How will you tell our story?
Who are you to tell our story?
Maybe we do not want you to tell our story!
When I look back on the period between receiving my acceptance into the MACS program and the residency, I remember my certainty as I explained to friends and family what cultural sustainability is, and explaining at length what it was I was going back to school to do. They know me well enough that when I started my explanation with “…I will be working with ng’ano cia marimũ (folktales), they smiled. After all, the smiles seemed to say, isn’t that what you have been doing all along?
I have been collecting, compiling and translating folktales to Kikuyu for a couple of years. On Friday, January 8th, 2010, as I drove to Goucher College, that was my idea of what cultural sustainability is. I am not sure whether to cry for lost innocence or to celebrate the growth I experienced during the residency. My idea of culture and cultural sustainability was turned on its head. This ‘violence’ going on in my mind was buffered by the friendships I made between the introduction dinner and dinner the second day. By the end of class on Saturday, I did not feel I was among strangers. I was among a tribe that spoke my language – cultural sustainability.
I look back on the exercise on January 10th, 2010, where we were asked to write down a description of cultural sustainability on post-it notes and post it on the back wall of the classroom, as the moment the unraveling of my thoughts started. It framed the work we will be doing in three parts:
Gathering/collecting: When we were done with our descriptions, we posted our different colored post-it notes on white paper on the wall. The wall was a colorful mass of ……… ideas. That, in my mind is how culture looks like, what I knew it is when I signed up for this program. I was very comfortable with the jumble, with the mess, and the idea I had of how I would go about “cultural sustainability”.
Sorting/categorizing: The second part of the exercise involved sorting the descriptions and grouping those that were similar. Not only was my comfortable world disturbed, and my idea of the work I wanted to do disintegrating, I felt as if I would be ‘disturbing’ culture if I sorted or categorized it. Why, I wondered, even as I marveled at the descriptions we as a group had come up with, did I have to do more than listen to Mike as he told us about restoring skip-jacks or sit under a tree and listen to story tellers? This question was answered as the residency went on and we met those who work on the ground as well as policy makers.
Analyzing: There is more to cultural sustainability than collecting material; I am grappling with what I will do with the material I am collecting. I have no answer for this part just as I still do not know for sure what I will be collecting and gathering. However, I know that all I will do will be guided by my answers to:
How will you tell our story?
Who are you to tell our story?
Maybe we do not want you to tell our story!
The answers will inform my willingness to work with my constituency and my acceptance of the boundaries they set. After all, is it not all about the people?
My deep gratitude to all the friends I made, my companions in this new world and faculty too, for being there during that tumultuous week. Thanks for sharing and once again, for being there. I look forward to our journey together in the world of cultural sustainability (whatever ‘cs’ turns out to be).
