You Who Stand in the Doorway, Come in

From a Seattle based blog post whose title I love: You Who Stand in the Doorway, Come in:

 Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a single story

"The problem with the stereotype is not that it is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. . . 

. . . The consequence of the single story is this: that it robs people of dignity."

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story, and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have and entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

Invitation

Adapt International and Compassionate Action Network

cordially invite you to a week-long program to celebrate

Children's Peace Day

Program begins with  

You Who Stand in the Doorway, Come in

 a community oral storytelling festival to build bridges of understanding across cultures & generations

October 16 & 17, 2010
1:00PM - 5:00PM


 Inscape (the former Immigration & Naturalization Services building)
 815 Airport Way South, Seattle


The festival is curated by Amineh Ayyad as part of the Passages event at Inscape, a collective re-visioning and transforming of this historic building into its future role as an arts and culture hub for Seattle's diverse communities.

 We are transforming an old detention dorm in the building into a traditional hospitality room representing various cultures around the world.  Come to share coffee, tea, and  stories.  We will listen and share stories about hospitality, compassion, perseverance, friendship, and the struggles & legacies of immigrants, refugees and other communities in diverse Seattle. Humor, greed, global health and healing are other themes included in the festival