Storytelling. The drawings found in sacred sites around this land we now call Australia, showing the gathering of people together, along with the songlines of country, affirm the power of taking our words to form new ways of being and new senses of belonging.
I was reflecting on this on Friday as I attended the YWCA of Adelaide She Leads Conference. We had the very good fortune to listen to some wonderful speakers, all of whom – through their words – took us inside their lives to help us think through our own leadership journey.
Two of the speakers were particularly powerful. Deborah Cheetham and Gala Mustafa moved us, quite literally, to our feet.
In 2010 Deborah Cheetham premiered Pecan Summer, Australia’s first Indigenous opera. As she spoke (and sang) with us Deborah reflected on the power of words to form identity. She challenged us to think about what it would mean, for a Yorta Yorta woman, to sing the words “Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free”. What does that mean to a Yorta Yorta woman when her people have been on country for over one thousand generations and, with the coming of Europeans, the freedom of her people was stolen?
Whether we tell stories with words, music or dance, what role does art play in our lives to connect us to struggles for justice? As Deborah sang phrases from a childhood song I was reminded of the capacity for the voice to soar, and take our heart flying with it, and how that can change the world: transform injustice to justice, violence to peace, and hatred to love.
At the end of our day, as Gala Mustafa spoke, recounting her period of imprisonment and torture in an Iraqi jail, we listened with hope in our eyes and tears in our hearts.
In the 1990s, as the global women’s human rights movement gained momentum, feminist activists recognised the power of speaking out in tribunals on women’s human rights violations. At a time when the language of human rights was largely colonised by civil and political rights violations perpetrated by state actors, feminist human rights activists claimed the language of rights to condemn the practices of patriarchy by state and non-state actors alike. Their stories documented domestic violence, economic injustice, racial discrimination, discrimination on the grounds of sexuality and gender identity, political deprivations and many other manifestations of inequality between women, men and those who move between such gender signifiers.
While the political project of claiming human rights as a language of demand and accountability in the struggle for equality was important, the project of “speaking truth to power” and the healing that comes with that process, was also vital. By creating tribunals, feminists around the world used their bodies and their voices for storytelling. They made safe spaces in which women could tell the stories of abuse and hatred, spaces in which their stories would be received with compassion and empathy, affirming the injustice, and contributing to the healing. And spaces in which their stories would transform from individual injustice to an impetus for collective anger and action.
Amongst other things, torture seeks to break your spirit, to destroy your capacity for trust. Testimony, of the type Gala honoured us with on Friday, is a fundamental challenge to the intention of torture. Because on Friday in Adelaide, as we listened to Gala, we joined her as she reclaimed her life and story. By trusting us to listen to the cruelty she endured Gala fought back against the men who tortured her. She denied them the power of silence and shame. She trusted us to listen to her story with her hope in our eyes and her tears in our hearts. Because, despite the horrors of her story, Gala left us uplifted by the strength, courage and determination with which she has rebuilt her life.
Storytelling. Words that move us to action.
2015
Stardust Becoming 