It usually happens at night, when the noise of being useful has settled. I think best after dark—always have. Most of my strongest memories live there too: reading to my kids under the glow of a bed lamp, the slow work of composing while the city sleeps. Late-night walks, overhearing someone’s voice crack open mid-story, right at the part they weren’t planning to say. Those are the moments that stay.
A few nights ago, I was reading a paper that hit me harder than expected: Story as Research Methodology by Devi Dee Mucina. It’s about Ubuntu storytelling—not as folklore or entertainment, but as a method of research.
Ubuntu, a worldview held across many Bantu-speaking cultures of Southern Africa, carries the ethic: “I am because you are.” In this framework, storytelling is not performance or product—it’s how wisdom is carried, co-created, and remembered.
One line in particular caught me: “The story of one cannot be told without unfolding the story of many.” That felt true.
It echoed something I’ve been circling in my own work for years—in essays, in music, and in the novel I’m working on. There’s always been this pull toward something else: external memory, spiritual resonance, atmosphere. The idea that story isn’t just a vessel for information or catharsis. It’s a field of continuity. A way of recovering what mattered—or still does—even if we no longer know why.
Mucina describes story as something that exists in relationship—not in ownership. You don’t tell a story to someone. You tell it with them. It’s not a performance. It’s a return. I’ve often felt that music and writing aren’t about creating something new—not really—but about tuning into something that’s already vibrating just under the surface.
That’s how I experience story when it works: not just as ingenious invention, but as resonating recognition. Like walking into a room you’ve never seen but somehow remember.
What Mucina’s paper made clear—and what I’d felt but hadn’t articulated—is that story isn’t just how we express knowledge. It’s how we produce it.
That’s not how most people are taught to think about storytelling. In Western contexts, stories are often treated like content—plot, structure, character arcs. But within the Ubuntu worldview, a story is a method of inquiry. It’s how a community investigates what matters. The meaning isn’t dictated by the teller—it emerges through shared attention and layered interpretation.
This rings close to Wittgenstein’s idea of language games—that meaning doesn’t live in words themselves, but in their use, within a specific context. In the Ubuntu model, stories are participatory. The listener is as important as the speaker. You tell the story and then ask a child to analyse it. Everyone speaks. Even the baby gets a turn—usually through the voice of an older sibling pretending. It’s beautiful. It’s humble. And it’s completely different from the way stories are typically discussed in literary or academic spaces, where analysis is often seen as something done to a story, rather than with it.
Joseph Campbell understood this too—that myths aren’t instructions; they’re frameworks for living. Archetypal structures that invite us to find our place within them. When Campbell maps the hero’s journey, what he’s really describing is a shared psychological topology—a way to locate ourselves across time and culture.
But where Campbell focused on the individual’s transformation, Mucina brings us back to the communal perspective. Ubuntu says: you don’t become a full person without others. You’re not even intelligible outside your relationships. “I am because you are.” That’s more than a slogan. That’s the cosmology.
Richard Powers adds another layer. In his novel The Overstory, he approaches narrative as an ecological system in which human and non-human actors—trees, microbes, memory, gravity—all play a part. Powers resists the idea that humans are the main characters. His narratives unfold in networks, not arcs. That resonates deeply with what Mucina describes: a world where the land itself participates in governance, and where decisions involve the water, the ancestors, the trees.
This reframes everything. The novel, the music, even this very act of writing—it’s not just self-expression. It’s a relational practice. A way to remember who we are by remembering that we’re not alone in the telling.
So what about all this? If story is a method of inquiry—a relational tool, a communal technology—then its purpose shifts. It’s not just for recording the past or entertaining the present. It becomes a way of noticing. Of remembering. Of keeping continuity alive in times that work to erase it.
Storytelling can be a space where meaning is co-created through presence, attention, and repetition. A story is not a thing, but a relationship. And like any living relationship, it shifts depending on who is listening, and when. Multiple interpretations aren’t a problem—they’re the point. Everyone hears something different because everyone brings something different. There’s something deeply democratic in that—and deeply spiritual.
From a neurological perspective, memory is reconstructive. The brain doesn’t retrieve the past whole—it reassembles it from fragments. In diasporic or disrupted contexts, that fragmentation isn’t a flaw—it’s the norm, made visible. We inherit gestures, tones, story shards. Western frameworks may see this as loss. But in Ubuntu thought, fragments are enough. The act of telling—even without the full origin—strengthens the memory. Meaning isn’t stored; it’s restored through use, through relationship.
In a way, this reframes our relationship to language itself. What if the point of a story isn’t to land a message, but to create a shared moment? What if storytelling is how we breathe together—how we calibrate to each other, across distance, even across generations?