to our readers
What in a story? We live in a culture teeming with them ... in Hollywood movies, in the video stores,
newspapers, radio shows and magazines. There are so many; we can't take them all in. Why bother?
Aren't they simply there to entertain and distract us, to give us a break from the more serious matters of life The video documenting Rhodessa Jones' Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women entitled "We Just Telling Stories," plays with this idea of storytelling as an idle pastime. On viewing it, however one sees tales of survival in the face of sexual exploitation, racism, drug addiction, poverty and loss of children. As I listened to their words my body shook and tears fell as rage, grief and
awareness welled us aside me. Far from being frivolous, accounts of life outside the official version have world-shaking
capacity. People :round the world are censored, tortured and even killed to prevent them from telling such stories.
How is this official version constructed? Some people's stories are broadcast larger than life, turned into giants on a field of starry sky like the old-time rive-in is vies. They take up a huge and centralized space in the mass media facsimile of our collective consciousness why is it that something as ephemeral as a cultural matrix of stories can be so controlled by a small minority? (See Afternoon Tea With the Mad Hatter' for more thoughts on this.) Right now we have a system where communication goes primarily from top to bottom. Those at the top usually know little more than stereotypes about those beneath them, oversimplifyations that sum up all the complexities of a human life in a word or two. Those beneath know more than they ever cared to about the ones at the top, the self-styled gods and goddesses of the congressional chambers and the multi-plex.
Where do the stories pushed to the edge go? Denied space in the expansive center, are they compacted in the very bones of people of color, women, the aged, the poor and the imprisoned? Too many of us cannot locate the truth and complexity of our lives in mainstream representations. The older woman pulsing with joy and wisdom experiences herself as a well-kept secret amidst overblown images of very young, pretty women with vacant faces. The intellectual Black youth may struggle to keep a sense of his own reality against a billion-dollar industry hyping images of Black gangstas. Against this backdrop, telling the truth about our lives becomes an evolutionary act.
I submit to you that all of our stories are meant to be in constant circulation, as the lifeblood of culture that they are. Trapped under the skin, they can poison us. Like many other elements in our world they work best when shared, exchanged and interacted with. When we as individuals dare to voice our stories to others, the lies and distortions we have believed about ourselves for so long are forced to fall away. The energy previously used to protect us from our own truths can now go into helping others and living our dreams.
Really listening to populations previously silenced may be part of saving our lives collectively as well. The evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, interviewed in this issue, emphasizes that humanity is a living system, rather than the mechanized one that outdated Western thought would have us believe. According to Sahtouris, one important characteristic of a living system is authentic communication between all parts. How would our world be different if the CEO understood what the prison inmate's life is really like, who understood what it's like to be in a lesbian relationship, who understood what it's like to be a homeless man?
This issue of Tea Party is a collection of excellent stories from as many wide-ranging points of view as we could find. They are drawn out in fiction, condensed into poetry, and encoded into visual images. Dell Shook tells about life as a homeless man in Berkeley, and a letter by the Infamous Bones details his life in prison. Paul Flores tells the unusual and complex story of a Mexican-American teenager who organizes a vigilante group against illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border. Lili Artel looks at a famous Rodin sculpture and imagines the lives of the people who are missing from it: the women. The paintings of TheArthur Wright all have a story behind them, and deeply felt connections to African and African American history. Sun Yom has a surprising twist on the traditional "Boy Meets Girl" tale, from the perspective of a Korean American bisexual woman. The Medea Project reaches across the centuries to some of the world's oldest stories, ancient mythology from Greece and Sumeria, and bring them up to date with the all too often silenced voices of incarcerated women.
And of course, much more! Enjoy the magazine, and contribute your own awareness to this collage-in-process of our culture in all its complexity.
-Denise Mewbourne
Senior Editor
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