Storytelling as Resistance
Storytelling has always been a form of resistance. Perhaps that is also what makes it so important right now?
I learned to tell stories long before I could read or write, or even properly walk. It is not something I learned in school or university, but something I picked up sitting on my Oma’s lap at the kitchen table, while waiting for the food to finish cooking. It is something I learned largely by listening – and a lot of that occurred with half shut eyes, before falling asleep to my Oma’s voice telling me a bedtime story.
My Oma or grandmother could have told stories about rabbits, sheep, and ducks – like most parents and grandparents do. She could have spoken about easy things and painted simple pictures of the world. Yet, she chose not to do that. Most of her stories were about people that never saw the end of the Second World War. They were stories about life, love, loss, resistance, remembrance, and facing hardship with kindness and humility.
She would talk about the Jewish soap dealer who always gave her and all the children in her village candy, until he had to sell everything and flee. She spoke about her childhood best friend who lived down the street and who she always did everything with, until diphtheria took her away. She would also tell me about her uncle who always gave her the best gifts until one day in his early twenties, he literally fell out of the sky because the fuel in his airplane tank ran out mid-flight.
My grandmother was born shortly before Hitler came into power and she grew up in Nazi Germany. When I was born in the Ruhr area in the 1990s, most people from her and later generations still avoided talking about the war. They did not want to be reminded of all the lives that had abruptly and unnecessarily come to an end, or confronted with the role they or their parents’ choices and actions had played in all this.
Yet, my grandmother actively chose to speak about the war every day – not because she was lost in its darkness, but because she understood why remembering mattered and why stories mattered. She knew that storytelling was one of the most effective tools through which things could be learned, remembered, and changed.
In my grandmother’s stories, people who were long gone were not villains or saints. They were people with flaws and limited means, operating in a deeply broken system, and somehow still just trying their best to live a life that felt worthwhile.
Through my grandmother, I met so many people who were long gone by the time I was born. While she has now been gone for a few years herself, she is still abundantly present in my memories and my stories. I have found my own voice over the years, but what she taught me about pace and framing, finding a balance between accuracy and conciseness, and the importance of storytelling and its power as a form of resistance is still very present in my writing today.
In this new age of AI, it is easy to think that writing has no more value, but I could not disagree more. Our stories, our ability to listen and empathize, to think and share, and our creativity are at the heart of what makes us human. That is not something AI can replace – because if there is something that AI is not (by default), then that is human.
At The E-Waste Column, we have been creating human-made content since we started out in 2022. We have no desire to outsource our writing, educating, and community building to AI. If you would like to contribute to making our future work possible, I welcome you to submit your #impacttestimonials here.
Comments