Ishtar: My understanding of narrative has shifted over time. I work with narrative strategies and for me, it is vital to enable me to do other work like shifting policy and changing laws in South Africa, specifically around the criminalization of sex work.
I think what I came to realise very quickly in my policy advocacy work, is that the truth will not set us free.
We sometimes think that if people have the facts, if people have the information, they will make the right decisions. So then all we have to do is just make sure policymakers have the facts so they can make good policy decisions. We know that that’s not how it works. We know probably none of us would be doing this work if the truth really set us free.
The truth is important, but the truth needs help. That’s where narratives come in. Narratives and stories create that empathy and connection, so that people can hear the facts and so we can create the changes we want. When we think about sex worker rights in South Africa, we need to change how public opinion feels about sex workers and see their work. That requires so much to be done to combat the negative stereotypes that have been built up for generations. It requires us to create our own stories in the sex worker movement, so that those who are involved ‑ those who policies and laws most affect, are able to have their voices heard, specifically by people in power. The work we’re doing as narrative workers is trying to create cultural shifts, trying to get people to make behavioural changes.
We know people don’t change behaviour based on facts. They change behaviour based on feelings. We know that combining facts with feelings is what’s going to create the shifts that we want to see.
That’s how I understand it in my work and the role it plays in doing strategic advocacy.
Āryā: Yes I also had things originally in my society that will now be called “narratives”, but I didn’t have that name for them. I think the word narratives came from someone in the Global North. Narratives have always been part of my culture and of my life. Because narratives are what kept traditional African societies living in a certain way and what told us how things were done. We didn’t have laws or policies, it’s narratives that kept all African societies going. So for me, I now see the powerful role narratives can play in society, and also how that power can be abused. Right now in Africa, despite people knowing that queer folks existed pre-colonization in Africa, despite the evidence we have for that, despite any facts, we still have 27 governments in Africa who criminalise us.
Despite all these truths, the truth, like Ishtar said, needs help. It needs a new narrative. Clearly this narrative needs to be centred on humanity and humanness. We need to go back to the beginning and build powerful narratives, because narratives can make things seem as if they’ve always been a certain way or this is how things are supposed to be.
Lucila: my understanding of narratives has also shifted a lot. When I started, I thought of narratives as only centred around more traditional ideas of communications. My perception has really evolved through meeting people from all over the world that work with narratives, who are not necessarily campaigning. Sometimes the work is way more embodied and includes a lot of processes that maybe don’t seem like narrative work at first. For example, I have a friend in South Africa who works with seeds and fermentation. She’s recovering ancestral knowledge, which is part of narrative work.
Telling stories can help us access a lot of spaces. Here is one of the things that really taught me that [holds up a pañuelo — green handkerchief] — this one comes all the way from Argentina and became the symbol of the movement for abortion and reproductive rights in Latin America. It was like a wave. I started studying it — it appeared in Argentina, then Chile, Brazil, Colombia and then Mexico. It felt like a wave that was catching up with us.
I remember one of the protests we held in my city, which is super conservative and very far from abortion rights. We talked about how we could ride this wave and what we needed to do. We discussed that we couldn’t just talk about the law, because it was depressing and complex and we weren’t getting anywhere. Instead, we decided that we needed to socially decriminalise abortion. So we held a protest with all the green we could find. This was part of coming into this narrative and being part of it. We didn’t end with a speech in a town square. Instead, we ended up with reggaeton music and a party in the street! And that was such a shift, such a realisation that my work was not just about explaining why this or that is “super‑important” or why abortion has to be guaranteed. It was also about creating a space for us to exist, to dance and connect. The notion of narratives shifted from “we’re here to tell this story and these facts help these truths”, to a process of living, community, art and connection. This really gave me an energy boost and the knowledge that we’re always creating narratives and telling a story. We’re always in this state of being.
How do we use narratives in our broader work? What is useful and what’s not?
Ishtar: The struggle I have is the jargon that often comes with the narrative world. I know we all know what we’re talking about because we have to: we see opportunities for funding for narrative work, and we figure out how to make that work in a proposal. The struggle that I have is the perceptions of where it sits and lives and who the owners, creators and shapers of narratives truly are. Too often it falls squarely into the media and comms space. I’ve found it so useful in my work, but I definitely would not define myself as a media and comms person. I’m a grassroots activist and I work in advocacy. Some of the struggles I’ve been having is trying to communicate the value of narrative work, but also trying to communicate who it is that truly creates narratives, tells stories and creates culture. In our communities it’s mothers, hairdressers, people that work at your corner store. These are the people that talk about things and use particular language. They shape stories, and share the stories, and make sure everyone knows the neighbourhood gossip.
So when we’re talking within our organisations about how we can make sure that our work is challenging problematic narratives, we need to remember that it’s not just the work of the media and comms people; it’s the lawyers talking about human beings, telling stories in their own way. It’s the peer educators, people working for helplines, people that are trainers. These are all kinds of narrative and cultural workers. The work that we really have to do is make clear that it’s not just the comms people that shape narratives. It’s all of us. One of the things that really excites me about this space and the future of this space is that it’s making the circle bigger. It’s really thinking more expansively about how we understand narratives. It’s not just this jargony thing that people from the Global North tell us we’re doing. Actually we’re all participating in the creation of narratives. We all have power to shape them, either in a problematic conservative oppressive way or to use our powers for good and shape them in a progressive, amazing, inclusive and empathetic way. We all have that power. Going forward, that’s what’s exciting me about this space. It’s an invitation for people to drop those labels, drop the jargonistic understanding to instead come together and learn from each other about how we can create more progressive empathetic, connected spaces where we can join together across our issues. That’s another powerful role that narratives play; telling our stories as whole human beings. It connects us across issues, across countries, and that is really, really exciting.
About the speakers:
Lucila is a communicator from Latin America, specifically from México, specifically from Guadalajara, a very warm city that is getting warmer every day. I’m a feminist, I’m queer, and a narrative worker. More than a storyteller I see myself as a weaver of stories, people, projects, big-all-encompassing narratives, and tiny phrases I catch on the web or on the wind. I provide communication services and support to organizations which are striving for rights over the land, defending the LGTBI community and fighting against GBV.
Āryā: I love to introduce myself using absolutes. I am a human being — this is an absolute (never going to change). I also describe parts of my humanity — I exist as a transgender woman, I love as a lesbian. I also talk about my ways of being in the world such as I fight as a feminist and view the world through an African Feminist lens. My name is Āryā. I am a full time chosen mother of some awesome young adult non-binary human beings, in whatever time left I do storytelling and I work for my communities of belonging as a human rights activist. I am also an ideal dinner guest.
Ishtar was born in South Africa to parents that fought the Apartheid government so activism is in her DNA. Her time at university gave a Masters Degree in Anthropology but more importantly a desire to smash the patriarchy. Her career has ranged from coordinating a feminist advocacy campaign for survivors of sexual violence, to revolutionary sandwich-making, to fighting for the rights of sex workers. Her passion lies in creative activism and the experimental melding of fantasy and reality, of art and activism, in an attempt to imagine and enact what a more just world might look like.
