Reading About a Dictator At the Roller Rink
It's All Connected, and It Has Always Been "Too Complicated"
KnotWork.
Interwoven.
Fite fuaite.
I named my storytelling podcast KnotWork before I knew the Irish phrase that means “interwoven,” fite fuaite.
It was actually in episode 1 that my first Irish teacher, the storyteller Kate Chadbourne, gifted me with these words. Fite fuaite would have greater resonance with each season of the show. (There’s even an episode named Fite Fuaite, featuring a story by Jen Murphy.)
When we can be present enough to notice, we see how the universe is all entangled and designed according to synchronicity. We are all enmeshed in coincidences too meaningful to be dismissed as mere happenstance.
The great cloak that weaves us all together is intricate and infinite, expansive enough to wrap around the whole world. Sometimes the colors clash and the threads tangle. We cannot pretend to comprehend the true nature of the design, but such is the way of life as we know it (and can’t know it).
The Latest “Mini-Season” of KnotWork Storytelling
As you may have heard, we’re doing things a bit differently on the podcast this December.
We are featuring four authors, each reading from recent or forthcoming memoirs. Rather than telling old stories from mythology or folklore and then finding their modern meaning, we’re reversing that formula.
This week, a sister story healer
joins me on KnotWork Storytelling.Dimple is a coach and a consultant who uses the power of story to heal individual and organizational trauma and moral injury. She roots this work in her twenty years of experience working as an asylum officer and as a leader within humanitarian organizations.
When she asked me to read an advanced copy of her book, Tell Me My Story—Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self, and offer a quote about it for her launch, I was honored.
And, as is the way, the generous reading period Dimple provided vanished all too quickly, and I found myself trying to complete the book just before the publication deadline.
That’s why I found myself reading about Idi Amin while leaning on a sticky railing at the roller rink. My heart and mind were transported to in Uganda in 1972, even as my elbows were grabbed by small children trying to balance themselves as they moved in endless circles on that shiny floor.
It was PTA night at Wood n’ Wheels, the scene of much childhood joy, pain, disappointment and germ incubation. After all these years of birthday parties and desperate winter Sunday afternoons when everyone just needed to get out of the house, I still struggle to handle the blaring music, the flashing lights, the whining for more arcade money, or the way tiny strangers tend to barrel into you while wearing skates manufactured during the Clinton administration.
The contrast between Dimple’s story and this overstimulating night of “entertainment” was profound.
Terror from Five Decades Ago, the Trauma of Today
Dimple’s book weaves her family’s stories of escape and immigration with her own childhood in America. She talks about domestic violence and mental health struggles within her own family, her own quest to find her true calling, and her work with asylum seekers and refugees.
Tell Me My Story challenges the belief that by choosing a career in the service of others, we agree to sacrifice our time, our relationships, our health and well-being—our humanity.
And, the book includes a chilling story of Dimple’s Uncle Yash who was forced from Uganda, the country of his birth. The notoriously mercurial military dictator Idi Amin had ordered the expulsion of all Asians from the country. The scene Yash describes, when Amin appeared at the airport as hundreds were desperately trying to obey his orders to flee, is absolutely harrowing. It reads like something out of a movie.
But then, the little I know about Uganda from this period is shaped by a movie.
Remember The Last King of Scotland starring Forest Whitaker as Imin? I had to rely on the Wikipedia synopsis because I’m not someone who remembers much about movie plots from 2006. Plus, I never made it through the entire thing. It’s a brutal, brutal film.
In my research, I found a terrible synchronicity.
The Last King of Scotland, which is based on true events, includes the arrival of a hijacked AirFrance flight. The plane was captured by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as the German guerilla group RZ.
My knowledge of this event, and what follows, Operation Entebbe or Operation Thunderbolt, the Israeli counter-terrorist mission, is non-existant and only reaches a few clicks beyond Wikipedia.
And yet, at a moment like this, it seems like a meaningful coincidence that is significant enough to mention.
It’s All Complicated, Paradoxical, and Interwoven. Now What?
My conversation with Dimple is wide reaching, touching on intergenerational trauma, the many forms of story healing, and the paradox of humanitarian work. We also discuss the horrors of the October 7 attack of Israel and the brutal bombardment of Gaza that has followed.
I reject the responses to the Israeli-Hamas war that declare it all “too complicated” to understand, and hence too hard to have any opinion. (Are people still saying that? I know I did in the earliest days of this latest, most terrible chapter, but that excuse is proving too false and flimsy to stand.)
And yet, it is also true that a long, complicated, devastating history that underpins the genocidal events of today. For example, you think you are researching the expulsion of people of Asian origin in Uganda from fifty years ago, and you end up finding yourself in another not-quite-forgotten layer of the Middle Eastern conflict.
So, yeah, it’s complicated. What isn’t?
In this moment of polarization and propaganda, when your whole perspective on what is happening in Gaza can be shaped by the accounts you follow on social media, the levels of complication are irrefutable.
It feels harder than ever to trust that we are experience a shared reality when it comes to our neighbors, never mind the strangers on the internet and peoples around the globe.
Though I believe we live in a world that is divinely interconnected, we also live in a world that is fractured by paradox.
You can read survivor accounts of a dictatorial regime while the kids roller skate. Politicians make arguments for how killing 7,000 children is a strategy for peace.
It’s all impossible to comprehend. We try, as we keep spinning around the rink and whirling around the sun. We try to trust the movement, and also pray that we don’t crash and burn.
And So, We Keep Weaving
I’ll end where began. Fite fuaite.
Despite the inconsistencies and cognitive dissonances, it’s all interwoven - all the stories, perspectives, rallying cries, and half-truths.
All the love and hate, hope and despair.
The past, the present, the uncertain future.
The narratives that come from governments and mainstream media across the world, those that come from reporters on the ground in Gaza, and the accounts that yell the loudest in the digital square.
The prayers uttered in Arabic, in Hebrew, in every language under the sun.
All of these are interwoven, fite fuaite.