The Power of Telling Your Story

Scholar-artist Asya suggested that India Arie expresses the power of telling our stories in her beautiful song, "I Am Not My Hair." Listen to India Arie, as she sings

I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am not your expectations
I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am the soul that lives within.

Consider the connections to "The Danger of a Single Story," as she sings

Good hair means curls and waves
Bad hair means you look like a slave.

This made me think of a great poem by the great Gwendolyn Brooks.

To Those Of My Sisters
Who Kept Their Naturals

-- never to look a hot comb in the teeth

Sisters!

I love you.
Because you love you.
Because you are erect.
Because you are also bent.
In season, stern, kind.
Crisp, soft-in season.
And you withhold.
And you extend.
And you Step out.
And you go back.
And you extend again.

Your eyes, loud-soft, with crying and with smiles,
are older than a million years,
And they are young.
You reach, in season.
And All
below the rich rouch right time of your hair.

You have not bought Blondine.
You have not hailed the hot-comb recently.
You never worshipped Marilyn Monroe.
You say: Farrah's hair is hers.
You have not wanted to be white.
Nor have you testified to adoration of that state
with the advertisement of imitation
(never successful because the hot-comb is laughing too.)

But oh the rough dark Other music!
the Real,
the Right.
The natural Respect of Self and Seal!

Sisters!

Your hair is Celebration in the world!

Telling your story is an act of power. You may be surprised to discover the incredible impact your story has on your audience.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives,

 the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it,

and change it as times change,

truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

  ~Salman Rushdie