Art, music, and literature are powerful tools in bringing forth new ways of seeing, thinking, and understanding social and political issues such as homelessness. Art can be activism. Consider the influence of art on culture and vice versa. Art is necessary in both understanding the world and changing it. When we connect to an artist, we connect to each other and the world around us. This is also true when we consider how we, as a society, think about and understand poor and homeless people.
As a formerly homeless person, I’ve used creative non-fiction as a primary tool in connecting to the world about homelessness. Most importantly, I use storytelling. Why? Because the story is important. Stories are powerful and empowering.
Thomas King, a Native American storyteller, states that “stories are all we are”. It is through stories that we connect and understand each other. It’s how we convey important truths and messages. It is undeniably the real – the lived experience. Stories are remembered. The message, the purpose – its truth is remembered. It stays with us. Arguably, all the way to the voting booth.
Each person I have connected with and spoken to about homelessness was found in the comments section of a blog post. Sometimes a single comment turned into numerous, long, on-going conversations. Some turned into phone calls or email exchanges. Sometimes friendship. Sometimes activism. It started in a single comment, compelled to be sent by the reader, after engaging in the words I had written. The interaction started with a story. It started with being affected, which inevitably lead to the effect.
And that is powerful.
The Center for Artistic Activism states that “social change doesn’t just happen, it happens because people decide to make change. As any seasoned activist can tell you, people just don’t decide to change their mind and act accordingly. They are personally moved to do so by emotionally powerful stimuli.
We’re moved by affective experiences to do physical actions that result in concrete effects: Affect leads to Effect. We might think of this as Affective Effect, or perhaps, Effective Affect. Or, combined in a new word, Æffect (pronounced Aye-fect). Artistic Activism is a practice aimed at generating Æffect: emotionally resonant experiences that lead to measurable shifts in power.
A single story told creates a ripple, and that ripple can and does transform our world.
I was first challenged to write three years ago. It was immediately after arriving at El Camino Inn, a processing center for homeless families in Queens. My friend Sequoia challenged me to write a book in two days. Of course, it’s quite impossible to write a book in two days. But I found myself with 30 pages after 48 hours of nonstop pouring my experiences onto paper. It was a cathartic experience jump-starting a year long process of writing my story of homelessness. Soon I found myself documenting my daily life – what had happened that day, what I ate, conversations I’d had with social workers, police officers and other homeless peers.
I became quite a makeshift journalist, in fact.
Today, I have over 100,000 words collected across word documents, writing apps, and on several blogging platforms. It is the most I have written about anything. And that writing didn’t stop when I finally was housed again. It was at that point, however, that I began to really connect to other people about homelessness.
When I finally had the time and energy to engage with others about homelessness, change occurred. Minds at least. And that’s a start. In fact, it’s the hardest part. The amount of comments I’ve had to delete – the hate mail – I’ve lost count. There were many.
People are mean and many really don’t like homeless people.
And beyond that, activism is really hard. It’s complicated. And we’re still trying to figure out how it works, what works, and what doesn’t. In fact, “other forms of activism can take a hard line. Protests, megaphones; situations presented in terms of conflict and struggle. More creative methods of activism, like storytelling and blogging tend to be discounted by media … It may seem that activism is not taking place if it is not loudly proclaiming itself.
However, the power of narrative as a form of activism is that it does not need to be in your face to be effective. … Storytelling simply presents lived experience. Experience cannot be argued with. Lived experience has no need of megaphones or protests. While it may not be accepted initially; it lingers.
In Crippling Narrative: Story Telling as Activism, June Jordan states that, “to tell the truth is to become beautiful; to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that is political in its most profound way.”
To begin to love yourself, to begin to value yourself, as a homeless person, when the world does not love you, does not value you, is no simple feat. But it is necessary. Because to love and value yourself is to make yourself powerful. To make yourself powerful is how you change the world.
I became powerful by sharing my truth, by becoming beautiful again, by being seen, by connecting with others. Meanwhile, I have wielded others with something they did not have before – another way to think about and understand homelessness. I gave them a new story, a fresh chapter, an alternative narrative, one more true, one that came from the source, to weave into their understanding of the world.
