In October, 2009, a short talk by Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie was posted on the Ted.com website. In this talk Adichie addressed our vulnerability in the face of stories. In particular, she addressed the power of “single stories” – authoritative, centralized stories that masquerade as the final truth about people and their lives. She spoke of the consequences of the single story: “it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.” In Northern Ireland we are faced with a number of competing “single stories”: “Divided communities carry different experiences and understandings of the past in their minds and indeed it is this that divides them. Their accounts of the past differ deeply” (RCGP 2009:24).
Adichie provides a good example of what Winslade and Monk would call “taking stories seriously,” by which they mean, “treating them as having the power to shape experiences, influence mind-sets, and construct relationships” (Winslade and Monk 2008:1). In the context of Northern Ireland the work of story in conflict transformation can allow us to challenge the power of the “single story”, to take stories seriously.
Maureen Hetherington has also written that “Within the field of peace building in Northern Ireland, it has become apparent that the ‘healing work’ has not been adequately dealt with” (Hetherington 2008:51). Even though different groups have competing versions of history in Northern Ireland, it could be argued that those competing narratives have in themselves become our “single story”, “… the conflict-saturated relationship narrative in which people are often stuck” (Winslade and Monk 2008:8). This is understandable. In Northern Ireland, between 100,000-140,000 people live in households where someone has been injured or killed in a Troubles-related incident (Fay et al., 1998, p. 59). It has been suggested that 12% of the Northern Ireland population may be diagnosable with PTSD (Healey 2008:59).
It is within this context that story projects such as An Crann, Towards Understanding and Healing, and Our Story, Our Peace have been developed. At the heart of such projects people trust in the power of story, storytelling, and the voicing of stories in “positive encounter dialogue” to open to the door to the possibilities of change and transformation in the wake of conflict. Story work can provide “a safe space for people to begin to articulate personal stories and also to listen to other stories, or “truths,” in a way that does not diminish their own experience” (Hetherington 2008:42).
It is important to remember, as Jessica Senehi notes, that “storytelling, of course, is not inherently good or peaceful” (2009:203). Senehi makes an important distinction between “destructive storytelling”, storytelling practices that can intensify conflict and reinforce social and political inequalities and divisions, and “constructive storytelling”, storytelling practices which tend to emphasise dialogue, mutual recognition, consciousness raising, and which offer alternatives to relations of domination (2009:203).
It is possible to recognise the violent histories of people’s experiences in this place, and also to suggest that the dominance, replaying, and reinforcement of exclusively violent histories may be destructively contributing to what Hutchinson calls “colonisation” of social imagination, or “restrictions on creative thought and creative action in relation to potential reality” (Hutchinson 1996:34). We can challenge the “single story” of Northern Ireland as “a history of violence”. We can imagine differently.
This is where story work comes in: “Through the physical recording of stories and an ongoing storytelling process, opportunities for individual healing and societal healing may emerge, as well as providing a forum for a shared and diverse history” (HTR report cited in Kelly 2005:4). Paul Thompson has written that oral history “gives history back to the people in their own words. And in giving a past, it also helps them towards a future of their own making” (1978:226). Through story work we can challenge some of the ways that many people’s voices can easily get silenced by the lumbering simplistics of single stories casually told as definitive histories. As Johnston McMaster has written: “The lost voices and lost stories not only give us permission to ethically remember and to critically commemorate, they provide us with a counter-story to the dominant discourse of the time” (2008:132).
I am interested here in the possibilities opened up by Winslade and Monk’s mediation technique of “double listening”. Drawing on the work of Michael White, they make note of the “absent but implicit” story of hope that sits alongside the voicing of a story of conflict:
“Mediators can give this story of hope for something better a chance if they first of all hear this absent but implicit hope and then begin to inquire into the story that it is a part of. The story may often by subordinate to the story of the outrage and pain, but it perhaps speaks to the person’s better intentions in relation to the other party. If given the chance for expression, these better intentions can give rise to a different story of the future” (Winslade and Monk 2008:10-11).
The expression of pain and suffering through remembered events and feelings can become a seed for hopeful reflections, not as a utopian aspiration, but as an awareness of the desire for a more positive experience that the pain and conflict reveal. I think the lessons of this “double listening” are not just relevant to formal mediation, but are also helpful in invitations to story more generally. What Winslade and Monk’s work draws attention to is how stories of the past also shape our stories of the future. It may be that “double listening” can further open up what John Paul Lederach (2005) calls the “moral imagination” of peacebuilders, allowing for even deeper understandings of the complexities, paradoxes, and possibilities of conflict transformation
References
Chimamanda Adichie. 2009. “The danger of a single story.” Ted.com October 2009. URL: http://www.ted.com (accessed 7th October, 2009).
Arlene Healey. 2008. “Holding Hope When Working Towards Understanding and Healing.” In Stories in Conflict: Towards Understanding and Healing. Liam O’Hagan, ed. 55-70. Derry/Londonderry: Yes! Publications.
Maureen Hetherington. 2008. “The Role of Towards Understanding and Healing.” In Stories in Conflict: Towards Understanding and Healing. Liam O’Hagan, ed. 39-53. Derry/Londonderry: Yes! Publications.
Francis P. Hutchinson. 1996. Educating Beyond Violent Futures. London: Routledge.
Gráinne Kelly. 2005. ‘Storytelling’ Audit. Healing Through Remembering.
J. P. Lederach. 2005. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford: OUP.
Johnston McMaster. 2008. “Ethical Remembering: Commemoration in a New Context.” In Stories in Conflict: Towards Understanding and Healing. Liam O’Hagan, ed. 127-138. Derry/Londonderry: Yes! Publications.
Report of the Consultative Group on the Past. 2009.
Jessica Senehi. 2009. “Building Peace: Storytelling to transform conflicts constructively.” 201-214. In Handbook of Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Dennis J.D. Sandole, Sean Byrne, Ingrid Sandole-Staroste and Jessica Senehi, eds. London: Routledge.
Paul Thompson. 1978. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
John Winslade and Gerald Monk. 2008. Practicing Narrative Mediation: Loosening the Grip of Conflict. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
