I always thought I had a handle on truth. Truth lives in facts, in what we know and can measure and prove. But there is truth beyond that, too – truth that lives in the stories we tell each other.
I learned this from Augustine. He was a friend of mine from Nagaland, a forgotten teardrop of unyielding land wedged between Bangladesh and Burma, high in the foothills of the Himalaya.
It is a part of India often neglected by the rest of the country: rent by a decades-old separatist insurgency that has yielded little appreciable liberty, scarred by drug dependency and high rates of HIV, suffering the dislocation and disconnection so many minorities endure in the face of an indifferent majority.
As my friendship with Augustine developed, he drew me, little by little, into the extraordinary world of the Naga, a people disconnected by the whims of distant governments drawing map lines on other people’s lands, but joined by the stories they shared.
Augustine and I would walk for weeks in the hills of the Naga people, arriving unannounced in villages to sit down and talk, to share meals and swap stories. To an outsider’s sensibility, these stories were mythology – legends of boys who turned into birds, of flowers that bloomed for a goddess’s aegis. But as we walked – and I listened – increasingly I came to understand that these stories were more than legends passed down for divertissement or tradition. These stories were true.
The reporter’s task is simple, in principle at least, if not always in practice: you assemble the facts, as many as you can, from your own observations or the best sources you can find, and you test them and interrogate them, holding them up to the light in an effort to find their flaws. You are sceptical of everything, questioning of everyone.
But if your facts stand up, if they check out, then you use them, like bricks in a wall, to build your truth, little by little.
In journalism, these first drafts of history we write, these adumbrations of truth, are built on foundations of fact.
But there is truth in storytelling too. Truth that lies beyond what is provable or not, outside the accepted and the contested.
This is not to draw equivalence with falsehood in reporting, with “fake news”, or paid-for partisan opinion dressed up as reportage. This is not to excuse lazy journalism, blithely unconcerned with independent verification or happy to repeat a lie just because it has been uttered by someone in authority.
But there are deep truths within the legends and myths we choose to hold on to, even if we can’t necessarily accept them all as “fact”.
I came to accept Augustine’s stories as truth. I came to believe in their belief. And I came to know this: one worldview is not more valid than another; one community’s fables and legends are no more unreal than another’s.
As communities, our stories unite us, bringing us together to belong to something larger than ourselves. They tell us who we are and what we value. They are the foundation stones of our identity, of how we understand our place in the world.
The story that would become Nagaland – that emerged from those long walks in those grey-green hills – was not reportage. It could not be: there was too much there beyond “facts”, indisputable or otherwise. But truth lives within it.
I sat with the former foreign minister Gareth Evans recently at the Sydney writers’ festival talking about the genocidal Rohingya crisis currently seizing Myanmar and Bangladesh – and likely soon the Asia Pacific and the world. And we were talking about peace talks, about finding consensus, about untangling the Gordian knot of intractable issues that afflict our globe.
Evans said peace talks fail because they are designed to fail. He said if you wanted peace talks to succeed, you would bring the warring parties together, with their families and whole communities, and you would have them live together for two weeks. Their children would play together, their communities would work together, they would make and share food, and they would talk and share stories. And through being together, they would find common ground, and they might find a place to begin.
Through hearing – and understanding – another’s story, we are able to see the world more as they do.
There is truth in that.
