The Political: What’s in a Story?
When I was born they looked at me and said, “What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy”/ When you were born, they looked at you and said, “what a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl.” –What a Good Boy, Barenaked Ladies.
We come to know who we are and about who we can be through the stories we hear and repeat about ourselves and about each other. A good story can make us feel invincible or defeated, and can facilitate or frustrate the next big you. 
Take, for example, the stories we have been sold about who women and girls are and about what we want and dream of. Much of the mainstream media you may be exposed to is still obsessively devoted to promoting the story of the slim, cheerful, perfectly groomed, ‘white’, heterosexual, girlfriend, housewife or mother. Or take the myth of a global sisterhood, a movement based on the idea that we are all united by the same oppressions and desires; an idea that fell apart once realized that ‘we’ have not traveled the same journey. This story of feminism moved forward while leaving out the realities faced by indigenous, trans, racialized, queer, and otherwise Othered girls and women.
New Wave Feminism: A Haiku
ain’t I a woman?
truth telling uproots stale myths
I arise as grass
The limits of the Big Stories (or metanarratives) of who we are (and who we can be) are well described by Sherene Razack who explains how “a woman’s race, class, sexuality, and physical or mental condition combine in historically specific ways to produce her, and responses to her, in classrooms and courtrooms”(157). As Razack and other critical race and cultural theorists have argued, our selves -our identities or our ‘roles’- are produced in relationship to one another, in our everyday interactions, and reinforced through repetition.
Enter the rise of an increasingly democratized media where anyone plugged into the blogosphere or who has access to paper, ink, a stapler, and a copier, can participate in the promotion of ever more complex, varied, and changing ideas of difference and desire. This third wave new media activism invites us to produce open narratives that change at various points of encounter. Claims about memory and self-assertion are momentary and reflect a rapidly shifting social landscape.
The Personal: Performing Identities
My own momentary claims arose out of several significant encounters that permitted and continue to give shape to my ‘becomings’. Having been initiated through the first French Immersion class in Edmonton Alberta in the early 1980’s and fed a steady diet of Remi et Aline and the usual rescue tales, I learned to see myself in relationship to how I thought my classmates and teachers saw me: a coconut, a little awkward, immigrant, bookish, not from here, etc. It was not all bad. In fact, I don’t think I recognized any losses in this until I moved to Montreal, entered grad school, and stumbled upon the work of Angela Aujla, Sheila James, Amita Handa, the Masala Trois Collective. Their poetry, prose, and performances reflected experiences I did not yet have words for. Their work, amongst others, invited a furious curiosity about identity, mobility, agency, and co-existence.
Since 1999, these curiosities have given rise to various platforms. I became a co-founder and contributor to the "South Asian News Collective” at McGill’s CKUT radio (90.3), the co-host of Indo-Montreal on Global television, the coordinator of Teesri-Duniya’s South Asian Youth Action project, and co-founded a non-profit organization dedicated to intersecting the arts, healthcare, education, and civic engagement. Of these arts, theatre offered a compelling immediacy and a greater proximity to the experience of bearing and being witnessed.
Performing life stories can take on many forms including autobiographical, sociobiographical, and self-revelatory theatre, documentary, testimonial, and verbatim theatre, as well as performance ethnography and ethnodrama. They may be created alone or with others, scripted or improvised, employed as a strategic subversion or as propaganda, and can bring about personal and collective healing and transformation. As a breathing archive of lived experience, the performance of life stories is also a form of knowledge creation and representation.
Performance has also been used as a metaphor by Erving Goffman and Judith Butler amongst many others to describe the ways in which we ‘perform’ in every day life. They have suggested that our identities are unstable structures;that our ideas about gender, race, sexuality, and nationality, for example, are produced through our interactions with others, and stabilized through repetition—sometimes in ways that are harmful and constrain freedom. The body, from this perspective, becomes the site of political struggle and cultural negotiation reflecting the unstable tensions that one lives within.
These conceptions of performance as metaphor, as an approach to generative arts-based inquiry, and as an experience of social change continue to feed my imagination and daily practice as an artist/drama therapist/educator/researcher/activist. I have been particularly interested in how embodied improvisation and relational play can permit an exploration and experience of being and becoming. Improvisation invites individuals and groups to take risks in relationship to each other, to try on and to discard social roles, to develop flexibility between roles, and to do so while remaining responsive to the divergent impulses of the group. From my perspective, these are all qualities of a healthy community.
These days, I think about my contribution to social justice as being about facilitating this ability to respond in myself and in others. Response/ability has become synonymous with presence or ‘showing up’, commitment, mutuality, and a willingness to jump in an get involved. It is the opposite of apathy. It involves a kind of creative empathy. In a way, my interests lay just behind the story, with its form and focus, on encouraging an ethical curiosity about what gives rise to our ideas and expressions of who we are and can be to each other-so that the moments we claim and the stories we choose to live are just that: choices.
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BIO
Nisha Sajnani, PhD, RDT is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and registered drama therapist. She is the director of Creative Alternatives which is, at once, a network of inspired social innovators committed to deepening the relationship between creativity and interdependence and a platform from which Nisha has designed and facilitated learning environments examining a broad range of social policy issues (racism, poverty, immigration, youth engagement, social cohesion, gender equity, violence prevention, governance). Nisha has had the pleasure of facilitating the annual retreat as well as training in popular education for members of the Girls Action Foundation over the past eight years.
Nisha has extensive experience with arts-based and collaborative approaches to group learning and inquiry and also brings expertise in trauma and its effects on human systems. For the past four years, Creative Alternatives has been a project partner in a ground breaking Oral History project in Montreal entitled: Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations.
Nisha is also the director of the program in Drama Therapy, Community Health and Prevention at the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, CT. She coordinates an innovative program called Animating Learning by Integrating and Validating Experience (A.L.I.V.E) which is a preventative approach to facilitating student engagement that draws upon principles from popular education and drama therapy.
She is on faculty at the Institutes for the Arts in Psychotherapy (NYC) and at New York University where she teaches a course on Arts-Based Research. Nisha is also on faculty at Yale University where she teaches a course on Applied Theatre, Trauma, and Cultural Intervention. She is currently affiliated with the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (Global Mental Health Trauma and Recovery Program). Nisha is the President-Elect of the National Association for Drama Therapy.
Read more about Nisha here.
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