Unlearning how to tell stories
Claire Brown, communications lead
We don’t ask people to share traumatic stories about their past to promote or benefit Local Welcome.
This is the central premise of the new guidance I’ve written on how we share the stories of our guests who are refugees.
It’s the culmination of things I’ve been learning and thinking about for a year, but its roots go much deeper, to my life before Local Welcome.
So here’s my story about telling stories.
Telling other people’s stories
I’ve spent my whole adult life telling other people’s stories.
I was still a teenager when I became a junior reporter for a local newspaper in north Nottinghamshire (I’m now 35), and I’ve spent countless hours in strangers’ living rooms, notepad and pen in hand.
People have shared the intimacies of their lives with me - love, loss, addiction, illness - and often in the most difficult of circumstances.
Part of the job of a reporter is to knock on doors where you may not be welcome, and it has always astounded me that more often than not, people would invite me in to sit with them in their pain for a little while. It’s a privilege I’ve never taken for granted.
There were joyful moments too of course; it’s absolutely lovely to spend an afternoon chatting with a couple celebrating their Diamond wedding anniversary about how they first met. I remember one lovely woman, a former local councillor, even presented me with the first slice of their anniversary cake at the end of our interview. When she died a few years later, I wrote a piece in tribute to her for the paper. At its heart, local journalism is about the sweetness and sorrow of ordinary lives.
When I left reporting and moved into PR and marketing, the storytelling didn’t stop. Working for schools, colleges and charities, there were plenty of opportunities to collect more stories for case studies, websites, brochures and articles. I would often be writing about the experiences of homeless people and vulnerable young people. I’d record story after story before repackaging them and sending them out into the world, ready to persuade people to donate, take part or volunteer.
A slow process of unlearning
Despite stories being my world for more than a decade, it’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve started digging deeper into my role as a storyteller. I don’t enjoy admitting this.
Since joining Local Welcome, my thinking has been influenced by what I’ve been listening to in podcasts, reading online and in books.
A real ‘ding’ moment for me was listening to an episode of The Guilty Feminist podcast featuring host Deborah Frances-White, co-host Irish comedian Alison Spittle and the writer and actress Helen Linehan. They were discussing Repeal the 8th - the referendum campaign to legalise abortion in Ireland. Alison was angry about the fact that in order for the campaign to gain traction, women like Helen were having to come forward to share their personal stories of abortion. She said:
“There’s people in Ireland that are humanising the debate by sharing their personal stories and we owe such gratitude to them, because if it wasn’t for them it would just be very angry people shouting at each other...There’s people humanising this and it’s a big sacrifice to make, I have a friend called Tara Flynn who’s an amazing comedian and writer and she shared her personal story with Amnesty and I’m just inspired by her because she’s incredible, she takes such a lot of flack off people for making a decision that people really shouldn’t judge.”
This was followed by watching Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix comedy special Nanette. Hannah’s devastating critique on the way we retell stories to minimise our pain and trauma resonated deeply with me. I’m tearing up thinking about it now. Please watch it if you haven’t already. She speaks of the shame she felt about being a lesbian while growing up in Tasmania, where being gay was a crime until 1997, how she partly dealt with this by telling jokes about homophobia, and why she wants to tell her story differently now:
“You learn from the part of the story you focus on. I need to tell my story properly...I will not allow my story… to be destroyed. What I would have done to have heard a story like mine. Not for blame. Not for reputation, not for money, not for power. But to feel less alone. To feel connected. I want my story… heard.”
Later, I read, Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. It helped me to develop a deeper understanding of my own whiteness, of the privileges my whiteness bestows on me and how I’ve allowed this to unwittingly impact my work. In her introduction, Reni talks about the moment she started to think differently about race:
“Thinking about power made me realise that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances.”
Looking back in dismay
These three cultural moments forced me to look back and reflect on the work I’ve done over the years. It hasn’t been easy and I’m going to share things with you that I’m embarrassed about, but it’s all part of the process.
Here’s an example of something I did as a PR officer that I now look back on with regret. I think it epitomises the problems I’m now seeking to address...
I’m in my mid-20s, and working for a charity in Nottingham. I’m writing words for a leaflet to promote our sponsored sleepout to raise money for the residents in our homeless hostel. I need a case study - a real life story from someone who will benefit from the money we raise - so I call the hostel manager who arranges a phone interview with a resident. In the course of our conversation, I find out he’s from Eritrea, we start to chat about the circumstances of him coming to the UK, he tells me about horrific beatings and violence he experienced while trying to escape from the army there. I listen, patiently, writing down his words and offering my sympathies. At the end I thank him for sharing his story. When we hang up, I write up a quote summarising the situation he escaped and how he’s benefitting from the work of the charity, anonymise it and send it to the graphic designer to include in the leaflet. Job done.
Let’s unpack this, shall we? Where did keen, hardworking Claire, who had the very best of intentions, go wrong?
I reduced a human being’s most horrific life experiences to an anonymised quote on a piece of paper that would most likely be chucked in the bin.
This man shared an intimate story with me that ended up as a three sentence quote to persuade someone to take part in a charity sleepout. Did the charity’s need to raise funds justify me asking this person to share his story? I don’t think so. Also, it’s not a complete story, it doesn’t reflect this man’s complex humanity, only his victim status as a ‘poor African’ dependent on our benevolence. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s said in her TED talk, The danger of a single story:
“The consequence of the single story is that it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult and it emphasizes that we are different rather than how we are similar.”
I paid no attention to the fact that I was a white women writing the story of a black man from another culture
As I said earlier, it’s only recently that I started to recognise my own whiteness. I know that in the past when working as a press officer and interviewing people who have English as a second language, I’ve ‘polished’ up their quotes to make them more ‘acceptable’ to the audience, erasing the actual words spoken, essentially white-washing a story or sentiment someone has shared with me. I can’t remember if I did this in this particular case, but I’m willing to bet that I did.
I had no clue about the power dynamics involved in our conversation
One of the many things I’ve been learning about since joining Local Welcome is power and the dynamics of power. It never occurred to me that this man may have felt compelled to talk to me because he was asked by the person (hostel manager) who he may have seen as keeping the roof over his head. In my naivety I failed to recognise my own power, and by not acknowledging it, I failed to use it responsibly.
This is not self-flagellation. I’m sharing this with you because if I want to move forwards I have to admit my mistakes. They say all good writing is rewriting, well, perhaps all good learning is unlearning.
Recognising how refugee stories are commodified
So now here I am at Local Welcome, trying to do better. Trying to put all I’ve been learning about story, power, privilege and race into practice.
It’s important on a personal level because I don’t want to keep tripping up on my own good intentions and harming others in the process, and it’s important for Local Welcome because we have values like grow and learn, have compassion and fun, and tell the truth.
Here’s where I’m at:
When people come to the UK seeking sanctuary, they arrive with their stories. It’s their stories (and our Government’s view of their validity) that will ultimately determine whether or not they’re allowed to stay here or be forced to return to the country they’ve fled from.
So they make a trade. They trade these stories, perhaps their most traumatic experiences, with a bureaucracy we call the Home Office, in the hope of being offered safety, and it is just a hope.
Who among us would choose to share the most personal details of our lives with a stranger if we didn’t have to? Yet everyday we ask people seeking sanctuary to trade their trauma for help and for hope.
Their story is commodified. Traded. And what did I do in my previous roles? I commodified it again - I used their stories in leaflets, in brochures, videos and impact reports, all in the belief that I’m one of the ‘good guys’. What I did couldn't possibly have been an abuse of power, racist or erasing because it was all for the greater good, wasn’t it?
In an interview for Reni Eddo-Lodge’s About Race podcast, Gabby Edlin, founder of Bloody Good Period - a charity providing period products to women who are refugees - spoke of her dismay when people who donated asked her about their reaction to being given period products. She said:
“As though [they] should be like, thank God you thought of me!...it needs to be that you pick it up because that’s what you do in Boots, you don’t go crying to the till in Superdrug saying, thank God you thought of me! and that is something that we really need to crush in this activism sector...that you’re lucky for getting anything at all.”
No-one should be made to feel grateful for dignity.
What we’re doing
Unlearning and relearning how to engage with refugee stories is an ongoing process (and it might help here to understand what I mean when I say refugee).
I’ve started by writing this guidance on how we share stories for myself and for the team.
It recognises that stories are powerful and that when we tell them, we’re giving away a little piece of ourselves. It leads us away from falling into the trap of single story narratives and pushes us towards considering our own power in the storytelling dynamic.
It outlines practical steps we’ll take to share stories in a way that doesn’t abuse our power, ‘whitewash’ people’s words or ignore the privileges we have.
There are simple things like, not asking leading questions or putting words in people’s mouth during interviews, authentically recording their words and making sure they are clear about which words have been recorded or noted.
Looking at the bigger picture, it requires us to focus on a person’s present circumstances rather than digging into the trauma of their past, to ensure that whenever possible the audience can get as close to the person who is sharing the story as possible without a mediator in the way, and to give people genuine ownership over the use of their story now and in the future.
It also outlines our approach to working with journalists. We share our approach with reporters and we only work with those in whom we have confidence to share the story of Local Welcome, and of the people in our community, responsibly. We’re very clear that everyone who takes part in a meal benefits from their connection to others - leaders, members and guests - so that we don’t succumb to ‘saviour’ and ‘victim’ narratives.
I think it might be helpful to clarify here that this isn’t about suppressing refugee stories, hiding from the truth of their experiences, or pretending everything in life is rosy for them now they’re in the UK.
It’s not about infantilising refugees and deciding what aspects of their life they can and can’t share. It’s about the work we need to do at Local Welcome to create the conditions for their stories to be properly heard, respected and valued.
It’s a natural follow-on to the meals themselves. When Ben founded Local Welcome, he’d already learned a lot about power and pain. The food ritual at the centre of our meals today has been designed to help people connect in a way that feels safe. As people cook and eat together, there are structured questions like, ‘what’s your favourite meal’ to avoid well-meaning but potentially harmful ones like, ‘and where is your family?’ There’s also an emphasis on local people and refugees cooking together, eating together, washing up together to help mitigate the power dynamics in the room. When personal stories are shared around the table - by leaders, members and guests - it’s not because people feel compelled, it’s because they feel safe.
We don’t get it right all the time. One of my team spoke up last year to say he didn’t think some parts of a promotional video we shared with funders was in line with our approach and values. It was hard to hear at the time but he was right. I’m so proud we’ve developed a team culture that means we can hold each other accountable like this.
I can’t promise that we’ll get everything right going forward, but I can commit to learning, admitting mistakes when they’re made and continually adapting our approach.
As a woman from a working class background, with no degree, working for my first national charity and living in London away from my hometown for the first time aged 35, I battle imposter syndrome fairly frequently. It’s hard to see myself as powerful and privileged, but that’s what I am.
What I hope is to be able to use that power and privilege to bring about change, even if it’s within my own small sphere of influence at first.
If any of this has resonated with you, I hope this is what you choose to do too.