Storytelling as Justice for the Forgotten
Tell stories that lift the forgotten; narrative is an instrument of justice. — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
What does this quote ask you to notice today?
A Moral Task Hidden in Art
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o frames storytelling as more than entertainment, positioning it as a moral act with real consequences. To “lift the forgotten” implies that people can be erased not only by death or distance, but by silence—by never being named, heard, or centered in the stories a society tells about itself. From this starting point, narrative becomes a kind of public record, one that can either reinforce neglect or interrupt it with attention and care. Because stories shape what feels normal and what seems possible, they quietly govern who is seen as fully human. In that sense, Ngũgĩ’s line asks writers and readers alike to treat imagination as responsibility, where art’s beauty is inseparable from the ethical question of whose lives are allowed to matter.
Recovering Lives History Left Behind
Building on that moral claim, “lifting” suggests an upward motion: bringing submerged experiences into view. Official histories often speak with the voice of winners—colonial administrators, elites, institutions—while ordinary people appear as statistics or background noise. Narrative can reverse that camera angle, restoring interiority to those reduced to footnotes. This recovery work is visible in texts that stitch personal testimony into wider political realities, such as Svetlana Alexievich’s *Voices from Chernobyl* (1997), which gathers polyphonic accounts that would otherwise vanish into bureaucratic summaries. By following individual voices rather than abstract headlines, such storytelling doesn’t merely add detail; it changes what counts as the truth of an event.
Language as a Site of Justice
From there, Ngũgĩ’s broader project clarifies why narrative is an “instrument” rather than a decoration: the medium itself—especially language—can either liberate or dominate. In *Decolonising the Mind* (1986), he argues that colonial languages often train people to view their own cultures as secondary, turning speech into a hierarchy. Telling stories in one’s language, or restoring suppressed idioms within a dominant tongue, becomes a direct challenge to cultural erasure. Consequently, justice is not only about what is told but about how it is told and for whom. When communities hear their realities spoken in familiar rhythms, narrative stops being a borrowed mirror and becomes a home-built lens—capable of honoring memory without translation into someone else’s worldview.
Narrative as Counterpower
Once we see language as power, it follows that stories can confront power. Institutions often justify themselves through narrative—myths of progress, civility, and inevitability—so counter-stories become a form of counterpower. George Orwell’s *Nineteen Eighty-Four* (1949) dramatizes this through the idea that controlling the story of the past controls the limits of the present, making memory a political battleground. In real life, the same dynamic plays out whenever marginalized groups publish memoirs, stage plays, or circulate oral histories that challenge official accounts. These narratives don’t merely express dissent; they rearrange credibility, granting authority to voices that systems trained audiences to dismiss.
The Craft of Giving Dignity
Yet lifting the forgotten is not achieved by spotlight alone; it requires craft that grants dignity rather than pity. A story that treats its subjects as symbols can repeat the very flattening it claims to oppose. The most just narratives tend to be precise—attentive to humor, contradiction, resilience, and everyday texture—so that people appear not as causes but as complete human beings. This is why many powerful justice-oriented works focus on the ordinary: meals, arguments, work, small joys. By lingering in the daily, a storyteller quietly refuses the reductive frame that only recognizes marginalized lives at moments of suffering. Dignity, then, emerges through fullness, not spectacle.
From Empathy to Actionable Memory
Finally, calling narrative an “instrument of justice” implies outcomes: stories can produce empathy, but they can also create durable public memory that supports change. In courtroom settings, truth commissions, or community archives, testimony becomes narrative with stakes—an account meant to be preserved, believed, and used. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996–1998) showed how public storytelling can function as a civic mechanism, making private pain legible within a shared national reckoning. Even outside formal institutions, stories that lift the forgotten can guide how communities allocate care, resources, and attention. When the unheard become unforgettable, justice begins to move from principle to practice—because people are far less willing to abandon those whose stories they now carry.