SEEING EACH OTHER THROUGH STORIES

From the front of my classroom, Anne points up at the photograph on the screen. Twenty-five students sit shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes forward.

“Why don’t you request a bigger classroom?” my students often ask. I tell them that I’ve taught in larger rooms before, but the additional space seems to extinguish our energy. The smaller classroom, I find, keeps us closer physically and perhaps emotionally. We can see each other’s responses. We can hear each other’s whispers.

We stare at the screen on which Anne is projecting beautiful photographs of women, and some men, from around the world. They are survivors of sexual violence. As we look at each face captured in a bright smile or a solemn stare, Anne recounts a story.

A white-haired elderly woman, smiling with her eyes and her teeth, sits at a table in what looks like a café, next to a younger woman with black hair who pushes her smiling face against the face of her friend. Anne tells us that both women were raped by the same man. The room is silent.

Anne points to another photograph. A woman wears a kitchen apron and smiles down at her grinning six-year-old daughter. What makes this photograph all the more poignant, Anne explains, is that the woman had been six years old when she was raped. She kept the secret for ten years.

My thoughts take me to my plans for this weekend.

In a few hours, I’ll be leaving my laptop at home and traveling for a week – with a group of new colleagues and friends – to the Dominican Republic as a Global Justice Fellow of the American Jewish World Service. We’ll be touring Santo Domingo and the surrounding area, learning about the discrimination of minorities, the rights of women working in the sex trade, the rights of children, and the rights of people who are transgender, lesbian, gay, and bisexual.

In preparation for our trip, we were asked to listen to an inspiring talk by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who warns about “the dangers of a single story” (if you have a few spare minutes, watch the video – it’s terrific).

As Anne describes the women in the projected photographs, she tells their stories of sexual violence and I reprimand myself for perceiving these people only through the lens of sexual violence. Yes, they are survivors of rape, but that is only a small part of each person’s narrative. When we come face to face with a survivor of any experience – a survivor of rape, a survivor of genocide, a survivor of cancer – it can often be hard to see that person beyond that trauma. It’s hard to see a survivor’s other stories.

Anne’s choice of photographs – of friends in cafés, of parents, of medics, of business people; seemingly ordinary people – reminds us that there’s more to a rape survivor’s story than her or his assault.

Anne Ream is the founder of The Voices and Faces Project and author of the new book, Lived Through This. Anne and her colleagues have collected testimonies from hundreds of survivors of sexual violence. They help real people – women and men of different ages and from a range of backgrounds – to come forward with their stories of violence and resilience and shame, sometimes for the first time.

By giving the hidden victims of sexual violence a chance to speak and be seen, Anne and her team are helping to break the silences and taboos around rape and rape culture.

A few days later, novelist Christa Desir, visits my classroom. Christa talks about her debut novel, Fault Line (which I wrote about here). And she tells us how her own experiences as a survivor of sexual violence and as a volunteer rape counselor contributed to Fault Line’s plot turns, characters, and purpose. We learn that the events of the novel – including the most shocking and seemingly improbable moments – are all linked to Christa’s realities.

But what’s also important about Fault Line is that we get to know Christa’s protagonists so well that their experiences of rape – as victims and witnesses – live within the contexts and beneath the everydayness of their complicated lives.

Anne and Christa have been visiting my classroom every quarter for over a year now. Some of my students write about how meeting Anne and Christa and reading Fault Line has led to a shift in their perceptions of sexual violence.

Some students explain how listening to the stories of survivors leads to complex, overlapping feelings of hope, sadness, and anger. Some students are struck by Fault Line’s tough ending – a realization that, for many survivors of rape, happy endings are fantasy. Some students express optimism after listening to Anne and Christa talk openly about their personal journeys, of coming to terms with their survivorship, and their activism.

Through such stories, we’re able to grasp how to respond to a culture of rape that often seems impenetrable. We can begin to learn how to respond to friends or family who one day might confide in us their own stories of surviving sexual violence. And when we share stories – of our own and of others – we give permission for others to share their stories too.

Stories are important.

Over the years, my course has grown from a class on design into a learning experience focused on social justice. While we still study the design of community programs in general, we explore community health and human rights programming at the local, national, and international levels.

We learn about addiction through the story of a close friend of mine who has struggled with addition.

We learn about homeless youth and sex workers and their children through the stories of my friend who worked as a case manager for Chicago youth; for many years, she struggled against a broken system.

We learn about the experiences and isolation of survivors of cancer through the story of my friend who fought cancer and, at the same time, created a support community of cancer survivors.

This week, as I view the Dominican Republic as a visitor, I expect to encounter many stories of human rights and oppression to bring back to my classroom, but I must pay attention to the many other stories, including the joyful stories and seemingly everyday stories, that surround and provide context to stories of violence.

While I have a responsibility to teach theories of design, learning, and human development, my teaching has become more and more grounded in storytelling. Because it’s those stories – rather than statistics and theories – that seem to inspire my students – and inspire me.

I suppose the intimacy of my cramped classroom reflects the intimacy of each story.

Stories are an entry point into the bigger picture. Stories – multi-dimensional stories that humanize and complicate the sometimes only visible single story – make us care about and understand the real-life implications of policy.

I know that a single week isn’t enough time to grasp the realities of the Dominican Republic. Our guides will no doubt share statistics, and their critiques of social policies, and their strategies for change. But I hope to hear stories that will inspire me to learn more about human rights around the world and I hope to be excited and obligated to share many stories when I return home.