By Any Other Name

Growing up Liberian-American the terms gossip and storytelling were synonymous colloquially. This connection between the way we tell stories and the way we talk about each other and ourselves is something I’ve been grappling with in my own creative practice. It’s possible that the impulse we have to gossip and the impulse we have to tell stories are born from the same place: the desire to express our personal subjective truths. In my last three years as a writing student at Pratt, I’ve begun to wonder whether editorializing or stretching the objective truth can allow us to paint a clearer picture of the way that we as individuals experience the world. The movement of a chair in a scene, or the replacement of a friend's jacket with one that resembles the faint memory of a grandparent’s. These changes which, at first, may seem like a movement away from fact, contain the possibility of a movement towards a deeper, more personal truth. It’s not so much about what exactly happened in a moment, but the way that I, an individual with my own personal history, biases, and preferences, experienced that moment.

We will never be able to see the inside of another person's mind. Often the way we see the world is at odds or simply different from the way it's seen by those around us. Think about a time when you felt completely caught out by a disagreement. When you couldn’t even begin to fathom how somebody could have such an opposite take on a situation. Most of the time it isn’t the case that one person’s completely wrong and one person’s completely right. The situation is just being looked at in two different ways. So how do we communicate these differences? 

Quite often gossip is positioned as a malicious force. It can tarnish reputations and expose elements of our lives that were intended to be private whether for safety or due to feelings of shame. There seems to be a key difference between subjective truth and lies. The difference, perhaps, rests in the intention behind the things we say, as well as the harm that lies can bring. As a child I once got in trouble when a babysitter told my mother I was a ‘storyteller.’ It was a problem of miscommunication. To my mother, who had been raised in a different culture, this particular phrasing held an alternate definition. She had assumed that I’d spent the afternoon lying or deceiving when really the babysitter meant what she said literally. I was coming up with stories. But stories themselves are a sort of lie, aren’t they? And gossip, in its most confessional form, feels a bit like storytelling. The gesture of it, a sort of pantomime that builds over the course of an hour until the original threads of an event or conversation get mixed in with past experiences or imagined outcomes. Often it becomes a place for associative connections, for reflection. Though it doesn't mean that you’re not still talking about other people, at times even badly. 

The art and practice of storytelling has been around for as long as we have. Oral traditions, songs, cave paintings depicting scenes, these are forms that can teach us about the world and ourselves, and can satisfy our search for understanding or belonging. We get together and tell stories that allow us to represent ourselves with characters, creating arcs and setbacks imbued with metaphors. We also get together and talk about one another. Our idiosyncrasies, the things we do that are frustrating, and the ways that we endear ourselves. We structure our gossip as a narrative: this is where I went, who I was with, and what I saw. It’s a construction made with the hope of relaying feelings and information. In hope of someone else, for even just a moment, seeing from your point of view. At the end of the day I get into bed and tell myself stories in an attempt to settle some uneasiness. Always in hope that it’ll give me a place to stand in a constantly changing reality, amongst the mystery of other people.

Sydney Brewer