Whose Truth?

Author’s photograph, Jaime’s 1920 Underwood typewriter

Everyone has dreams and everyone has a story.

A wise Rwandan father would tell his children as they went to sleep; “At the end of the day, everyone has a story.” But most stories will never be heard. They are not written in books, nor shared in literary circles. They are not carried in local or global news outlets, wrapped into podcasts, or archived in databases. They are not whispered among friends, woven into coded messages or found scratched on walls. They are not told within the baskets of women working together or sung in skipping rhymes on hot summer days. They vanish into silence, unmarked, unremembered.

And yet, some stories break through because brave women and men, journalists, artists and truth-tellers risk everything to carry them across borders of power and indifference. Without them in their notepads, their cameras and recorders, how would we ever know the lives of children in refugee camps, the testimonies of women in war zones, the quiet losses of the elderly, the sick or the forgotten? Who would carry the dreams of those denied a platform, if not for the writers who reveal what powerful institutions would rather keep hidden?

Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) understood this over a century ago, when she fearlessly documented the violence and horror of lynching in the USA. She knew that silence protects perpetrators. She knew that truth, whether written, spoken or shouted is an act of defiance. Today, journalists in Gaza, Haiti, Sudan, the DRC, Ukraine and in other countless unnamed conflicts take up her legacy, documenting the violence occurring on every single continent, even as the world looks away. The price is steep. Every four days, a journalist is killed in pursuit of truth. Women journalists, increasingly on the frontlines, pay with their lives in growing numbers. And still, 85% of these murders are never punished. Impunity reigns and silence is enforced, (source: UNESCO digital library https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000391763 ).

What does that say about our world? Truth is fragile and deliberately endangered. Press freedom is not a luxury, it is a threat to those who profit from war, exploitation and inequality. The killing of journalists is not random. It is a weapon. It tells us that truth itself has become dangerous.

Edwidge Danticat, Haitian born writer living and working from the USA, reminds us of what is at stake. In “We’re Alone”, she asks haunting questions; What is left when you and your family are gone? Who will be a witness to our lives? I wonder who will see our dreams when we no longer rise from sleep? Colonial legacies and their modern mutations ensure that certain lives remain invisible, their stories unarchived, their dreams disregarded. Vulnerability, poverty and marginalization are not accidents but maintained structures.

I am often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of suffering. In this state of breathlessness, I return to the artists, the journalists, the relentless truth-tellers. They carve memory against forgetting in sculptures, manifestoes, photographs and billboards, in poems, in books, in films and plays. They weave truth into our lives and resist erasure by making us bear witness.

So, whose truth is it? It is the truth of governments, corporations or armies? Is it the truth of those who cannot afford to lie? The truth that outlives propaganda. The truth that unsettles the comfortable. The truth that refuses to be buried. 

Whose truth?