The Poetics of Peace: Non-violent Storytelling as Ephemeral Resistance

In 1941, Muriel Lester, British anti-war activist and social reformer, was taken from a boat in Trinidad and interred by the British Government. Lester’s anti-war activism has been characterised as a ‘failure’ by historians , and she rarely features in historical accounts of the twentieth century. Yet accounts of her arrest and incarceration illustrate the extent to which her philosophy confused and troubled officialdom; that her resistance to the binaries of the moment, her refusal to abandon empathy, her combination of the serious and the playful, and her insistence on throwing certainties into question were a powerful, if ephemeral, form of resistance. Powerful enough to see her jailed by her own government.

This paper explored how my research into the life and philosophy of Muriel Lester, as well as years spent writing this philosophy into fiction and performance, cast all my certainties about resistance, activism and art into question. Understanding Lester’s practice led to the formation of set of ideas about storytelling and creative work which harness the power of this kind of non-violent resistance through the ephemeral and questionable qualities that define it. Finally, the paper argues that stories are inherently ephemeral, and that when they cease to be so they lose their power as resistance.