The elegies that fail the forgotten places

Storytelling’s not about giving people a voice, it's about listening to what they’re singing.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A book's front cover beside a portrait of the author, JD Vance

J.D. Vance book promotion, 2017.

Does it matter who tells the story of a place? It’s a question I’ve sat with as a writer, a community worker, and as someone who returned to my native West Country after a long time away. My departure and return to this place brought with it a sharper awareness of the labels this rural region could invite; of the way its people could be portrayed; of how easily they can be reduced to a one-dimensional stereotype that fosters little understanding.

And I am both reducer and reduced. I am a proud Devonian, rooted in soil thick with my ancestors, whilst also craving the culture and variety of elsewhere. My story of life in this place is complex. It’s a story that’s mine to tell, and not representative of anyone else from here – just as the people I’ve worked with in communities here and across sub-Saharan Africa taught me too: this person is not this place. This story is not this people.

Stories matter – stories told; stories hidden. They shape our identity, our opinions, our possibilities. John Steinbeck wrote that:

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice…”

Stories told reflect stories carried, like light refracted through a prism. A story’s colours tell us something about who tells the story and how they see the world. Which is one reason perhaps that JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came under scrutiny, especially since he was named Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in the forthcoming US election.

Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of Vance’s white working-class family, from his grandparents in the Appalachia region of Kentucky to his own coming of age in Middletown, Ohio. Vance raises questions about how local people, including his own family, are responsible for their own misfortunes, including poverty and addiction. His book came out in 2016, at just the right time to give many Americans an insight into why so many people like Vance’s relatives and past neighbours had voted for Donald Trump. It was painted as the voice of a forgotten community, and it became a bestseller, admired by some for its portrayal of Appalachian culture by someone from the inside. But reading people who know the places he talks of, it becomes clear that the book is “rife with stereotypes and classic Republican talking points peddled under the guise of lived experience,” as one commentator said.

Sarah Smarsh, author of books including Bone on Bone: Essays in America by a Daughter of the Working Class, said in a Guardian piece published in 2016,

“that the media industry ignored my home for so long and left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.”

A Bitter Southerner article responding to Hillbilly Elegy said that generalisation means that “…complexity gets simplified, the edges get rounded out[…]Appalachia has been written about and photographed in such a compelling (if fabricated) way that the descriptions of passersby took on more weight than the lived experiences of the people being described. What remains is a concept of a place that is both wildly romantic in its natural beauty and backward enough to justify the destruction of that very nature.”

We live in divided times, but often I find it hard to discern real division versus the media-created story of division. Theirs is a story that gets things wrong. Smarsh reflects how “countless images of working-class progressives…are rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll. This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America…” This is why it matters that we hear stories that do not fit that paradigm. A many-voiced 2019 publication Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy offered some of those stories in response to Vance’s painting of Appalachia.

Vance thought he could write the story of a 13-state region, but many Appalachians were unhappy about him becoming their spokesperson, especially when he seemed to blame the poor for their poverty. Appalachian Reckoning is a graceful counter to this: not silencing Vance’s own story but offering many more views and stories from Appalachia. Its co-editor Meredith McCarroll said she wanted to “complicate any singular view simply by including multiple ones. I wanted to create a chorus of voices, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,” to borrow from Walt Whitman’s view of place.” The publication offers cultural nuance, emotional connection, and a “context for some of the claims Vance makes in his book when it moves beyond memoir, and to pass the mic to a wider range of writers, poets, photographers, activists, and artists who make Appalachia a place far too complex to capture and far too dynamic to die.”

This approach feels important now, in the world as is it, with a media that often overlooks nuance, and with a culture that has become so visual that the way things are styled and framed and presented to us online can often be quite different to the reality. It is important to know the difference, and stories can help us discern that.

This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear.

There are stories that are easy to peddle and easy to buy into. In charity work, I saw how the story of the benevolent professional outsider could shape things, leaving little room for local stories and experience. In politics I saw how the story of opposition got in the way of all the people getting on with the everyday work of restoring and caring for their communities across lines of difference. We can, unknowingly, make a place and a people shrink or even disappear with the stories we carry or amplify, or ignore.

Stories wielded unwisely can shrink faith as well as people and places. The Jesus who I did not grow up with but came to know slowly as an adult is a Jesus of nuance, compassion, and deep listening. He would not, I think, recognise the brand of Christianity that can be used to justify particular politics. That religion and politics have in places become so intertwined is perhaps a reflection of the reduction of the vastness of the Bible and the many diverse voices it contains into one story that serves a particular group of people. Jesus again and again subverted what empire and hierarchy and tradition expected of him. He invited people into his story over and over, curious about their own story but never using it as a reason to include or exclude.

When I think about who tells the story of a place – or of a people, a time, a faith – I see that really, there is never one story anyway. There is a chorus of voices, each a little different, each part of a vast harmony that – if we have the ears and heart to hear it – sings a song of challenge and joy, of despair and illumination. Former US president Woodrow Wilson said, “the ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people”. Storytelling is not about giving people a voice – something I heard a lot in charity work. It is about listening to what they’re already singing. This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear, of biased framing and selective storytelling. It can sing us back to ourselves, helping us see each other. And isn’t that what softens hearts, isn’t that why we tell stories? Author Kazuo said in his Nobel acceptance speech that “stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” Stories are not tools of manipulation or power, but pathways to encounter, to relationship, to understanding. They are, perhaps, the only way through divided times.

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Leading

Politics

22 May 2024

7 min read

Leaders wanted for these testing times

We need leadership that is famous for fifteen miles not fifteen minutes.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A deflated looking woman stands aside from a protest rally, holding a small doll of herself that reads Recall Knope'.

Local leadership: Leslie Knope serving Pawnee, Indiana.

We are in a year of elections – locally, nationally, and in the US, and I have been wondering whether it’s true that we get the leaders we deserve, whether political leadership has always felt this way – this detached, divisive, even dangerous? More about ambition than integrity, about individuals more than our common life? Where might we find leaders that can take us into an increasingly hard to navigate, uncertain world?

I find myself thinking back to local leadership and difficult conversations I was involved in as a district councillor. These were often conversations about priorities, and money – mainly, the fact that there wasn’t enough of it, and what there was continued to be pared back and back until only the absolute essentials were covered. Many council tax bills have recently gone up, usually with an explanation of the reason for the rise. Local authorities in Scotland recently voted for a council tax freeze but only after the promise of funding from the Scottish government to make up the shortfall. During my time on the council, we would write letter after letter to government ministers seeking clarity about grants or cuts. When extra funding was announced we were pitted against other councils to bid for meagre pots of money, taking time away from officers who were already stretched too thin. Each councillor, each officer, each member of the community we served had their own idea about how to approach budgeting and spending. Sometimes those ideas aligned, but often they did not. Councils are in an impossible situation.

And yet decisions made at this level impact us all. National leaders might set the direction, but local leaders steward and implement and envision and listen – they are close to the people they serve, their decisions impact us all day-to-day: councils are responsible for things like children’s services, highways, housing people, parks and pools, and lots more

The people who have played the biggest role in my life have been the people that made me feel valued, seen, heard, capable.

Conversations about how to fund local authorities are difficult at any time, but especially so now, with crises coming from every angle – cost of living, climate change, ongoing post-covid recovery, austerity, and so on. To be a leader now – nationally yes, but especially locally, means making sure that essential services keep functioning despite lack of funding or clarity from government, and whilst also tackling climate change and all the other pieces of our fragmenting world. To be a leader now who shows vision and humanity and care despite the seemingly cynical and hurting spirit of the age – is, I think, a test of the meaning of leadership. This test of leadership doesn’t just face local and national government though. It faces all of us right now as we contemplate an unknowable future.

Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that “our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be”, and we are all capable of helping others be what they can be – whether a neighbour, a colleague, a community, a team, an organisation, others we come into contact with; we can all lead. Author, poet, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said that “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The people who have played the biggest role in my life have been the people that made me feel valued, seen, heard, capable. They have seen who I am, and who I could be, and they walk with me as I move in that direction. I think the best leaders do this too.

It is not glamourous, but, like a lighthouse that shines by just staying where it is, it calls people, lights the way, watches, serves, guides.

In contrast, the worst leaders seem to cling to traditional ideas of power, to control more than setting people free, to achieving their goals through any means necessary. I think of authoritarian regimes that rig elections and limit freedoms, and corporations that pursue profit at the expense of employees and the environment, and political campaigns that prioritise controlling the narrative over informing people. These embody warped leadership traits. And these warped ideas of leadership are given airtime, they fuel our news and our social media feeds and our anxiety. They make us angry, but they can also disempower us and close off the possibility that there is another kind of leadership, one more aligned with the Old English root of the word ‘leader’, meaning ‘one who guides and brings forth’. There are, though, places we can look that point to that other kind of leadership – to something more beautiful.

One place is my own doorstep. Here, there are people that see a need and organise people to fill it – whether hunger, loneliness, lovelessness, this is a kind of roll-up-your-sleeves leadership, the kind that is famous for fifteen miles not fifteen minutes. It is not glamourous, but, like a lighthouse that shines by just staying where it is, it calls people, lights the way, watches, serves, guides.

I try to hold on to the fact that we do not need to wait for national elections to call forth the kind of leaders we want.

Another place is the gospel, where again and again Jesus turned traditional ideas of leadership upside down. He taught that it must serve, not be served; that it can be great through humility not self-importance. He criticised religious leaders for seeking prestige and personal gain. And Jesus did not just teach this stuff, he lived it – he washed the feet of his disciples, he empowered them rather than wielded authority over them. He lived as a shepherd that leads and tends his flock with his love. He laid down his life for his friends, for all of us. And this I think is where leadership starts to look a lot like love. Jesus showed how true leadership that transforms individuals and communities, that heals division and brings people together, is led and motivated by love, not power. He taught that leadership without love is hollow and even harmful. He showed that leadership, and the love that fuels it, guides and inspires and cares for people. We need these kinds of leaders now more than ever. My own experience tells me that hard conversations become easier to navigate when care, humility, and listening are present.

In the UK, many of us are trying to get the measure of Rishi Sunak and Kier Starmer. An Ipsos poll in February explored how the public view these and other political leaders – a significant number were unclear about what they both stood for, but Starmer was ahead of Sunak in various leadership traits including experience, capability, strength. I want to know what other traits we’re seeking and demanding of our leaders nationally, locally and in ourselves. On the council I served on, I saw elected councillors asleep in meetings, ill-prepared, voted in because people did not think their vote or questions or care made a difference. On some level at least we do get the leaders we deserve – those we are prepared to be curious about, and call out, or encourage, or demand more of; more than just the ability to stay awake during meetings, more than just capability and strength, but also aliveness, care, compassion, humility, love.

We need to demand more of our national leaders, especially now. But I try to hold on to the fact that we do not need to wait for national elections to call forth the kind of leaders we want. We can call them forth in ourselves, in each other, in our communities – these are the leaders that impact us closely, every day. I think of some of the best leaders I have known: theirs was a leadership of passion more than position, invested in people more than prestige, offering both humility and vision – a combination that feels hard to find in our current political landscape. They call to mind what writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, that: “if you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Good leaders will help us see and navigate this endless ocean, these present storms – cost of living, conflict, division, ecological and economic unravelling. They remind us, like the gospel does, that the ship is a means to an end – one of new horizons, of togetherness, of love for this beautiful wide world.