Sometimes Monotony is Good: Stories of Motherhood in the Time of Covid
By Joshua Tarquinio
Alphabet City recently hosted Stories of Motherhood in the Time of Covid. The event was run by Hello Neighbor—a local non-profit that supports newly settled refugee and immigrant families—and production company Sharing Our Story.
During the introduction, Caley Donovan spoke a bit about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban and the influx of refugees separated from family back home. I learned that the purpose of “sharing their stories” was to help others see the immigrants as people, rather than statistics. The audience would watch nine short videos and have opportunities for discussion in the middle and at the end.
Tahereh Hooshangi translates Caley Donovan’s English to Farsi.
The lights went down. The first video played. A woman narrated. English subtitles popped up over stock footage. I don’t envy the editor for having to find that much stock footage. Had I been cutting the pieces, I would have almost rather flown to Afghanistan to shoot my own video.
In the first short, a mother related that she and her family are refugees from Afghanistan. She said transitioning to American culture was difficult enough, but once Covid forced everyone to isolate, her young son grew withdrawn.
Then they sent him to school with the other kids, and he was happy, but he soon contracted the virus and had to quarantine. He had a hard time re-isolating but recovered and went back to school. Mom still worries though. (The end.)
I hate criticizing artists and I don’t want to sound flippant, but as far as storytelling goes, it wasn’t great. I have no doubt the storyteller went through things that would break me, but I never felt any of that in the telling. If the intent of the day was to show these people “aren’t just a statistic,” the length of the video was not enough time to see the mother’s humanity. I know Afghanistan is crazy right now. I know moving to a foreign country is hard. I know the quarantine was hard on kids. I know having covid is hard and scary. I know all mothers worry. I am already desensitized to all those things, but they were all I was given.
Doesn’t matter though. We’re not trying to win Oscars. We’re humanizing humans who could use a hand. Maybe not everybody is Ernest Hemmingway and I’m being an overly critical jerk instead of letting people put their lives on a screen for me to see and maybe learn something.
Video 2 started. Another mother had her children in the USA but took them back to Afghanistan to visit family. While there, her husband contracted Covid. Things were hard, but he recovered while Grandma helped with the kids. They came back to the US and had a third baby. She still worries, but her love is strong.
Not all, but most of the stories had the same bones as these first two: Have child(ren), Covid made things hard, getting by now, but Mom still worries.
Lots and lots of great stories have the same bones. The flesh is what makes them compelling. These stories didn’t have a lot of flesh. In my experience, the storyteller’s job is to draw the audience in to empathize with the people in the story. The main character must want something. We must want it for them. They must overcome obstacles. We must root for them. And whether they win or lose, we must take something away from the experience. The videos I saw relied on the audience’s ability to either sympathize or empathize. I was told what happened, but not taken by any of it. The immigrants, refugees, and mothers in the audience, no doubt sympathized, but if the intent was to help an ignoramus like me gain empathy for the individuals, the technique fell short.
I’ll reiterate I’m not a sociopath. Even though I can’t empathize, the videos are still important. I understand these women have been through some hard and harrowing ordeals. I appreciate that they’re a thousand times stronger than I’ll likely ever be, but to me, relegating stories that are supposed to “highlight the individual beyond the whole group” to three minutes and presenting them with eight others pushes that individual back into a group. I think two 15-minute videos and real footage would have been more effective at drawing me into another person’s life.
More records are good records though, so even if the presentation was a little monotonous, it wasn’t without value. Whether the producers intended it or not, the repetition helped deepen in me a concept I had already suspected: The mothers from around the world all had the same story.
Around the world.
Same story.
For more information about Hello Neighbor, visit www.helloneighbor.io
For more information about Sharing Our Story, visit www.sharingourstory.com
Joshua Tarquinio is an author and the co-creator of the Mr. Bones arts and entertainment video magazine. He has been working in media production since 2006.
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