Narrative Origin’s story begins nine years ago, when I sat under the stars with my grandmother, an 84-year old WWII survivor from Berlin. We were in northeastern Botswana, near one of my country’s few waterfalls. The winter sky was indigo and the vast canopy sparkled with constellations. That night, my grandmother spoke to me of her childhood in Germany, of being a young woman coming of age in West Berlin who loved music, art and dance. As her stories washed over me, weaving in and out of the sounds of the waterfall, I realized that her voice, her narrative, was a most precious gift.

That year, I returned to grad school in California to design a course for undergraduate through PhD students called Liberation Through Land: Organic Gardening and Racial Justice. Pedagogically, the course centred on conversations with elders under the live oak trees of the university’s 5-acre farm. These dialogues followed a similar vein to my experience that night with my grandmother. Students grappling with questions about their place on the land engaged with leaders in the climate, racial and environmental justice movements. Alongside these conversations, they learned the principles of acroecology and how to grow sustainable, organic food by cultivating the land. 

Though I didn’t recognize it at the time, the course was my first narrative intervention, because it sought fundamentally to disrupt the story that separated communities of colour in the U.S. from the land. Together, we engaged in a practice of reweaving connection to the earth through story, conversation, agrarian work and eco literature. Together we sowed the seeds of narratives harmoniously connecting us back to the land.

Since then, my communications work has centered narrative reclamation as a radical act of collective healing. This is why I tell stories. This is why stories matter. Stories have the ability to shape how we think, what we remember and who we become. That night with my grandmother taught me that even in the dark of winter, stories keep us warm. Even as we encounter realities of infinite complexity, we remain tethered to one another through the gift of narrative, of voicing our collective humanity.