Beyond Understanding: Other Ways to Practice Listening
One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?
– Florens, the main character in A Mercy by Toni Morrison
“Listen to understand, not to respond.” This amounts to a golden rule, maybe the golden rule, in dialogue work, taking its inspiration from Stephen Covey’s oft-quoted observation from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that “most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Understanding is taken frequently as the highest and most noble goal for dialogue, described as (or presumed without question to be) inherently in opposition, and morally superior, to more sinister motivations for engaging in conversation with other people, like outperforming, domination, persuasion, conversion, erasure, silencing, winning, humiliation, and so on. But I want to invite us to consider:
In our uncritical embrace of “understanding” as the most valuable goal, what other, equally or even more valuable ways of thinking about listening and receiving are we missing? How do we practice those alternative ways of listening? In what contexts is “understanding” impossible, insufficient, or even harmful? What do we mean by “understand” and “respond,” and is this actually a false binary?
“Understanding” denotes a few concepts simultaneously. When we speak of “understanding” in dialogue, especially when we’re practicing dialogue in an educational context like a college classroom or campus event, we generally invoke understanding in its primary meaning as “mental grasp”: both the achievement of comprehension and the power to comprehend. Comprehend, meanwhile, comes from the Latin comprehendere: to seize, literally to take together.
We also use understanding to mean comprehension (“mental grasp”) on two separate levels simultaneously. There is first the basic comprehension of what is being communicated: do you know what the words mean? Are you tracking and following what is being shared on a sentence and paragraph level? Could you summarize this content with reasonable accuracy if asked? And there is the higher-level exercise of making meaning or making sense of what is being communicated: fitting new information into preexisting schemas, comparing, interpreting, analyzing, synthesizing, towards a sense of broader comprehension or “getting it” on a holistic level. The first kind of basic comprehension is the prerequisite for the second, broader kind of comprehension, which is the product of a lot of cumulative intellectual activity involving much more than just tracking the basic meaning of what has been communicated.
When we say “listen to understand,” we rarely take care to distinguish whether we mean simply attending closely to try to ensure basic comprehension, or leveraging basic comprehension towards achieving that holistic sense of “getting it.” But I would suggest that we are usually hoping for that deeper, broader understanding: the ability to produce a set of observations, if not conclusions, about what we have been exposed to, to be able to explain rather than merely repeat or summarize the content of what we’ve heard or read.
When dialogue is centered on an exchange of ideas, or an interaction with or about a theoretical text, understanding is a logical and worthwhile goal to center. Training ourselves to attend to what is being offered (whether oral or textual) in a way that decenters our own knee-jerk reactions and re-centers what the speaker or writer is actually sharing, striving to first ensure basic comprehension and then work through towards broader, deeper comprehension, withholding judgment or outright dismissal until we have made sure we have a reasonable level of understanding of what they have tried to share, working towards that understanding collaboratively by asking questions, mirroring back what we think we’ve heard, testing out the validity of analogues that can clarify the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, reading as generously as possible – this is vital, difficult work. My colleague Ian MacMullen is particularly skilled in this mode of listening, and in helping students learn how to approach ideas in this way, and I learn so much from him.
I should clarify here that I increasingly tend to use the words “listening” and “reading” more or less interchangeably, with both describing a mode or practice of attentiveness and receptiveness more than a technical performance of audio or visual processing. That is, we can listen (or read) with our eyes, or with our ears, or with our hands, or our nose, or our tongue, or our spirit. The brilliant Jessey Shin taught me this way of understanding listening when they were a student in my Good Talk course. And I similarly make little distinction between “listening” to information, theory, or narrative presented in a written mode versus an oral mode versus a visual mode.
Let me also acknowledge, while on the topic of modalities: I am absolutely writing this essay in an argumentative, not merely explanatory and not principally narrative mode. That is, I have a core central idea of my own that I am working to explicate, in hopes that my reader will listen to understand, hopefully generously, in both a basic-comprehension way (you’ll be able to follow me on a word, sentence, and paragraph level) and a broader-comprehension way (you’ll be able to make some connections to your own experiences, ideas, values, etc, and come away with some new insights, whether in opposition to what I’m suggesting here or in agreement with it). I am a scholar and a teacher by profession and by nature. Understanding ideas, and presenting ideas and trying to help other people understand them, and helping other teachers help students understand ideas, is a lot of what I do. I even created a graphic resource summarizing and condensing the major ideas from this essay into a one-page, more visual format, for use in the classroom! (See it here!) I am very pro-understanding, and very pro-listening to understand, in many, many contexts.
But.
Dialogue is so rarely (some would say never, though I wouldn’t) solely an intellectual exchange of ideas, opinions, or theories that are perhaps explicitly informed by contemporary or historical societal context and political goals but vacant of any explicitly shared personal context. Dialogue very often (again, in many dialogue models, necessarily, by deliberate design) includes the sharing of personal stories, as participants relate narratives of identity, personal and collective histories, and affective experiences (drives, desires, suffering). Sometimes, people are offering (or are being asked or coerced to share) these personal stories as context to explain the origin of or particular force behind their ideas, beliefs, opinions, values, and theories. Other times, the sharing of personal narratives is an end in itself: the occasion for the dialogue is not the exchange of ideas with personal storytelling included, but rather the exchange of stories. (This kind of public sharing of personal narrative as a dialogic practice is what my Testimony class explores at length.)
Whether storytelling is an element in an ideas-focused dialogue or the entire purpose of the dialogue, what is wrong with “understanding” as the goal for listening when personal storytelling is part of the dialogue process?
A few answers:
One: In the moment of receiving testimony or personal narrative, centering understanding – recall: “mental grasp” or “seizure” of the whole, “taken together” – as the only or highest goal privileges an analytical, cognitive form of meaning-making that risks veering into colonialist possession, based on an arrogant presumption that what the other shares of themself and their life can be grasped, seized, taken, and made sense of by us. We receive the other’s story as a kind of raw material, a rich, enticing resource for us to mine, refine, and process it into a product that suits and serves us. This is how a great deal of traditional qualitative social sciences research (in Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, History, Psychology, and Economics) has been and continues to be conducted, but we do it outside of a formal research context all the time as well. “Ah, that explains a lot,” we say sagely in response to someone’s story, meaning: now that I know this bit of personal history, your (wacky, bewildering, distasteful, non-normative, foreign) behavior or beliefs make sense to me. I can fit the fragmented snippet of what I’ve heard into what feels like a satisfyingly logical narrative of cause-and-effect. In doing so, I take your story and I rewrite it into something else, governed by my systems of meaning and belonging to me.
Two: Consciously or not, we often make comprehension the necessary precondition for compassion, trust, and belonging. That is, in order to extend full humanity to the other, we think we must first understand or make sense of their culture, their experiences, their forms of expression, their behavior, or their choices. We must either identify (see ourselves and our own experience in the other) or empathize (feel the feelings of the other) in order to accept and extend care to them. If understanding is an intellectual grasp of the other’s story, we might say that identification is the presumption of an experiential grasp, and empathy is the presumption of an emotional grasp (recognizing that these boundaries between the intellectual, experiential, and emotional are artificial). Sometimes, we truly do identify or empathize with aspects of the other’s story, and this is an experience of profound connection. My colleague Lia Howard studies, practices, and teaches empathy with great rigor, humility, and care. But often, we rush to imagine that we “relate” – inappropriately projecting our own experiences or feelings onto the other’s story – because relatability is, deeply unfortunately, our metric for humanity. Too often, others are real to us, and equal to us, only to the extent that they make sense to us: this is a problem.
Three: We often use the quest for understanding as a way to avoid deeper emotional engagement with a person and the painful or bewildering story they present (in the form of an individual narrative) or represent (as a member of a larger community, a character within a bigger story). Confronting another’s vulnerability is deeply destabilizing. It is not just, as Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, that “some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.” It is that others’ stories (of both pain and pleasure) are often overwhelming both morally and sensorially, inducing helplessness, panic, depression, arousal, pity, disgust, or profound confusion, and we are not often trained in receiving and responding to them in anything but an intellectual way. We self-soothe by intellectualizing, taking comfort in the tidy process of reducing human complexity to a cause-and-effect sequence or a data set to be analyzed. After all, this is what we are trained to do in a classroom: take distance, apply a lens (literal or theoretical), work methodically through a question or text, isolate variables, examine evidence, identify phenomena, draw conclusions, make arguments. It’s comforting because it is familiar and we feel secure in our ability to do it, and satisfying because it yields a sense of resolution. But, as Jill Stauffer suggests in Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, this immediate move to explanation, analysis, and conclusion-taking about the other and their story constitutes a form of emotional rejection (even when it feels like a sympathetic analysis) and a form of ethical abandonment.
Here is an example from Héctor Tobar’s 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries that illustrates these three pitfalls of “understanding.” The novel centers on Araceli, a domestic worker from Mexico living with an affluent family in Southern California. During a party at her employers’ house, a guest named Carla tries to interpret what she experiences as Araceli’s brusque, unlikable behavior, observing her as she interacts with other guests: “This is one tough woman, a no-nonsense mom,” Carla thinks. “Look at those hips: this woman has given birth. Of course she is irritated, because she is separated from her child, or children.” To Carla, this feels like a successful instance of “listening to understand”: more than other partygoers, she’s paid close attention to Araceli, not just her words but also her affect and body language, and made an effort to understand the reasons for her behavior rather than simply write her off. She’s used her own identity and experience as a mother to try to forge a humanizing, empathic sense of connection with Araceli by imagining how she, Carla, would feel in Araceli’s place. But Tobar’s joke is on Carla: Araceli is childless and younger than Carla assumes, having left her studies at an art academy in Mexico to come to the U.S. Having reached what feels to her like “understanding” (in the sense of both comprehension and sympathy), Carla does not feel the need to learn more about Araceli (let alone from Araceli). She has objectified, not humanized, Araceli.
Four: On the other hand, sometimes we are aware of our inability to understand, and we use the awareness of our inability to understand as the pretext for abandoning any effort to receive the other’s story at all. We know that the other, because of their different identities, or culture, or experiences, has a story that we cannot hope to understand intellectually, experientially, or emotionally. Though we are often striving to embody humility and express respectful acknowledgment of difference when we say, “Wow, that’s really beyond my comprehension” or “I could never imagine that,” we often follow that acknowledgment with shut-down: the conversation is effectively over, and the story has been refused entry into the listener’s consciousness, turned away at the gates, as it were. When understanding is privileged as the goal, and it’s clear that understanding is not achievable, what is the point of continuing to engage? Centering “understanding” means agreeing that the storytelling effort has been a failure for both the sharer and the receiver unless and until the listener’s understanding (whether in the form of intellectual grasp, identification, or empathy) is reached.
Within a framework of “understanding,” then, what receiving the story does for the listener is prioritized far above what crafting and sharing the story might do for the speaker. This risks rendering the choice to share one’s story – inevitably vulnerable – a deeply fraught, dangerous endeavor, requiring a self-compromising and self-exploitative process of tailoring and translating one’s story to be maximally comprehensible by fitting into the frameworks of intelligibility, relatability, and emotional validity favored by the target audience. Anyone who has ever written a college admissions essay might know what I mean.
What are other ways we can think about and practice receiving another’s story that prioritize connection, compassion, and recognition of humanity over the need to understand?
To be clear, I am not suggesting that understanding, identification, and empathy are never possible when receiving another person’s story (or that they are trivial or worthless pursuits, or meaningless experiences when they do occur). Rather, I am wondering about how we can release the need to understand, or to displace understanding as a necessary precondition for compassion, connection, recognition of humanity, and care, as we are receiving another’s story. If we are not “listening to understand,” what might we listen to do?
To respond, I would say. Not to reply or retort, and not to take possession of the other’s story by seizing upon it and subjecting it to analysis and theorization in the effort to “understand” – which is what Stephen Covey meant when he wrote, “Most people…listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or they’re preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their own autobiography into other people’s lives.” These are unhelpful responses, but they are responses. To not respond at all is, as I’ve said, to shut down fully, to refuse presence to the other. It is not about “listening to understand” versus “listening to respond” – listening is response.
Respond comes from the Latin respondere. Spondere is “to pledge”; attached to the prefix “re,” to respond means, literally, to recommit to one another. Not necessarily the same thing as “produce an answer” – although, interestingly, “answer” comes from the same Germanic root as swear and thus likewise contains the echo of a solemn promise. What if we could recommit to this notion of response as nothing more and nothing less than a renewed promise to be present for one another, to receive one another’s stories with humility, to recognize each other’s humanity and right to life and repledge to protect and care for one another, regardless of how comprehensible we find each other?
What does, or could, listening-as-response look like?
A few answers:
LISTEN TO IMAGINE. To form a holistic concept of what someone is sharing, calling on all of the senses to attempt to live into their story and experience the world they describe, as they describe it, without claiming full knowledge or understanding.
Centering imagination means opening the gate wide and allowing the story to enter one’s consciousness – or, accepting the storyteller’s invitation to walk through the portal they have offered and enter into their story with them – without subjecting the story to analysis or making quick conclusions about what it means. It requires curiosity and humility in equal measure: the will and desire to form a sense of how the world looks, feels, sounds, smells, tastes, from the point of view of the other, infused with the profound awareness (and acceptance) that we can’t, actually, ever know.
In Leo Lionni’s 1970 picture book Fish Is Fish, a tadpole and a minnow are best friends living together in a sun-dappled pond, until the tadpole sprouts legs and becomes a frog and hops away. When the frog returns, he tells his old friend about all of the wonders he has seen on land: birds with feathers and wings, flying through the sky! Giant cows covered in spots, with bags of milk and horns! Humans walking on two legs, wearing clothes! The fish is enraptured: he cannot hear enough of these tales. But, having never left the pond, all he can imagine is versions of himself: brightly colored fish with feathers and wings flying through the sky, big spotted fish with udders and horns, and upright fish walking on legs, carrying umbrellas.
I use Fish Is Fish over and over again in my courses and dialogue workshops because it is a beautiful illustration of the ways in which our perception is inevitably limited by our environments, and of our instinct to, as Covey says, “[filter] everything through [our] own paradigms,” even when we are open-hearted and open-minded, excited to learn about otherness and eager to listen to the other. The fish is curious and engaged, excited rather than threatened by what his friend has experienced that he hasn’t, eager to imagine: what a welcome kind of listener! But he has not yet learned humility, or how to decenter himself. He is imagining what that world beyond his own pond might be like for him, if these things were happening to him – which is how we are often explicitly coached to develop empathy: Imagine if this were to happen to you. How would you feel?
What if we instead tried to imagine actually inhabiting the bodymind of the other, not as ourselves but as them, and think about how they would feel – while reminding ourselves that imagination is not the same as knowing or understanding? Imagination is an exercise, not an achievement; it is about generating possibilities for what the world of the other might be like, not conclusions. We might gently ask the fish why he didn’t imagine birds as brightly colored, feathered, winged frogs. We might encourage the fish to imagine what it might be like for his friend the frog to hop through that world, to be thin-skinned and amphibian, to see birds in the sky from his place on the ground, perhaps to be afraid of them. It is not just the world beyond the pond that is new to the fish; the act of imagining itself is new to him, too. (This is me, trying to imagine the fish! As Leo Lionni imagined him! While remembering that I am inevitably missing and mistaking important things about how Lionni conceptualized his fish!)
I used to say I can’t imagine what that must be like to my friends. Now I say, I can only imagine. This feels to me more true, and more responsible: I can imagine, and I commit to that effort, because you have offered me a piece of your world and I want to honor that gift with reciprocity. And imagination is great work, a complex skill for holistic engagement (emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, sensual) that weakens over time as we progress through our schooling and are encouraged increasingly to isolate and privilege analysis or “reason” over all else. But we can do it. It strengthens rapidly with use. I will not abandon you by claiming that I cannot imagine your world. I can. But I can only imagine, and I know and you know that I am not getting it right. But then, me “getting it right” is no longer the point of listening.
LISTEN TO BELIEVE. To accept and affirm what someone is sharing as true, valid, and real, without demanding a further burden of proof, even (especially) when what they share is unimaginable or incomprehensible.
Maybe we really can’t imagine, sometimes; maybe there are experiences (or reactions to those experiences, or bodies experiencing them) that are so radically different from our own that we struggle even to believe they are real. Or so upsetting, so disturbing to our worldview and our sense of social progress, justice, or individual autonomy and resilience, that we reject that they could be real. In this case, we might strive to listen simply to believe: to resist the instinct to reject or interrogate, even in an imaginative void, and allow for a challenging truth to exist without challenging it back.
In her extraordinary 2024 book Who Gets Believed: When the Truth Isn’t Enough, Dina Nayeri explores questions related to credibility and the need to perform affect (fear, pain, grief, anxiety, love, concern, devotion, etc) in a way that is read as legible and valid to one’s audience in order to make a legitimate claim (whether legal or interpersonal) for assistance or acceptance. Part of the issue, she says, is our need for a preexisting shared conceptual system between people. She quotes Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”: “To be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors” – meaning, we tend to only recognize as “truth” or “reality” that which is expressed in terms that are identical or similar enough to the way we understand the world. (This recalls us back to last month’s DiaLogic conversation about metaphors.) “What is truth, then, to most people?” Nayeri asks. “What is casual honesty and trustworthiness? Only the use of ‘the usual metaphors,’ the familiar, comforting images we’ve already imbibed. . . . Everything we take as true and canonical in human relations is a worn-out metaphor we’ve long ago accepted.”
This idea appears, too, in Dina Nayeri’s brother Daniel’s devastatingly beautiful 2020 work of autofiction Everything Sad Is Untrue: speaking directly to his reader/listener, describing a septic tank leak, 12-year-old Daniel asks, How can I help you understand the smell? What myth do we share that I can reference to make you feel the power?
When I was 19 years old and living by myself in an industrial city in northeastern China, my 5th-floor apartment was robbed, eleven months into my year there. I was called out of work teaching English to children to come meet with the police, and walked in to find two adult men and the secretary of the school standing in my desecrated sanctuary (the apartment was a concrete hovel with mold blossoming on the walls, but my private sanctuary nonetheless). Clothes were ripped out of drawers and strewn everywhere; the mattress was askew and half off the bedframe; the couch was overturned; everywhere was chaos, and everything of any value had been taken. I shook the police officers’ hands and smiled, thanking them for coming in my basic but accurate Chinese. I gestured towards the fruit still sitting on the counter, the loaf of bread visible in the tiny refrigerator, whose door was ajar. “Look, the food is still here!” I said brightly. “Would you like to stay for dinner?” I laughed at my own joke.
No one else was amused. The police assumed, with no evidence besides my behavior, that I had arranged or staged the robbery myself in an attempt to commit “insurance fraud” (what insurance? I had no insurance of any kind, not even health insurance), and they noted this on their paperwork, and there was no further followup on the case. By association with my shameful crime, the school I worked for “lost face,” and to punish me for this, they refused to advance me any of the money from my one remaining paycheck. I lived my last month in China nearly literally penniless. (I survived.) It was explained to me that my behavior was simply unbelievable: I was supposed to be crying, out of control, devastated by what had happened. I was devastated, but I had grown up in a violent home and I was highly trained in dissociation, in coping by joking, in always projecting a face of normalcy and control to strangers, and in putting others at ease first. My parents worked in the hospitality and service industries and so did all their children as they grew up: I knew what a “guest voice” was and I defaulted to it. The Chinese policemen and I didn’t share the same framework for what “my house was robbed” was meant to look like. Beyond a simple language barrier, I didn’t know what metaphors and myths I was supposed to reference, and it cost me far beyond what had already been taken.
This might seem like a ridiculous, extreme case. I acted absurdly, when there were already massive cultural and linguistic barriers: what else would I expect? But refusal to believe happens all the time without any of these barriers. When I was 18, an older family member recovered long-repressed memories of sexual abuse, perpetrated by another, beloved family member. When she told me, I didn’t believe her. I didn’t tell her that directly, but I didn’t. There were many, many complicated dynamics and history at play, but the issue boiled down, simply, to this: it was too hard for me to reconcile what she was telling me with the truth I knew. Eventually, I accepted her truth, and I made sure she knew that, but I will regret forever those few years of doubt.
Dina Nayeri describes Russian Jewish grandmothers unearthing the bodies of their Nazi-slaughtered children while a camera records them, enacting what looks to the Western eye like a melodramatic, self-indulgent performance of grief in an effort to have their loss and trauma believed. She asks, “I wonder: What if these women were accustomed to simply being believed? What if, starting in youth, their words were enough and grew sacred with age?”
What if, sometimes, this is what we dedicated a dialogic process to – believing one another, treating each other’s stories as sacred? What kinds of performing and posturing would that liberate us from? How might our stories actually become more true over time as we got more used to being believed?
TO WITNESS. To be deeply, fully present for someone’s moment of disclosure or discovery, especially of pain or trauma. This is the most simple (not easy) act of accompaniment: only presence and attention are required.
Listening to witness does not require imagination or even a commitment to belief (though disbelief is off the table). It does not require even the basic comprehension we have referenced – the ability to follow what is being shared on a word or sentence level, such that the listener could re-summarize the content at the end. One could serve as witness to a story shared in an entirely different language, and fulfill their role wholeheartedly. This does not mean that witnessing is easy, or that it requires little from the listener; in fact, it requires a great deal more than most other kinds of listening.
In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, his 1991 book co-authored with Shoshana Felman, psychologist Dori Laub describes the role of the witness: “Implicitly, the listener says to the testifier, ‘For this limited time, for the duration of the testimony, I’ll be with you all the way, as much as I can. I want to go wherever you go, and I’ll hold and protect you along this journey. Then, at the end of the journey, I shall leave you.’” This requires “a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other – in the position of one who hears. . . . There has to be an abundance of holding and of emotional investment in the encounter, to keep alive the witnessing narration.” An abundance of holding, and the commitment to stay on the journey, to help keep the narration alive (sometimes by encouraging the storyteller to continue, or helping them slow down), and to prioritize the protection of the one who shares above one’s own as listener: this, Laub says, is required when listening to witness.
The poet and comedian Alok Vaid-Menon (@alokvmenon), meanwhile, distinguishes between seeing and witnessing in this video: “Seeing is super-imposing your framework on somebody else. Seeing actually is just selfish. It’s seeing yourself in other people. It’s only seeing people in so much as they can become instrumentalized to justify and rationalize your worldview. Witnessing is about being able to encounter someone’s fundamental alterity – their incongruity, their dissonance, their rambunctiousness – and be like, okay. I feel no need to consolidate that in my world. Let me be transformed by you.”
Students from the Testimony class, meanwhile, describe listening to witness (what we call “existential listening” in the course) as “a listening that begins from entirely validating the speaker’s existence and therefore their unlimited value,” requiring “presence, patience, and a commitment to honoring the storyteller’s truth. Listening is not passive; it is an active engagement with someone else’s reality, an acknowledgment of their humanity.”
TO FEEL. To fully experience (without claiming empathy) any emotional and physical sensations that arise while receiving someone’s story, resisting dissociation and numbness and exercising full affective range.
Distinct from trying to imagine how the other feels, or how one would feel oneself in the same situation, listening to feel means embracing and remaining present and attuned to how one does feel as they are receiving the other’s story. It means allowing for a looming wave of horror to crash on the shore of your emotional landscape rather than rushing to activate a levee system to block the wave, or giving yourself permission to feel a swell of love for the character in the story that you know you are supposed to find despicable. It means resisting the powerful urge to resist emotional engagement: to suppress, shy away, or escape from the feelings that threaten to express themselves in one’s body and heart – or to laugh them off or intellectualize them.
Any sense of self-judgment (for feeling too much, too little, or the “wrong” thing) should also be resisted. Nor should listening to feel be an exercise in self-punishment, forcing oneself to be overwhelmed with pain and horror out of a sense of “survivor’s guilt” or dogged moral obligation to confront the world’s sorrow. (Nobody is asking you to drown yourself in those waves and swells of emotion!) Listening to feel requires care, especially in settings where emotionality is not traditionally valued or encouraged, like a classroom. There is a never-ending cycle of horrifying images and stories being shared via the news and social media without care; the more stories of pain and suffering one indiscriminately takes in, the less one is able to feel in response. Inherent to any dialogue process (regardless of the dialogue’s purpose, topic, or format) is intentionality; as a brilliant participant said in a dialogue workshop I facilitated last summer, dialogue is something you do on purpose. It ritualizes and builds structures of care and protection around the act of sharing with one another, including the sharing of ideas but especially the sharing of stories, whether oral, written, or nonverbal.
As a lesson in taking care when listening to feel, Leah Manaema (@co_cu1tur3) shares wisdom from her community, the Moana Lassi of Suvalu, noting that it is wisdom shared by many other Indigenous and traditional healers around the world. When allowing a great deal of feeling in response to others’ stories, she says that she consciously takes “a moment to thank my exquisite sensitivities for reminding me of my humanity. I would much rather feel this much pain than be numb to this kind of suffering, and that makes me feel really grateful.” And she describes channeling the love she recognizes behind her rage and grief into support for those suffering.
When I feel myself beginning to become numb and disaffected, unable to respond to the torrent of stories raining down around me with anything but tiredness, even irritation, whether they are international news stories or my colleagues’ anecdotes, I recognize that I am overstimulated and dissociating. I turn away from the torrent and consciously seek out a book, usually one I have read before that is full of people I love. I walk back into that different, familiar world, intentionally seeking to feel, to reactivate my affective center, in a way that is slow and full-bodied. I let my heart swell with joy, break, swell, and break again. It is restorative and renewing, and I find myself feeling alive once again, awake to my own humanity and others’. As the poet Andrea Gibson writes:
Poem: “Good Grief.” Text: “Let your /heart break /so your spirit /doesn’t.” From You Better Be Lightning, 2021.
Importantly, the listener should also take care not to center their feelings, or overwhelm the story(teller) with them. Have you ever had your story derailed by the gasps of shock and whimpers of pity, the excessive frowning and emphatic head-nodding of your aspiring empath of a listener? It is an intensely irritating experience for a storyteller, and it is usually less the authentic expression of the listener’s true emotional response and more a performance of “empathy” based on what the listener assumes the storyteller wants to elicit. If you are someone who has authentically “big” emotional reactions (gasps, sighs, shudders), you might practice listening to feel more when interacting with a visual, written, or recorded audio story than an oral story told in real time. Over time, it is possible to learn how to restrain the physical expression of emotion (to a degree) without repressing the physical sensation, so that you can remain present in your own feelings without imposing them into the other’s story as they are sharing it.
Though I have emphasized feelings that people are generally more uncomfortable with and resistant to allowing, like grief, helplessness, and horror, of course, listening to feel is also about being open to feelings of more pedestrian emotions (boredom, irritation) and more joyful emotions: delight, love, affection, giddiness. And, of course, one need not understand (even on a basic comprehension level) what is being offered to feel in response to it. Lin Yutang, in his extremely delightful 1937 book of philosophy The Importance of Living, describes making a practice of lying in bed and listening to the birds sing every morning in springtime, with deep intention and openness to feeling. He writes of the experience, “I am sorry I am not proficient in birdlore, but I enjoyed them all the same.”
TO RESONATE. To seek or discover points of resonance between the other’s story and my own, recognizing that even a powerful sense of affinity is partial, not comprising comprehensive understanding or identification.
In conversation for the first time recently with a colleague in the dialogue world, I was stunned to hear him use the word “unintelligible.” I had just confessed (anticipating censure) that although I don’t deny its value, “common ground”-type dialogue across political difference does not interest me as a facilitator as much as intercultural or testimonial dialogue work that does not try to bridge difference. He nodded as I spoke and replied that his life experience had taught him that we are all fundamentally unintelligible to one another, and my heart stopped. It was not just that he was sympathetic to what I had shared; it was the use of that particular word. My dissertation in Comparative Literature examined “the damaging effects of a discourse of mandatory intelligibility” on children in several different contexts of post-traumatic public memory. To hear the echo of the same language I had used reflected back to me, in a moment when I was expecting to be dismissed or misunderstood, was startling: an unexpected and powerful moment of resonance.
It’s funny to me that we encountered sameness (common ground!) in our mutual conviction that we are irreducibly not the same. But this is a core tension (a both/and), a beautiful, transcendent fact of the dialogic encounter: we are BOTH fundamentally unintelligible to one another, each human being irreducibly complex and swirling with particularities that no other human being can fully know or understand in their entirety, AND we are able to find and connect with one another, to recognize each other and to bond intimately, across unfathomable distance and difference. To seek resonance rather than understanding means allowing for these moments of heart-stopping recognition – the trembling awe of I can’t believe I’m not the only one who has felt this exact thing – without mistaking those moments for comprehensive recognition or identification.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is a Chinese-Malaysian-Singaporean and Asian American poet who immigrated to the U.S. to attend college. She and I share very little either autobiographically or demographically; her life has been vastly different from mine, as we have occupied very different worlds, in very different bodies, at different times. But the final lines of her poem “Self-Portrait” (from her 1998 collection What the Fortune Teller Didn’t Say) took my breath away. It was as though Shirley had dipped her pen into my heart’s inkwell to write them.
To recognize myself in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s words is also to recognize Shirley Geok-lin Lim. But it is not to understand or to know her. She produced these thoughts in a particular moment in time and nearly thirty years ago; the fragment of selfhood that speaks from within these few lines of poetry is merely that – a fragment. When she writes of languages, swaying palms and heavy books, she is almost certainly imagining different languages, different palms, different books, than I am. We inhabit different bodies and different worlds, and we remain in our different bodies and worlds, and yet, this powerful thread of singular, vibrating connection is cast between us.
“No matter how much you are similar and consonant . . . your story is never my story,” writes Adriana Cavarero in her 2000 work of feminist philosophy Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. “I recognize . . . that your uniqueness is exposed to my gaze and consists in an unrepeatable story whose tale you desire.” She calls this insistence “an altruistic ethics of relation” which “does not support empathy, identification, or confusions” and instead “desires a you which is truly an other, in her uniqueness and distinction.”
The light of a star travels many trillions of miles across the cosmos to reach us on earth, and we perceive it as present, real, and alive. And it is. But the light has traveled so far to get to us that the star may, in fact, already be dead. We can receive the star and respond powerfully to it; perhaps the stardust we are made of – remnants of the first generations of ancient stars, comprising most of the elements in a human body – recognizes kinship with starlight. But we can’t know the star. We cannot traverse that distance, even as we encounter each other, converge with startling intimacy, across space and time, even as we can feel that we are, in fact, made of the same stuff.
TO REMEMBER. To remain deliberately mindful of the cultural and ancestral history in which someone’s individual story is embedded, especially against dominant efforts to erase, revise, or forget this history.
When I say “listen to remember,” I don’t mean a note-taking mentality – that basic comprehension of attending carefully enough to content to be able to summarize accurately the substance of what has been shared. I am talking about a conscious commitment to collective or public memory, to refusing to see a singular story of trauma, oppression, resistance, liberation, joy, or beauty as disconnected from community history. For example, when we read a book like Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018), we are listening to the story of Jerome, a twelve-year-old boy shot and killed by a White police officer who returns as a ghost. Listening to remember means committing to the awareness during and after reading that Jerome’s story, though uniquely his, is one square in a vast quilt of other stories of young Black boys killed by White men claiming justice or self-defense, including Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and many, many others.
A story, Amir Khadem teaches us, is “not only the container of memories, but the instrument of a social act of remembering–or forgetting” (from his 2014 article “Cultural Trauma as a Social Construct”). Performing her poem “Afr0-Latina,” Elizabeth Acevedo demands,
It’s unclear whom Acevedo is directing her mandate: is she asking her ancestors or her descendents to remind her where she comes from? Is it a plea to her contemporaries–fellow Afro-Latines? To herself? To her audience of listeners? No matter which, it is an appeal to community and to collective memory. Further on, she continues,
Acevedo’s story is explicitly a memory project, locating her life, her story, within these multiple intertwined histories and communities, even as she insists that her story and every other one like hers is also a unique story (our stories cannot be checked into boxes).
If part of why we share our stories is to remember our own lives, to connect our lives to those of our elders’ and ancestors’ lives, and to cast a line forward to connect to the lives of those who come after us, then the way we receive such stories can honor and support that memory work first and foremost by affirming it as memory. We can try to follow the mandates of the storyteller to remind, reshare, remember, past the moment of first listening. The way we receive others’ stories can also dishonor, dismiss, or dismember that memory work, by insisting upon the story’s anomalousness, irrelevance, unbelievability, fraudulence, etc – or by rushing too quickly to claim understanding of the story by “checking it into boxes,” concluding not that the story is an “isolated incident” existing outside of context but rather that it is identical to crowds of others and therefore not worthy of closer attention, once the type has been identified and the story neatly categorized.
FINAL THOUGHTS
One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?
I opened this essay with these two questions, posed on the first page of Toni Morrison’s 2009 novel A Mercy. Florens is a young enslaved woman living on a farm in 1680s Virginia, abandoned by her mother and rejected by her lover, scratching out her story into the walls of the slavemaster’s empty house. The very first lines of her narrative are: Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done. Florens continues, You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog’s profile plays in the steam of a kettle.
On the first page, then, Florens offers us her story (“a confession”) along with hints that we won’t likely understand it – it will be “full of curiosities familiar only in dreams” – but will likely find it deeply disturbing (“don’t be afraid”). Nevertheless, she challenges us to accompany her: One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?
Florens’s voice speaking these questions has haunted me for years. Who is responsible? Can you read? seem to me to be the essential questions for dialogue work, for education, for human relationships on an interpersonal, intergroup, and interspecies level. Florens, speaking directly to her lover, may mean these questions far more narrowly and pragmatically: who is responsible for the destruction of their relationship? Will her lover, a free African man in the 17th century, know how to read the words she’s writing into the walls if he finds the confession she is leaving for him? But Morrison, speaking through Florens to the reader, asks: What do we owe one another? When confronted with each other’s stories, will we recommit to one another, as the original meaning of “respond” asks of us? Will we take responsibility for reading – for listening to their pains and pleasures, despite the terror, the confusion, the shame, the aversion they may threaten to make us feel?
The storytelling endeavor as a whole asks: What is possible if we do? If we acknowledge our responsibility (our ability and mandate to recommit to one another again and again) and work on learning how to read (to listen deeply), what wonders beyond (or more important than) understanding might await?
Though many answers to this question are possible, I will share just one from Alain Badiou to get us started: love. In his 2012 work of philosophy In Praise of Love, Badiou writes:
What kind of world does one experience when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be. It is an existential project: to construct a world from a decentered point of view other than that of my mere impulse to survive or re-affirm my own identity. . . . Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Comfort Sampong for the conversations we have had around these topics in recent weeks, which have both affirmed and expanded my thinking, especially around memory. I also thank the SNF Paideia reading group for our conversation about Who Gets Believed on February 20 of this year, which challenged me to name the distinction between understanding, imagination, and belief. In particular, Maddy Vaver courageously shared a story that taught me the importance and ethical imperative of imagining in the absence of understanding. I am so grateful to be in community with all of these exceptionally generous and generative people.
