A PLACE TO TELL OUR STORIES
By Grace Lee Boggs (bio)
Michigan Citizen, Nov.2-8, 2003

(In my work as an artist and broadcaster I have met many inspiring people. Few though have had as much impact as Grace Boggs. In the few years that I have known her she has become not only a source of inspiration, but a true role model. I hope that you'll enjoy her words, and my comments which follow. VF)

I've received some interesting and heartwarming emails in response to my request for readers' views. I hope they will keep coming.

"How do those of us who are committed to building a movement get to the next stage of engaging millions?" This is a question very much on my mind and the minds of many others these days. My friend , Vicki Robins, suggests an answer in her comments on "Everyone has a choice."

Vicki is cofounder of the New Road Map Foundation and other non- profit organizations. She is currently building the Conversation Café/drop-in dialogue in public places initiative. There are around 70 of these now in North America.

" I do believe we all have choices," she writes. "I do not actually know what makes one person resilient in awful circumstances and another collapse. The resilient ones lead, show the way out of victimhood. The crushed
need to have another soul hear how much it has hurt to be in their skin - not as pity but as just listening to their story. And then the invitation to join the world of the engaged comes. Then this person has more of a chance to be able to use their power of choice.

"I think great leaders speak to these pains in the collective, so that many can feel heard, just by hearing one speak who neither diminishes nor enflames the pain, but really sees it. I think when people are told, 'you have a choice' and they have not been heard, their changes, if they come, arise in guilt and fear. When they see another choosing in circumstances where they themselves feel a victim, it is a powerful invitation to do likewise - to choose the better course."

Telling our stories has traditionally played an important role in movement building. In the civil rights movement the testifying usually took place in churches. The women's movement was born out of individual women simply
sharing their experiences in small consciousness-raising groups.

Maybe in order to build a movement of millions, what we need most at this point are places in every community where people can tell their stories of sadness and loss, of deprivation, of cruelty and abuse, of anger at oppression and submission, as well as stories of struggles and the joys of sharing and overcoming.

When these stories are heard and responded to, the identity of both the tellers and responders is affirmed, the health of the individual and the community is restored, and the neighbor is brought back to the " Hood."

Maybe the reason why our children are acting out in so many ways is that they have no places to express their pain, anger and fear because the lives of so many of their peers, family members and friends are being
snuffed out. Every year since 1999 there have been around 400 homicides in Detroit, more than one a day.

Playback Theatre has created a form for this process of affirmation that can be used in workplaces, conferences, schools, churches, etc. In an article on Playback Theatre entitled "Who is Your Neighbor?" Mary Good
writes that "an oppressed person is a person who has no place to tell their story."

To empower ourselves and others requires patience and an ability to listen to many different ideas. By listening to one another we get a more holistic picture of the complex challenges that we face. We learn to think for
ourselves instead of being stuck in the polarization and fear that Bush fosters by his "If you¹re not with us, you¹re against us" ultimatums.

After reading Grace's words, I asked if I could place them here, and she asked me to respond with some words of my own.

Dear Grace:

I really appreciated your article "A Place to Tell Our Stories". It makes many connections with the work I have been doing in sound and community radio, which focusses on storytelling and creating a place to tell those stories.

Thank you for letting me post the article on my website Magnetic Spirits (www.magneticspirits.com) because I it expresses so many thoughts that are consistent with my own.

The section where I will put it is called "Sound and Community". This section focusses on ways we can listen to our collective voices. Community radio is an important part of my website and my life. I work in community radio because I believe that our airwaves should be used for the very purposes your article describes.

The link between your article, community radio and the artwork and storytelling which I do is best summed up in this paragraph.

"Maybe in order to build a movement of millions, what we need most at this point are places in every community where people can tell their stories of sadness and loss, of deprivation, of cruelty and abuse, of anger at oppression and submission, as well as stories of struggles and the joys of sharing and overcoming."

I have worked both for the "big" radio voices (The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and small, thin voices of community broadcasting. And though community radio does not have the booming voice of the large corporate transmitters, it has a power which is far greater. For me, the joy of radio is working with people who find joy, hope and confidence because at last, somebody is listening to them. I am thankful for the years I have spent in community radio because it has also taught me that my voice counts too.

The individual voice is the foundation of democracy. Radio can be a powerful way to add our individual voices to the collective voice of the place where we live.

I wish every place could have a community radio station. In Detroit, FCC rules make this very difficult, if not impossible because the position of the regulators are that there are no frequencies available.

(If Detroit was in Canada, there WOULD be frequencies available -- to make a complicated engineering question simple, Canada allows more stations on the dial that the United States does. The large broadcasters in the States have convinced the FCC that it would create chaos if the stations were closer together on the dial. Up here, stations are closer together and we don't have radio chaos. So I guess we must have a different kind of airwaves in Canada???)

On the positive side, it is also encouraging to hear about the new stations starting up in Benton Harbour. Hopefully, small communities in Michigan will follow Benton Harbour's lead. So that's a good step forward.

Back to my comments about your column --

Thank you again for putting into words some of the things I have been thinking. Regardless of what medium we use to express our deepest selves, it is important for all of us to have confidence in our own voices.

And as our own voices become stronger, it is equally important for us to validate and strengthen each others' voices. It's about speaking, but it is also about listening.

May we boldly speak our truths and quietly listen to each others'.

Peace,
Victoria

Grace Lee Boggs - biography

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer and speaker whose sixty years of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of this century: Labor, Civil rights, Black Power, Asian American, Women's and Environmental Justice.

Born in Providence, R.I. of Chinese immigrant parents in 1915, Grace received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1935 and her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. In the 1940s and 1950s she worked with West Indian Marxist historian C.L.R.James and in 1953 she came to Detroit where she married James Boggs, African American labor activist, writer and strategist. Working together in grassroots groups and projects, they were partners for over 40 years until James' death in July 1993. Their book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, was published by Monthly Review Press in 1974.

In 1992, with James Boggs and others, she founded DETROIT SUMMER, a multi-cultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine and respirit Detroit from the ground up which completed its ninth season in June 2000. Currently she is active in the Detroit Agricultural Network and writes for the weekly Michigan Citizen, and does a monthly commentary on WORT (Madison, Wisconsin).

Her autobiography, Living for Change, published by the University of Minnesota Press in March 1998, now in its second printing, is widely used in university classes on social movements and autobiography writing.

In May 2000 she received a Discipleship Award from Groundwork for a Just World; in June the Distinguished Alumna Award from Barnard College; and in July the Chinese American Pioneers Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans. A plaque in her honor is displayed at the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

E-mail: fenner@magma.ca

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