Objects have a life of their own.
That’s what a Croat friend of mine believes and what I have always found difficult to image. But on Monday, everything changed.
I was on a tour of the hurricane Katrina disaster areas in New Orleans and, while trying the take in the horrible devastation, I peeked into one of the houses (or what remained of it). My eyes fell on a toy, two little Panda bears hugging in an attempt to find refuge and forget the devastation. Tears came to my eyes with my mind promptly retrieving a long forgotten image: a rusty key.
It laid on the kitchen table of a friend one evening I visited him in Prague. Bill (not his real name) travelled every summer to Auschwitz with his American family. And it was on one of these trips that he had found the key lying between the train tracks that had been part of a terrible journey.
In my imagination the owner of the key was a girl who had been deported to the camp. She had managed to hide it in the few clothes she took with her. May be, it was the key to her room or that of a drawer where she kept all her favourite music sheets and books.
I don’t know if this story my mind started telling me that evening in the neon-light glow of a drab Prague kitchen is true. And I don’t know what happened to the child who used to play with the little Pandas. What makes these two objects so heart-breaking is the bridge they manage to span between horror and reality. They look absolutely sovereign and unshaken amid sheer dreadfulness and manage to tell a powerful story.
There might be a lesson in this. I have already written about the challenge communicators face when trying to tell the story of human tragedies in a way that makes people relate to them and care. I wish I could find a quick fix but I suspect it doesn’t exist.
The brilliant speech cultural anthropologist Jennifer James made on Tuesday at IABC International Conference gave me hope. According to her, humanity is moving into a compassion phase (after the greed phase of the past years read Enron). We are in a new era of authenticity. People are overloaded with information and do not know whom to trust. In order to get their message through, communicators need integrity and the ability to tell a compelling story that resonates with deep-seated values.
May be some day I’ll be able to master the skills of the little Panda bears…
|
|
Another excellent blog, Silvia: relevant, moving and succinct .
Well done!
There is a seeing is believing aobout the effects of Katrina’s destruction. Not just seeing it in the - so many - devastarted building and communities but in the faces of the people who are left. A kind of stunned resignation; still , nearly two years after the event.
It will take many years but, like Auschwitz, it is important to bear witness.
And Iit was so right for IABC to do that by holding its International Conference there.