Amal Kassir, an international spoken-word poet, delivers a talk arguing that effective storytelling depends on listening: stories expand our mental maps and foster empathy across cultural and geopolitical divides. She supports this with personal anecdotes (a headlining performance at a Spanish poetry festival, a controversial Denver slam, visits to refugee camps) and a family tragedy in Syria (eleven relatives killed), urging listeners to broaden perspectives and take responsibility for amplifying human stories.
Questions this video answers
Hope.
Eleven members.
She was the headliner at the festival (described as the first of its kind international poetry festival).
Chapters
Hello. Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Amal Kassir. My name means hope, and I've got a little spiel on the art of storytelling. I think a lot of creatives have an approach to tackling this, but as a world traveler from the suburbs in the good old Denver, Colorado, I know sometimes what can happen when we assume that the message that we have is founded, it's gone as far as it could, and it's very limiting. Sometimes when you walk into a room thinking, you know, everybody there, only to be dumbfounded and lost, having not listened to enough to know exactly what your message can actually do. I'm an international spoken word poet, and a few years ago I had a performance in Spain. It was the first of its kind international poetry festival, and I was the headliner. And before the event, we were sitting in the hostess's home. All the other poets were local, Catalan. And one of them came up to me, and I'm quoting, he said, I think you're lost. I think you don't know where you are. Now, I humbly say, I don't think he knew he was opening for me, right? And it was a little imperialistic, this approach, walking up to someone and making it clear that you had more of a right to be there than they did. And I think that goes along with this obsession that we can sometimes have, assuming that the audiences we're accustomed to are the extent of the audiences that we can reach, that our messages are as far as they could, but we end up cheating ourselves out of the power of our own message. In this case, I would say that the real art of storytelling is derived from listening. So I'm going to draw a metaphor for you all. Storytelling and map making are the exact same thing. Stories contribute to the map. They make it bigger. They make the world filled with more landmarks, viewpoints. They add empires, nations and tribes to help us get to know one another. In some cases, we can see the world far beyond anything we've ever known. Or it can be much, much smaller. In Denver, after a poetry slam, I had a very, very controversial set list. It was a psychosocial analysis of terrorism. Coming from a Muslim girl, you know, that's going to be interesting. And the audience was way different than it usually was. It looked like the tourist from the nice part of town, you know, the kind that might call Guantanamo on me. But I went for it. And after the show, a middle aged white man, a Ford truck driving looking fella, came up to me. He looked me dead in the eyes and he said, you have changed my perspective on the entire world. Now, there's two reasons why this is a big deal. First, my assumption originally was that my message wouldn't reach that type of audience member. And I was sure shown two the world's a very big place. And to have your viewpoint changed on all of it, that is dramatic. You cannot undo that. And after our conversation, I would argue that both of our worlds were a whole lot bigger. Listening and map making, listening and map reading, speaking and hearing are a symbiotic relationship. But we are going to speak better when we keep our mouths shut first. Walking into a refugee camp thinking you know all about these people's strife, it is humbling when you see people and you ask them, look, I'm American. I can tell you I can give you whatever you need. I can get you clothes, I can get you shoes. And these people said, no, that's all we want. Which means your peace. That's all we want. This is something that the Western savior complex really, really struggles with, having to listen to somebody say something like that. And at that point, all we can do to become a part of these strangers lives is listen to their story. That's it. I can't pull up from the nonprofit organizations and provide a means of getting some nicer pumas to this camp. These people wouldn't give me that opportunity in the first place. All I had was my ears to listen with. Storytelling is the reason why the global platform has as much power as it does. It's the reason why old guy can get into office. It's the reason why a poet can make world headlines. Because it's the one thing that when we listen to, it resonates. We get it. It's rooted in that pit of empathy that the human language is innately, innately stored in. My family's from Syria, and Syria didn't make it on the map for most people until ISIS did, which was about three years after the conflict. We know Syria to be the place of refugees or migrants and terrorist groups. In April, a bombing struck my family's home and my aunt and several of my cousins died. Eleven members of my family were killed. It wasn't by isis, it wasn't by refugees, it wasn't by the typical map legend that we're all aware of. It was by the Assad regime. And I got multiple calls from media spokespeople all across the world asking me to describe this a little bit. Was it the chemical bomb? Was it the Russians? Was it? And there was almost a sense of disappointment telling Them the truth about what had happened. It wasn't quite what some of them were looking for. Through listening, the map is rearranged. Through listening, they're not just migrants anymore, they're refugees. It's not just a war anymore. It's people breaking apart their dinner tables for firewood. Through listening, War is a human reality. It's not just some trigger word that we hear in the headlines. Through listening, we can take a look at places like Thailand, places like Baltimore, El Salvador, places with sex trafficking, drug trafficking, with violence, with gangs. We can look at places like Afghanistan with terrorists. We can use our listening capacities to actually see that the world has a lot more similarities than differences. We're listening beyond the trigger words because war is not a story, that is a word. But when you listen to what's behind the word, when you listen to what's behind the map, you will find people, you will find poverty, you will find hunger. You'll hear interviews about people picking up the gun, clocking in and clocking out because that's how they feed their children. I don't expect to give sympathy when I listen to why a terrorist becomes a terrorist or why a gang member does what he does. We are deliverers, entrepreneurs, people with global platforms, people with the power of people listening to them. We are change makers and our responsibility is delivery. It's not about fun anymore. It's not what we read in our children's books anymore. When I stand up here, I take this stuff seriously, to be honest. I had a speech prepared word for word. It was memorized and everything, but it wasn't what I wanted people to listen to. When I stand up here, my responsibility is to give it raw, is to give it genuine. It's to have listened to everyone around me this morning, to seeing the war, the brutality, the genocides happening, and to know that somehow, somehow on this stage, I have the responsibility of communicating through the human words. Take the art of storytelling very seriously and the only way you're going to do it is through listening. That boy in Spain, after the performance, he walked up to me very humbly and he thanked me and I thanked him. And I assure you, both of our worlds became much larger as a result of listening to each other. You could say it was a new world. I've got an imperialism joke, but I'll leave that for later. Right. I hope that the only message you take away from me today is that the more you listen to the world, the more you realize that the message you have inside of you can be fixated in a way that your message can become globalized, but only by universalizing your perspective. First, we have to know our neighbors, because sometimes the message you send out there, the story you tell, could resonate the most by the people you know least about. I thank you all and I hope you will keep your thoughts and your prayers with the people of Syria, with the people of Burma, with the people of Mexico, with the people of Sudan, with all of the war torn areas, with all of the struggling, the impoverished here in the United States, overseas, all over the world. We're all together. We all hurt the same, we all cry the same. I'll end with this. In the words of Brother Ali, the human reaction of smiles and cries. What language are the tears when they're falling from your eyes? Keep making the maps bigger. My friends, you're in bound for a surprise. When you do.
