The workshop of
The Untold Stories
The workshop took
place within aljana annual
summer work camp in Broummana High
School, Broummana, Lebanon between
August 6 and 12, 2005. The
words I am using here to describe
what took place in the workshop are
a “mesh” of my words, Shilpa and
Charlotte’s (the two people I worked
with and who form part of the ‘web’
of friends/ co-partners associated
with the Arab Education Forum (AEF)
around the world.
The event in
Lebanon was the 4th annual summer
camp (held in August of every year).
It was conceived about 4 years ago
through work and discussions between
Mutaz Dajani, director of al-Jana
group in Beirut and Serene Huleileh,
AEF regional director – discussions
to initiate a reading campaign and
establish libraries within
Palestinian refugee camps in
Lebanon, inspired by the reading
campaign experience in Palestine
that started in 1992 (and which is
still going). [For more details, see
Munir Fasheh, “The reading campaign
experience within Palestinian
society: innovative approaches in
learning and community building,”
Harvard Educational Review,
February 1995.] The work camp this
year included 150 people (both
Palestinians and Lebanese) who work
with children and youth in the
refugee camps or in poor areas in
Lebanon. Fifteen artists and
cultural ‘creativists’ from various
countries (which included this year
Italy, France, the UK, Germany, the
US, Mexico, and India in addition to
Arab countries) joined the work camp
and conducted workshops on issues
that included: forum theatre,
storytelling, clowning & juggling,
body & mask, untold stories, art
with children in difficult
circumstances, educational toys,
magical tricks, noncompetitive
games, music & disability,
choreography & improvisation with
children, and Dabke
(folkloric dance). Al-Jana
group organized the event.
Untold
Stories is the workshop that
exemplifies the spirit of
aljami3ah. Three people
collaborated in working on it:
Shilpa Jain one of the founders of
Shikshantar in Udaipur, India (www.swaraj.org/shikshantar),
Charlotte Saenz from Mexico (who
worked with women in Chiapas, with
street youth in Chicago, with youth
in Lebanon, and currently an ‘artist
in residence’ at the University of
Chicago), and Munir Fasheh. The
workshop revolved around themes that
were the intersection of what the
three of us brought in:
Scheherazade, walkouts-walkons, and
queematu kullimri’en ma yuhsenoh,
the guiding principle of
aljami3ah. The idea of ‘untold
stories’ linked the various themes
and activities. The legend of
Scheherazade was used by Charlotte
Saenz in her work with youth in
Lebanon in 2003 under the title
“Arabian Nights: the Untold
Stories”, where youth wrote and
performed on stage their own stories
rather than Scheherazade’s. At the
workshop, we used that spirit in
encouraging participants in the
workshop to tell their stories. The
story of Scheherazade within Arab
culture is a wonderful legend about
transforming the brutal power of
Shahrayar by telling him stories.
All she had was this simple
strength, rooted entirely in her.
And with it, Scheherazade was able
to challenge – through love, spirit,
kindness, generosity, creativity – a
perpetrator of violence and cruelty.
How she softened power instead of
accepting, submitting, or doing
further violence is inspiring. She
did not treat Shahrayar as a monster
in spite of his terrible oppression,
nor did she focus on the looming
problem of her impending death at
his hand. Rather, she started with
what was beautiful in her, embodied
in her skillful storytelling and
imagination. We owe much to the many
Persian, Arabian, and Indian
co-creators of what is now known as
Alf Layla wa Layla (one thousand and
one nights), whose beauty lies in
its nested structure evolved over
several centuries. Similarly do we
co-create the stories of our lives
by reviving, preserving and
reconstructing memories, joys, and
sorrows – with each telling and
re-telling etching deeper into our
personal and collective memories.
The second
theme that was woven into the
workshop was exploring the sense of
a person’s worth in light of Imam
Ali’s insight, where the five
meanings/ dimensions of yuhsen
come up. This way of understanding
one’s worth is not only an important
counter to dominant measures
(degrees, financial wealth, material
possessions), but also relocates
power in peoples’ hands. A crucial
dimension of such worth is making
sense of one’s experience, which
usually embodies people telling
their own stories and co-authoring
their own meanings. No external
authority has any power over another
person’s story. Challenging these
kinds of controls, measurements and
competitions is like challenging the
brute violence of Shahrayar – except
even more difficult, because these
‘tools’ are rarely questioned and
overwhelmingly seen as positive.
Beginning with our real experiences
and telling untold stories often
open up different ways of seeing and
relating, and actually can be
healing for both individuals and
society. The question that embodied
this spirit, and which we used in
working with participants, was: what
do you yuhsen?
The third theme
that was also part of the harmonious
weaving within the approach we used
was walkouts/ walk-ons, which Shilpa
brought into the workshop from her
experiences and work in India. Last
October, AEF in collaboration with
UNESCO HQ in Paris, helped bring
Shilpa and another person from India
to Lebanon and work with people who
work with walkouts (who are referred
to in the dominant discourse by the
degrading term ‘dropouts’). They
brought with them from India and
around the world stories of people
who found it necessary to walk their
own paths of learning and living,
and encouraged people to gather such
stories from Lebanon. The idea
involves ‘walking out’ of a place
that is suppressing, violating or
hurting a person in some way.
‘Walking on’ involves changing one’s
thoughts, speech, actions,
relationships, to be in ways that
are in greater alignment with their
selves and deepest values. Through
gatherings as well as through
publications, films, and the
Internet, people have been sharing
their stories of walking their own
paths. In some sense, everyone in
his or her life has, at some point,
walked out and walked on. It is very
exciting to reflect on one’s life
and discover those instances. They
remind us that whole other worlds of
living and learning are possible.
Shilpa brought in – among other
things – the art of asking questions
that bring out the beauty in selves
and others (appreciative inquiry),
non-competitive games, …
With these
intersections, the ‘Untold Stories’
workshop had 3 main aspects that
guided our work in the workshop, and
embodied a logic different from the
dominant one:
- Valuing
selves: taking time to see the
good things in each person, to
recognize the strengths,
talents, powers, that are rooted
within us.
-
Challenging unjust, illegitimate
power: questioning and resisting
those places, institutions,
structures, tools, attitudes,
which are suppressing and
destroying the good, beautiful,
meaningful parts of ourselves
and our societies and cultures.
-
Appreciative inquiry: noticing
the strengths and beauty in
other people, places,
relationships, and using
different ways of listening,
questioning, interacting, to
transform the challenges of our
lives.
We used a lot
of different activities in the
workshop to bring forth these
aspects. We had no interest in
having a ‘product’ or a ‘result’.
Rather these were means by which to
better understand our own worth, our
challenges and our possibilities,
and to see where each of us is at in
his/ her own learning journey. Each
process also helped to illustrate
that there is no one ‘best’ path;
that each path offers learning and
unlearning…
What emerged
over the course of both three-day
workshops was a surprise to all of
us. Somehow, a community was built,
in which we were all sharing deeply
of our minds, hearts, bodies, and
spirits. We were engaging in
multiple spaces and ways of
learning. New understandings were
emerging, often as re-appreciations
of traditional wisdoms and local
knowledges. We also were taking time
to ask hard questions, to notice
what goes unnoticed, to appreciate
our experiences and each other. In
addition to knowledge that was
constructed about selves, meanings
of words such as wisdom, pluralism,
dignity, humility, and values were
formulated – with no attempt to come
up with one common universal meaning
to any of them.
The process of
coming to recognize our own
beautiful value and creating our own
paths can be slow and painful, but
only by unlearning oppressive habits
can we begin to change what is not
healthy in and around us. Learning
to listen deeply and to ask
affirmative questions are both
valuable skills to continue
developing throughout our lives. It
is truly amazing how radically our
psyches shift when we ask questions
that seek to bring out the positive,
in a way that builds on people’s
strengths and value. Where we focus
our attention truly determines what
we will harvest. In the words of
Matthew Ghoulish (?):
|
If we turn our attention to
problems,
and speak of problems,
problems proliferate.
If we turn our attention to
miracles,
no matter how small, deliberate or
accidental,
and speak of miracles,
miracles proliferate.
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Such a statement stands as an
invitation…
If you accept
this invitation, you get lost in
creativity,
far from the
world of comparisons,
with only
splendid moments, words, and images
to carry around
in the mind’s back garden
until we share
them together. |
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