In April 2023, the U.S. Senator George Mitchell took the stage at Queens University, Belfast, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Irish peace process.  The room hummed.  The anticipation was great.  Diplomats.   Irish leaders of every stripe.  The President of the European Union.  Scholars.  Community leaders.  Former terrorists.  Rock stars.  Journalists.  Schoolchildren.  

Phones swayed in the air as people craned in every direction to take photos.

Hillary Clinton strode onstage to introduce the senator: he had been the primary architect of the peace process a quarter of a century before.  At 89 years of age, he was rumoured to be ill – and he had indeed recently battled a severe case of aggressive leukemia – but he looked trim and strong in a grey suit and light purple tie.  

For the next 47 minutes Mitchell held the audience spellbound.  

“If history teaches us anything it is that history itself is never finished,” he said.  “Twenty-five years ago the people of Northern Ireland and their political leaders changed the course of history.  It was a day when history opened itself to hope.”  

The American senator was speaking in a city that had seen unspeakable things.  Bombings.  Butcherings.  Disappearances. Desolation.  Disorder.  There were still “peace walls” euphemistically dividing the neighbourhoods of Belfast, and there were still segregated schools, but there was a sense that the past was indeed past, and that

Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

The peace process was perhaps the greatest of Irish stories at the end of the 20th century.  Even if it has been sometimes shaky and unstable – as it was when Brexit huffed and puffed — it is also one of the great ongoing stories of the 21st century.  

During the process of peace-making, Mitchell had developed a reputation as a good listener.  He had reassured the participants in the process that even if others wouldn’t listen to them, he would.  He had even been given the nickname of “Iron Pants” for his ability to sit in the plenaries without budging.  

And talk and talk, they did.  The Irish – mea culpa – have always had a wild ability to gab.  But this was more than plain gabbing – there was life and democracy and hope at stake.  Mitchell’s ability to listen became legendary.  

“Within the word ‘impossible’ is embedded the word ‘possible,’” he said.   

The audience rose to its feet for several standing ovations.

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Storytelling is, at its core, democratic.  The practice is available to, and can be exercised, by all.  It spans across borders, genders, economies and divides.  It has the ability to break down stereotypes. Storytelling, when exercised properly, has a healing balm that can help hold a system – even a whole democracy – together. 

And yet storytelling can also be used for divisive ends.  A story can take away your house, your car, your identity, your country.  A story – especially one which is violent or false – has the ability to take the ground from beneath our feet.  

Much of the innate power of storytelling comes from its corollary – listening.  Still, we seldom credit the art of listening as the key to storytelling.  Listening is often considered to be the passive partner, the murky edge, the distant cousin.  

One of the reasons why George Mitchell’s experience in Northern Ireland is so affecting is that it was so profoundly centered on the idea of listening.  The Senator gave the various political parties his time and allowed them to speak, listening without judgement or reproach.  At first they did not speak to each other, only to him.  He relayed the messages and then attended to the other side.  (There is the infamous tale of Ian Paisley going into a room after his nationalist opponents had left, and then spraying the room with air freshener to “clean” it).  In fact, one of the most striking things about the Irish peace process is that all the parties were never in the same room together until the actual deal was signed.  

George Mitchell had listened Northern Ireland into peace.  

But his 25th anniversary speech was also a caution to further generations to continue the listening.  “We are living in fractured times,” he said.  “This is an agreement not just for the past, but an agreement to initiate the future.”  

We live now in the exponential age, a carousel of quickening, where just about everything is faster and smaller, faster and cheaper, faster and more accessible.  One of the great dreams of the internet was how it would give us all a chance to participate and be heard, even from the margins.  

Social media has indeed given us a chance to tell our stories, but increasingly in brief and brutal ways.  Part of our loneliness arises from this one-way form of storytelling.  It is quick, it is sharp,   but it seems to give little in return.  Two hundred and forty characters is hardly enough to get us beyond the breakfast bar.  A minute of Tik-Tok is not exactly going to clue us into the dark nature of our souls.  In the end, all we may get is our fifteen zepto-seconds of fame.  

In our rush to understand the world, and especially the ongoing splintering of our communities, we often give precedence to the force of storytelling, but what about the nature of listening?  Surely it becomes as powerful, if not more so, than telling?   When we don’t listen, we don’t understand.  And when we don’t understand, we get more vocal.  The cycle extends itself, noise unto noise.  

The danger is that we get to a place where everyone tells and nobody listens.   

Of course there is a messy contradiction here: there is no listening without stories. But, let’s face it, stories are everywhere.  Stories are in that little machine we carry with us at all times.  Stories hum on the airwaves.  Stories display slogans across our chests.  Stories are in the billboards that paint our sky.  The world’s corporations and our governments have copped on to this: it is difficult to find a business pitch, or a political document, that does not condescend to the powers of storytelling. 

But just because a story gets told, doesn’t mean it gets listened to.  

The way we listen is a measure of our lives.  Listening is difficult.  And rare.  And often radical.  It is an act that is entirely personal, but it steps into a public space.  It requires energy and humility and patience.  It also requires imagination and engagement and submission.  It demands of us to be present.  

And, in the end, listening can extend the democratic project: a unity greater than the sum of its parts.

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For the past eight years, in a school in the South Bronx, New York, an experiment in education – where students employ listening and telling as a simultaneous means of engagement – has been underway under the auspices of Narrative 4, a global non-profit that seeks to use stories to inspire change.  (For the sake of transparency, I am a co-founder of the organization).  

The school is in one of the poorest congressional districts in the United States.  The students are mostly Black and/or immigrant.  Police sirens – “the misery music,” the locals call it – often forms a backdrop to the classes.  But the school itself, under the visionary leadership of a Black principal named Hazel Roseboro, is a haven of possibility.  

The guidelines to the storytelling program are relatively simple: If you step into my shoes, I will step into yours.   The students relate the story back to one another in the first person.  It engages the art of listening as much as it engages the art of story-telling.  In fact, it makes the two inseparable from one another.  In order for the stories to get told, they must be listened to.  A culture of listening is not only encouraged, but vital.  The stories often get changed in the re-telling, but their primary essence remains.  The lesson is one in the deepest, most radical empathy.  

The organisation is supported by several writers and artists, including Ishmael Beah, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Sting, Marlon James, Darrell Bourque and Terry Tempest Williams.  

One of the signature programs in the school is an ongoing “exchange” where the Bronx students get together with students from the Floyd County High School in rural Appalachia, a thousand kilometers away from one another. This is an exercise in stark “difference” – Black and white; urban and rural; blue and red; Harris and Trump.  The students could hardly, in their own eyes, be more different.  When they meet at first, they are terrified of one another.  Some of them admit to being nervous almost to the point of paralysis.  But when they begin telling their personal stories to one another – and then telling those stories back to their partners – their fears fade, their imaginations expand, and they began to see the world in a different, more nuanced way.

Those from the Bronx get a glimpse into what it might be like to be from a coal-mining family in the south.  And the students from Kentucky can begin to understand the northerners’ fear of stepping into a grocery store where the Confederate flag might hang over the cash register.  

The cultures of both schools have changed dramatically over the years of the story exchanges, resulting in higher levels of attendance, lower amounts of conflict, better test scores and a soaring level of engagement among students.  

The key to the program is personal story-telling and personal listening.  The students are not talking about facts and figures.  Their stories aren’t designed to win arguments.  They talk about the deep texture of their lives: stories of their fathers, their mothers, their grandfathers, their sisters, their brothers, their teachers.  The exchange highlights what stories and listening can do: the world gets layered, complicated, muddied even.  

The young girl who wears a hijab in the Bronx suddenly realizes that she listens to the same music as the young white boy who comes from the holler.  And the young Kentucky boy suddenly realizes that the airpods hidden underneath that young Black girl’s hijab connect her with his own world. They are linked. Their listening propels them.  They see each other anew.  It’s the sharp, tender shock of recognition: perhaps we are not so different after all.  

And because stories never really end anywhere – in fact it is hard to find their beginnings too – the young people are then tasked with turning their new-found empathy into action, which they do by embarking on civic engagement projects.  

It is, in effect, like George Mitchell, listening the world into change.  It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it matters. 

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I am aware that much of this has the air of the clarion call.  It wears its heart on its sleeve.  It dares to believe.  It is possible to label it as naïve, or easy, or sentimental, especially in these dark times.  In the face of the world’s stark reality – its violence and its shrinking sense of moral courage – it seems an outlier.   It dares to hope.  But my argument is, I hope, not one of a naïve, bright, shining future.  

Authoritarian regimes prefer for us to listen to only one story.  That story is singular and it is directed and it is generally quite easy to follow.  It displays a narcissistic need to be correct. The regime creates narrow lanes of certainty around race, around nationality, around gender, around identity.  And they ask that its followers stick to those lanes.   Your enemy doesn’t look like you.  Nor sound like you.  Nor act like you.  You should hate them. 

If you want to isolate, you cut off any sense that the other side has a story to tell.  Without a story, the violence, the brutalization and the demonization becomes easy.   Without story, we are left floundering in a very precise darkness.  

A proper democracy, on the other hand, is charged with telling a wider and deeper story.  Often that story is messy.  It is not easily pinned down.  It contains multitudes.  It has many, often contradictory versions.  It is vulnerable.  It must bend without breaking.  It is therefore more difficult, and harder to grasp, at least initially.  

Part of the function of democratic storytelling is to eschew the simplicity of the didactic.  At its best, it doesn’t try to win its own argument.  It is both tiny and epic at the same time.  It validates the more anonymous, even contentious, corners.  Much of the time it confronts the personal story, the outlier, the one that exact at the edges, and has remained, for whatever reason, untold.  

Within this, then, dwells the role of literature, education and art. They try to tell the messy, complicated stories that lie at the edge, in order to rescue the fundamentals of who we are.  We cannot tell a proper story if we are not being properly listened to.  What this essentially means is that we have to be involved – fully involved – in the story of others.  

When Senator Mitchell was originally dispatched to Northern Ireland, he thought he would be gone for a couple of weeks.  The weeks extended into months.  The seasons extended into other seasons.  The leaves blew off the trees around Stormont.  At times the process was enormously frustrating for him, and indeed the people of Northern Ireland, but Michell continued to double down on his desire to listen.   

In the end, it took three years.  That is a lot of listening.  And a lot of patience.  And a lot of frustration too.   But what Senator Mitchell learned is that listening is the quiet soul of democratic change.   

So too with the young students of Narrative 4 and other organizations around the world that refuse to kowtow to the authoritarian notion that we are all just one single thing.  It is, and can be, an underground force.  If we are to try to shore up our democracies it is something that must be cultivated and encouraged.  

What will survive of us, in the end, is not just our stories, but how they have been heard.