Richard Kearney notes in his book On Stories that when someone asks you who you are, you tell your story, and in doing so, you narrate your identity, “you give a sense of yourself as a narrative identity that perdures and coheres over a lifetime.” We take the fragmentary moments of our life and put them into a plot, desiring to make sense of life’s events as a unity. “Every life is in search of a narrative,” Kearney says.
The narratives we create and recreate may tell of individuals or families, nations or peoples, cultures or humanity as a whole. They may be small tales of the oppressed or grand legends of the great. They may be mythical or historical, religious or scientific. Each and every narrative offers a particular and different answer to the question of who we are.
The stories we tell make our lives memorable. Sometimes we tell stories so as not to forget an event or to defy a campaign aimed at destroying the past. We remind ourselves of terrors and tragedies and those whose lives and stories were violently cut short by famine, sword, and fire. It is also vital that we remember that our identities are fundamentally narrative in character. We invent and can therefore reinvent them. We construct and should therefore reconstruct them. Being narratives, they are not the last word, closed to revision, or closed off to what the other has to say.
Kearney remarks that “the solution to many national conflicts may well reside in the willingness of both disputants – for example Arab and Israeli, Nationalist and Unionist, Serb and Croat, Tutsi and Hutu – to exchange narrative memories. For such mutual translation of competing stories might eventually enable the adversaries to see each other through alternative eyes. If warring nations were able to acknowledge their own and the other’s narrative identities they might then be able to reimagine themselves in new ways. Blocked and fixated memories, trapped in compulsive repetition and resentment, could then find the freedom to remember the past differently, historical enemies recognising themselves as mirror-images.” (VN)
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