Community radio operators in the studio in Mangalamapatti, India. Photo: Atul Loke / Panos for Oxfam America
Few verbal chasms loom as large as the one between “us” and “them.” Between these words stretches a negative space, full of unspoken meanings. As long as there is an “us” and “them,” there will always be an “other.”
So how do we close the distance?
As a writer here at Oxfam, I’m sort of stuck between two worlds. My job is to get people in the US to care about–to fight for–people they may never have met, with whom they may have little in common on the surface. I don’t know what it’s like to be an alpaca herder living at 16,000 feet up in Peru, or a struggling rice farmer in Senegal. But by meeting these people and documenting their stories, we writers try to cross the chasm between the people on the ground and our audience. Our goal is to turn the “us” and “them” into a shared story of human experience.
But sometimes words fall short: they’re ambiguous, after all, and weighted with readers’ own perceptions.
Recent Comments