Guy Delisle spent a year living in Jerusalem as his partner worked for an NGO in the West Bank and Gaza. He detailed his experience in Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. During that year, Delisle led comics’ workshops in various cities in the West Bank including Nablus and Ramallah. At an event in Nablus he notes that the level of the artists “is not very high” because they have not been exposed to comics, only a few know of Tintin. Delisle speaks with a few of them before listening to a man, bent over his desk, as he creates his comic.

The man tells Delisle that he has been stuck in Nablus for three years because “people under thirty can hardly get through” the checkpoints. He bluntly states, “We’re being held hostage.” Along with this lack of movement due to oppression, the man also tells Delisle, who stands next to the man holding a cup of coffee, about the nightly “incursions into Nablus” by the IDF. Delisle just stands there, blankly listening, and when the man says that Nablus is like a “big prison,” Delisle tells the man, “You could do a comic about that.” The man, not looking up from his paper, simply asks “Who’d want to read it?”

Delisle’s framing of this conversation is important because it takes place over five panels. We only see the man hunched over his desk in the first two panels as Delisle stands to the left of the desk. In these panels, we never see the man’s face as he tells Delisle about his hindered movement and the IDF incursions. In the next three panels, we only see a closeup of Delisle, again on the left, and all we see of the man is a piece of his elbow on the desk. This framing erases the man, driving home the dehumanization he feels with Israeli occupation and also driving home his feeling that nobody wants to read about Nablus because nobody cares.

Delisle’s interaction with the man reminds me of the importance of writing, the importance of sharing one’s story with the world. Our stories connect us. Our stories link us together, helping us see one another not as enemies but as fellow travelers working our way through existence. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” While our experiences may be different, those things that torment us, that make us angry, that make us happy, that make us sad, that make us feel, link us to one another.

This linking together through stories is why we must encourage individuals to share their own experiences and lives through writing, film, music, and other forms of expression. Toni Morrison, during a 1981 speech to the Ohio Arts Council, said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Morrison wrote works that she wanted to read. She wrote The Bluest Eye because she did see Pecola’s story represented in media, so she wrote a book that told Pecola’s story of dealing with the psychological impact of racism and beauty standards on individuals.

Likewise, Ernest Gaines detailed, again and again, why he wrote about his home in Louisiana. Gaines said when went to the library for the first time as a teenager in California he didn’t see himself or the people he knew on the shelves. He found works about people who worked the land, Russian peasants, Midwesterners, and others, but he did not find himself. So, he wrote the stories he wanted to read, the ones he wanted to tell about those he loved. In a little flip notebook in the archives at the Ernest J. Gaines Center, he wrote,

1. Write because I must. Because there’s something out there that’s need to be said. If i don’t say it-nobody ‘else might not say it either. By this, I mean, who will write about my part of the country? who will talk about write about the way my people talk, the way they sing, the way they feel about God, the way they work; their superstitions. There are so many things that be said about this particular area.

(B.) Money is not the objective, though I want to make money with my writing. But I want to get self-satisfaction.

Writing serves many purposes. It serves as a means of telling the stories of one’s own experiences, and in so doing, it provides voice for those who have been marginalized or invisible to those around them. It forces readers to see the writer and those they care about. It forces readers to engage with themselves. As well, writing saves individuals, as Dorothy Allison talks about when she discusses how she started writing Trash and her other works.

Allison talks about coming home from work and writing, expelling everything that she had bottled up inside her: frustrations, anger, love, sadness, lonlieness. She says, “Writing it all down was purging. Putting those stories on paper took them out of the nightmare realm and made me almost love myself for being able to finally face them.” Like the man in Nablus, Allison wondered if anyone would care about her and read her stories. She writes, “I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people’s seemed real — the lives I had read about in books.”

Like Baldwin, Allison found connections to others when she read. She connected with Morrison The Bluest Eye and that led her “to write about incest” and her own experiences. Allison points out that this moment, and others, showed her the literary conversation she would partake in as a writer. Writing and art are not solitary, they are not individual, they are communal. They are part of an ongoing conversation with the past, the present, and the future, connecting us not just in this moment but across the centuries. Allison asks, “Why write stories? To join the conversation. Literature is a conversation — a lively enthralling exchange that constantly challenges and widens our own imaginations.”

The man in Nablus has a story to tell that will connect us to him and him to us, a story that “challenges and widens our own imaginations” by helping us understand the world beyond the news chyrons and headlines. The man, Morrison, Gaines, Allison, Baldwin, and others teach me about the world and myself. They help me see others as my neighbors, my co-travelers through time and space. They help me understand that the world and what happens is not one side or the other but a multi-sided experience that cannot, in any way, boil itself down to a binary.

These are the things that scare so many people because they fear widening their world beyond themselves and what makes them feel comfortable. I think about videos like the one below that mentions “smut” and why someone who is a “Christian” doesn’t read books with “smut.” As a Christian, I have read widely, and my reading, while sometimes being graphic and not pleasant, has expanded my world view. It has deepened my faith. It has caused me to question. Questioning is not bad. Questioning is healthy. It is how we grow. I have read stories by writers like the man in Nablus. Those stories have helped me understand what is happening in Palestine and the impact it has on individuals. I have read Allison and her work helps me understand the impacts of crippling, systemic poverty. Gaines and Morrison help me understand my homestate of Louisiana and race. All of these have made me more empathetic, more knowledgable, and more engaged with those that I travel alongside.

Don’t ever think that your story isn’t worth telling or that someone doesn’t want to read it. All of our stories are important. All of our lives are important, and when we share our stories and ourselves with one another, we all benefit. What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.