Translator: Ludmila Ueda Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Good afternoon.
A journalist can't talk without holding a paper,
so I apologize for my notes.
Well, my name is Adriana Carranca,
I'm a journalist and a writer,
and I tell stories.
And it's about this, the power of storytelling,
that I'd like to talk to you today.
Stories remain for eternity when there are no more memories.
They actually write our existence.
It's like the stories that weren't told never existed.
They're forgotten over time when there's no more memory of them.
My first experience, my first contact
with the importance of storytelling
was in South Sudan
in a refugee camp on the Ugandan border.
It was night, very dark, a complete darkness,
and I heard at a distance -
I'd gone to the camp to see how they lived there at night,
and I heard a song in the distance.
I moved closer,
I didn't relax until I'd moved nearer to that song
and found out what was going on.
I found out that they were telling stories.
They were refugees
who had escaped from war and left everything behind -
their homes, clothes, objects, photos,
and the only thing left was their memory.
And there they were, trying to share this memory,
adults with children,
so they could continue their existence.
Without this, it's as if they weren't part of our story.
We only know the past through the stories we tell
and register in some way.
Each of our lives is a nonfiction story,
and it's an excerpt from the narrative of our existence.
The question is, "Which stories to tell?
With which stories are we building the narrative of our existence?"
I'm going to tell you a little bit
about my story searching for others' stories around the world.
This story started when I got a scholarship to go to London,
and in my class, there were 60 students from 45 countries.
My best friend was Egyptian, and over spring break
she invited us to spend the vacation with her in Egypt.
Her family had selected three suitors
from whom she whom she was to choose one to marry.
So we went, the "three amigos":
me, born Catholic but not practicing,
who had decided to not follow any religion
so I could write impartially about religion;
Geraldine, a Protestant Filipino;
and Jillian, a Canadian Jew.
We were supposed to help Dina, an Egyptian Muslim, choose a husband.
And when young men are courting girls in Egypt,
they pamper their friends,
so that was the best trip we ever took.
(Laughter)
We got gifts,
we went boating on the Nile River,
and we received flowers every day.
But what impressed me the most on that trip
was that when we returned to the room,
we were just four girls
talking about what girls and boys talk about everywhere:
love, friendship, family, future, work, school, college, and so on.
There was no Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim.
There was no Egyptian or Brazilian.
There was absolutely nothing to make us different.
And I began to ask myself if this was true,
if what we hear in certain places isn't the complete narrative
of what really happens on the ground and in the field.
So I returned to Egypt later for Dina's wedding.
She didn't get married to any of those three.
She got married to a guy she met at a party in London.
(Laughter)
And when I went to Dina's wedding -
this is her and Geraldine -
the first image I saw of the hostility and hate
between Arabs and Jews was this image
of friendship between the two.
So, for me there was never this enmity,
because my first perception of this conflict was through friendship.
When I went to Egypt for Dina's wedding, I decided to go from there to Iran.
In my head, I had it pictured that I was going to meet
an impoverished country destroyed by war,
economically destroyed
by economic sanctions,
isolated, and with oppressed women.
I had a connection in the United Arab Emirates
so I could buy a veil because in Iran it's mandatory to wear a veil.
When you enter Iranian airspace,
the flight attendants warn you to wear the "hijab."
They notify the women because it's the law in the country.
So I went to the shopping area on this connection
to ask girls to help me buy a veil.
And I invited them for coffee because I wanted to know
what it was like to live and to be these women
who I'd pictured as oppressed women.
But at coffee, before we started talking,
one of the girls, the one with the glasses,
who is a designer of these black clothes,
the "niqab,"
said, "I'd like to ask a question.
Is it true that Brazilians have a lot of plastic surgery?"
I said: "Yes, it's true. Why?"
She said: "Wow, that's so oppressive!
This is what feminine oppression is -
you're obliged to submit yourself to surgeries
in order to go around and be accepted in the society."
So for me, what I saw as oppression was freeing to them.
The way she dressed was a way of freedom
because under the "niqab," she could be whoever she wanted to be.
That's when I realized that the narrative
told about these regions and these women
ignored a very important part,
which is their own perspective on how they see the world.
Well, from there I went to Iran.
I arrived in Iran wearing a "niqab."
After all I'd heard about Iran,
of what I thought I would find there,
I was greeted at the airport -
I had planned to meet my translator,
and I saw in the distance a girl wearing jeans, pink Converse shoes,
a colorful blouse, and a veil that almost didn't cover her hair.
And when I got closer she looked at me and said,
"What are you doing dressed like this?"
(Laughter)
"We Iranians are very modern."
We took her car to downtown Tehran.
She was driving and listening to Iranian "funk."
(Laughter)
Then I realized that in Iran, too,
the narrative I'd heard before was incomplete.
In Iran, I met amazing women, who dress in many different styles.
Lawyers, filmmakers, students.
I found out that they take 70% of the places in the universities
and are 50% of the workforce.
The first Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize
was an Iranian.
The first Nobel Peace Prize for Iran came from the hands of a woman,
Shirin Ebadi.
However these stories didn't fit into Iran's narrative at the time.
At the time, people were talking a lot about Iran's nuclear program,
so only stories about violence really fit into the context of that narrative,
and the other stories were ignored.
Then I attempted to find out other stories,
see other places,
and discover if the narrative about these places wasn't really complete either.
From there, I went to Afghanistan.
Narratives have been used a lot
to make us support military offensives.
Who doesn't remember Iraq,
and the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
We believed in and supported that.
Most Americans supported the war in Iraq at that time
because they were exposed to a narrative
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
It's the same with the Afghans - the women under the burkas
who we should save through military action.
I went to Afghanistan, and discovered, under those burkas,
there were stories as incredible as the ones I'd discovered in Iran.
There are a range of issues they're fighting over.
They fight for their rights.
The government tries to oppress them and tries to limit their role in society,
but there's a very important phrase I heard from Shirin Ebadi,
the Iranian who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
When I interviewed her, she greeted me with a veil,
and I knew that she supported women's freedom, so I asked her,
"Shirin, why are you wearing a veil,
even indoors,
with all your background defending freedom?"
She said, "Because I don't support not using the veil,
I support the freedom to choose,
even if it is to choose to wear the 'hijab."
And if I had this freedom, I would choose to wear it."
Then I realized -
that which she fights for, is that which we all fight for.
There's no difference between us,
women and men.
We all fight for the right to have freedom of choice.
So the Afghans also fight for that.
And you can find women like this teacher,
who secretly educated 150 girls in her house during the Taliban regime;
this deputy, the first woman to run for president in Afghanistan;
the editor of the first Afghan women's magazine;
and the commander of the first female Afghan battalion,
who is trying to further humanize the military's actions.
She has a poetry blog.
In a few weeks, she was going to marry a man ten years younger than her,
from another ethnic group, and from a lower rank of the army.
He had fallen in love with her by reading the poems she wrote,
without knowing she was an army commander.
They were going to get married,
breaking all the possible taboos that exist in Afghanistan.
Shamsia is the leading graffiti artist in Kabul.
She is redesigning walls destroyed by war with her art.
The first Afghan boxer to take part in a world championship
fights in the same stadium
where women used to be judged and prosecuted,
many times to stoning.
She chooses to fight in that gymnasium as an act of peaceful resistance
to show that this new generation has another fight.
I found the same stories, that I could talk about for days
in Pakistan, Indonesia, Turkey, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Congo,
Sudan, South Africa, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Haiti.
There are similar stories in all these places,
but what often happens is that they are invisible.
And the problem of not making room in the narrative for peaceful stories
and for these nonviolent actors
is that the actors who use violence dominate the narrative.
The message we send to those who try to change things
through nonviolent actions
is that the only possible way is to hold a gun.
This is the message we give them.
If these peaceful stories don't have a voice,
don't take up space,
don't create pressure, and, therefore, any reaction,
people get tired of trying
to change things through nonviolent actions.
And many of them begin using violent actions
We live today in a battle of narratives,
and this is the great war we live in our world today.
The stories we tell have a direct and concrete impact on reality.
This has been studied by many scientists,
and MIT has a department exclusively
to study the correlation
between how our brain works when exposed to different narratives
and how this can lead to violence.
Emile Bruneau is the MIT professor responsible for this department.
Researchers have already found,
for example,
that when you read about other people's suffering,
an area of your brain is activated
and it's the same area that's activated when you yourself suffer pain.
They drew the conclusion that we're all able to develop empathy
and to feel the pain of others.
But researchers also found that this is only true
when the object of the violence is familiar to us.
This is to say that only when we relate to the victim of the violence
will it cause an empathetic reaction in us.
This explains, for example,
why when there are terrorist attacks in New York or in Paris,
our reaction, the world's reaction, and also the Internet's reaction
is much bigger than, for example, when a terrorist attack occurs in Nigeria
because we're more prone to put ourselves in the place
of people who are in France or the United States
because we possibly visit these places more,
and we barely hear about Nigeria.
Nigeria has no place in the narrative that's being written nowadays,
and, thus, Nigeria is an unfamiliar place to us.
And scientifically,
our brain doesn't react to the violence suffered by people in Nigeria.
Researchers have also discovered
that even when we're able to develop empathy,
there's a backlash -
you develop empathy for one group
and this makes you unconsciously support the violence of another group.
In every film, we're always supporting the good guy against the bad guys,
even if the good guy also commits violent acts.
So it ends up perpetuating violence.
This failure of empathy is what researchers call "empathy gap."
It's a failure in the empathy system.
Our brain just reacts differently
when we are exposed to positive stories -
stories in which there is suffering
but focus on a positive action
that proves capable of changing the situation.
In this case and only in this case,
our brains' reaction is of comfort and altruism.
This impacts our desire to help and contribute
to that change that's being displayed.
And here lives, precisely, the power of storytelling,
the power that nowadays is in all our hands.
Because today, all of you can tell stories on your timeline
when you share or disseminate information.
Researchers, however, have also found out
that on the internet, we also have a higher tendency
to share only what is familiar to us.
We only have friends in our social networks,
and we just share the thoughts of people who think like us.
And because of that, instead of developing empathy
it increases distances, reinforces differences
and causes
a decline in our ability to develop empathy for others.
This was research conducted up until 2009
that assessed the Internet's impact.
So, if I could leave you a message, I'd ask you to remember
that together we're writing the narrative of our existence.
Instead of promoting hate and violence,
share peaceful actions and positive examples
that inspire and transform.
Instead of highlighting what divides us,
let's show what bring us together
and what makes us equal as human beings.
That's how together we'll build
a peaceful narrative of a better world for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)