WE LIVE WITHIN narratives, don’t we? Our identities are built on them. Our collective identities are definitely group memories woven by time into stories and narratives, and into memories and myths.
For places and times for whom there are few stories, we use terms like “prehistorical”, “no man’s land”, “wilderness” and even “the hinterlands” to describe them. For personalities unknown, we have other terms; we refer to them as being “off the grid”, being an enigma, a phantom, a ghost, a shadow or a cipher.
Narratives are, by their nature, a collective event and a social event; in sum, they are an exercise of power as well, a nexus where different wills and opinions wrestle each other to emerge with as much claim to being true as possible. It is therefore far from correct that tales about ourselves are dictated from within, by us. In fact, they emerge out of the very process of co-existence and inter-conflicts.
