Day 44 – Listening to each story
Artist, author, educator, and organizer, Faith Ringgold is one of the most influential cultural figures of her generation, with a career linking the multi-disciplinary practices of the Harlem Renaissance to the political art of young Black artists working today. For sixty years, Ringgold has drawn from both personal autobiography and collective histories to both document her life as an artist and mother and to amplify the struggles for social justice and equity.
I can’t wait!! Today as I sat with kids at the high school, I kept thinking about her “story quilts.” I kept wondering what their story quilts would look like and what mine would look like!!
Meanwhile, I’m working on another piece of writing on “care.” Today I was writing about how hard it is to “care” when our world is so upsetting. It’s hard to stay with the complications of dismantling the “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy” that hooks reminds us about. The temptation to want to simplify, to universalize, to reduce the noise and the disquiet of all that oppression is strong… but I believe
It is time to complicate our history and our current practices, even as we complicate the ideas about “art” – not appropriating, but recognizing the power of the arts to allow our clients to “tell their stories.” Aurora Levins Morales in her 2015 forward to Eli Clare’s (2015) book, Exile & Pride: Disability, queerness and liberation, says,
Skin of our bodies and skin of the world. This is how to understand the land as well as the flesh. To be unsingular, fractured and whole, grieving and proud, in universal solidarity and difficult alliance, never to allow urgency or burning injury to keep us from demanding the whole, intricate, inclusive story.
Exile and Pride doesn’t provide us with answers, but neither does it only pose questions. Instead it keeps issuing this challenging invitation: to bring our whole broken selves to these problems within which we struggle and engage them with all of our beings. Search your pockets. Start jotting it down, your own map of contradictions. (p. xix).
Here is where we come in – we welcome the story, we accompany the storyteller, we offer the third hand in shaping through the materials of our craft. And for those of us who are expressive arts therapists, we do that with whichever art form speaks to us and to our client.
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