Thoughts on purpose and ownership of the performative stage
I’m writing this first thing in the morning, at 6am, Dawn is all over the place and I am ignoring a pile of work and chores I ordinarily will wake up to do. This is how I know I must write about something when it consumes me so much it stabs my routine.
The arguments here are derived from my understanding and experience, and while I hope that the people who read this will derive some meaning from it, I do not expect everyone (or even the majority) to relate or agree with it. I understand that your own experiences will preclude you to different, possibly opposing perspectives. And that is fine.
Is it too early for the nut graf? I think no nut-graf beats my journal entry from exactly ten days ago today.
I must ask for more than the stage. Take the stage, yes, but take more than the stage. You/We are dying and here’s a stage to tell that story, but the dying needs more than a stage. The dying need a hospital. A stage is important in and of itself, and might even be a means to a hospital. but the dying needs more than a stage, especially not a commodified one.
The kind of work I want to do this year is the ones that bring more than a stage. Storytelling and communication is a stage-centric pursuit and I want my work to be staged, yes, but also more than that. I want to change shit, not just stage them. I am coming to terms with the fact that a stage can be just a stage – especially through contemporary Western cooptation – and be no means to true change. I want to be more conscious of this and actively make sure that the stages I give and I’m given are more than just stages.
– January 25, 2024
A stage here is not the colloquial type you perform on, right – or it also is. A stage is an attention just for the sake of attention(and extended hope that attention will consequently translate to something else). A stage, in this broad (not-so-)philosophical context here is platforming – good or bad.
In recent times, we have built culture, economy, and societies by telling (see staging) and/or highlighting the importance of telling/staging stories. We are told to tell/stage our stories, to tell/stage the African story, and to tell/stage marginalized stories.
Before I continue, let me note that in the beginning, I did not want to be a journalist. I study Agricultural Extension and Rural Development as a final year student at the University of Ilorin, so I was never drawn to this profession like a moth to light. It was not inevitable. The vision was to improve the quality of life for myself and the people I am surrounded by. At some point in my life, I thought being a computer whiz would do that, and briefly, I thought being an oil engineer could be the answer. As I grew older, became less anxious, and read and understood way more about life than the young me would ever dream of, I developed a perchance for people and culture and terminologies that confuse my parents, like politics and socioeconomics and the isms. Especially the isms.
Time has gravitated me towards systemic work and that is how I find myself in journalism and storytelling. That is why I am studying rural development rather than breeding and genetics which I had first wanted to specialize in when 16-year-old me decided to major in Agriculture. Sub-point is that the mechanisms have changed, but the goal remains the same.
I think it’s important to state this because understanding where I’m coming from gives you, the reader, more power to interrogate my perspective. We all have an agenda; this is mine.
Okay, back to this thing about stages.
Who owns the Stage?
We’ve been “empowered” to tell stories and own the stage without thinking about who truly profits from the stage. Who profits the most from a stage is the owner of that stage and you and I, the storyteller, are not the owners of these stages. Not even when we “go solo.”
When a journalist tells a story, we, the media, blindside all the career benefits the journalist earns and focus on the impact it has on the community that the journalist is journalisting about. My argument is that stories do way more for the journalists than they do for the receiving subject of their work because even whatever that story does for the subject is inherently a gain to the journalist who can now argue that they do “impactful” work. Whether or not they do that with narcissistic abandon (and let’s be honest, we often do) is left to the journalist’s/storyteller’s own volition.
Also, permit me I use the words journalist and storyteller interchangeably.
In this journalist-subject relationship, the journalist/storyteller owns the stage and the subject is the one being given a stage. The other layer of this is the stage a publisher gives a storyteller. As a freelance journalist who reports African stories for mostly Western media, I am always elated to be published in these “prestigious” outlets, and the outlets, in turn, pretend like my work for them serves me more than them. Again, a stage gives infinitely more to the stage-maker than it will to the one performing on it
The layers of the stage-giver and the stage-taker never ends. In the outlet-journalist relationship, the outlet is the stage-giver and the journalist is the one who is being given nothing more than a stage. You, the storyteller, do not own that stage.
The argument against this is that this problem can be superseded by media entrepreneurship. By actually owning the stage, by owning your outlet. Tut your outlet – like the one you work for – does not belong to you simply because you hold its day-to-day administration. Who funds the stage, and owns the stage?
Because I assume we’re both thinking systemically here, I’ll say it before you do; the system (which you are trying to change with your stories,) funds the stage.
The stories we tell have done nothing more than point the spotlight and because we have built so much egoistical and financial gratification into stories and storytelling there are way too many spotlights. So we try to solve that by making stronger, brighter spotlights with our stories, or by making the spotlight a different color hoping it will attract a specific set of viewers, becoming enablers and participants of the attention economy. We intentionally miss the point that stages are not supposed to be the end, especially not when we are staging problems as existential as this.
Many of these stages exist just for the sake of stages to exist because it is a commercial/systemic pursuit. The end of these stages is not to encourage change, it is to fill pockets, legitimize exploitative structures, and sometimes (or many times), even justify the existence of what is wrong.
Because these stages are nothing but stages, they do not lead to change for you and me and the people whose stories we tell. Not unless we actively decide to take and give more than a stage.
We have empowered stories in a way that validates selfishness, exploitation, and ignorance of existential problems. When a house is burning, you raise the alarm, call the fire brigade, and try to put out the fire in any way you can. You don’t raise the alarm and say “Well, there’s my part, let’s hope the Fire Brigade and general public arrive here (on time) and put it off.”
I spent my childhood in Ajangbadi, Lagos. While I was in Junior Secondary School, a house was burning near Learnfast Primary School where a woman sold Wanché with her kids. They called the fire brigade and they never arrived. The fire was put out with water from the canal, detergent from Mama Dada who sold provisions just opposite, and buckets donated from neighboring houses.
If you’re Nigerian, you know you can always trust the Fire Service to never arrive at a proletariat fire scene on time.
To analogize “complex societal issues” as a burning house seems like committing to gross unworkable oversimplification, but it is true. I have two perspectives to layer on this.
One is that we view a burning house as an existential problem that requires immediate work to stop or at least delay further damage. I argue that these “complex societal issues” are as existential as a burning house. Fixing the environment is existential, and so is crime and homelessness and poverty and food security. Solving them requires more than shouting because when/if the fire brigade arrives it will be too late.
Two is that the system is the same everywhere. A major goal of this system, again, intentionally or unintentionally, is to limit the power people have over changing their situation. The poor man’s community does not wait for the fire brigade when there’s a fire because they will never arrive early enough.
This System you want to change thrives on the staging of problems rather than fixing them
Staging works for the system. Reporting corruption and economic damage works well for a government because it legitimizes that nothing will change without the government. The extreme structures of capitalism are actively involved in funding the media because the stage is profitable.
To stage is to filter. I write in my photography that storytelling is reductive. It is to look at an endless pile and filter out a specific narrative to be staged. To be contrived as acceptable filters, journalists are legitimized by the same system and structures they want to watch.
We desperately want to set ourselves apart from “bloggers” and “sensationalists” and that legitimization comes with binding caveats. You must be objective, non-participatory, and pretend(!) like these issues do not affect you. And I guess it ordinarily wouldn’t?
One of the advantages of creating an attention economy is the openness of the Stage to people who would otherwise not have it. Journalism, historically, has been a position of the privileged. The transformation of journalism from the reportage of crime and violence to legitimize government and policing to being a tool to spotlight “complex societal issues” was (and is still) done by people who became so aware (or sick) of their privileges they go and report the absence of it.
What the commercialization of the Stage has done is create access to a lot rather than just people who had privileges to study and means to fund a mostly profitless pursuit. I believe the interrogation of the system that comes with it, like you and I are doing now, is inevitable, although very rare.
The point is, that journalism is participatory in the damage done right from the onset. “Journalism” as an institution was built to legitimize systems – good or bad. By extension, we focus on the wrong things and reach the wrong ends because that is what journalism is incentivized to do.
Recently, I’ve touted that I might remove the term “journalist” completely from my personal and professional tags. I find that terms and terminologies like this are terms used to censor and limit what a person can do to change a system that feeds on the less privileged.
Again, because we are talking about systems, I’ll say it before you; journalists are not passive observers, we are complicit in the problems.
Take – and give – more than a stage
I have spent most of my years strongly believing – as I have been led to – that the Stage means something. I still think it does but in a much more nuanced way. I still believe in investing in telling stories, helping people tell stories, and getting others to the point of telling their stories. I just approach this goal with more awareness now.
My core passionate work going from here, free of financial pressures, will border on storytelling as a tool of advocacy. And I will be loud and unapologetic about it. I’ll be using stories to raise money and be much more confrontational about the problems rather than being a passive-pretending exploitative observer.
I will take and give more than just a stage.
