Narrative
I love telling stories. I could tell stories for days. I believe in shaping your narrative. Your re-invention. I believe in the power of storytelling. Planting acorn seeds that will become oak trees in minds is no small business.
I invite you to the inquisition of the narrative.
In the Micro;
Who authored the story you're in? What if the plot twist isn't coming. Because you are the twist? Tongue Twister, Dear Gentle Reader yes?
Yes.
In the Macro;
- Narratives shape nations before policies ever do.
- Narratives hold together kingdoms, currencies, and kinships.
- Narratives are the source code of civilizations and
- Narratives are the spiritual subtext of power plays.
And in case we forgot, the most dangerous thing isn’t a lie. It is the danger of a single story. Chimamanda says it best in her Ted Talk over 15 years ago.
So let’s play dot-dot-dot this Sun-Day See Best Day.
Between currency and culture. Between consciousness and contracts. Between myths and models. What The Almanacki does best: build bridges. To you. From the edge of awareness, through the frequency of blessing, to the evolution of narrative.
What is essential is invisible to the eye~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
It begins with noumenon; the unknowable reality behind the visible performance. Kant called it the thing-in-itself.
What is the true story, the real narrative, before we filter it through perception, projection, and propaganda?
This piece is not about what happened. It is about what survived.
We must ask ourselves:
- Whose lens are we using?
- What filter are we stuck behind?
For in an era where Instagram captions have more influence than policy briefs, and where the TikTok algorithm now dictates teenage ideology, we can no longer afford to treat storytelling as a side dish.
It is the main course.
It is How we remember. How we rebel. How we rebuild. How we remake the world in our image when the world refuses to see us.
Narrative as Inheritance
The Story in Our Bones
You may not control the legacy you’re born into, but you can choose the one you leave behind~Rupi Kaur
Before we ever tell our stories, they tell us. Our names, our languages, our lores. All encoded inheritance. I am because we narrated. Ubuntu isn’t just community; it’s a co-authorship model. Griots were the first hard drives. Ancestral memory is our original cloud storage. Before AI, there was oral tradition.
For some of us, inheritance came with eulogies, not wills. When I lost my mother young(a narrative I have been utterly remiss in taking up especially publicly given the weightness and ripple effects to date of the matter), I inherited questions.
About lineage. About loss. About legacy.
Oprah calls it "the seed of morning purpose." I call it the narrative nudge that grew roots in my soul.
But inheritance isn't always kind. It's in the customs that crown sons and silence daughters. The funeral ceremonies that cost more than the life lived. The hand-me-down scripts that tell men they're masters and women they're meals.
If the story you inherited says, "boys matter more," that story…that narrative; is a form of violence. Quiet, cloaked, cultural. But violent nonetheless.
And the thing is, we pass these stories on, sometimes without even noticing. Like a family recipe for gender roles. Auntie says, "A woman should cover her knees up in front of male relatives." And we nod, pretending that our respect is not built on repression. Then we teach our daughters the same.
Inheritance is not just financial. It's spiritual. Emotional. It's the stories we swallow and the myths we marinate in.
Narrative as Identity
Who We Think We Are
You don’t have to be anything more than yourself to be worthy, but you have to know what that self is~Octavia Butler
Signs tell you who you are. Houses tell you where you are. But narrative? Narrative tells you why you are.
Your aura is your algorithm. Your story is your strategy. Aura farming begins with authenticity.
Every time you write and share truthfully, especially about your broken bits, you leave a breadcrumb trail for someone else. We know this so well at the moment with the swirling national conversation on grooming and predatory behavior in girls high schools in Kenya, for example. In a world that monetizes your soul and debates your existence, that is resistance.
That is TRUE liberation.
Your story is not just who you are in the light. It's the shape you cast when no one’s watching. And sometimes, it’s the parts you tried to edit out that hold the most resonance.
I am not what you think I am. You are what you think I am~ Rumi
We ask: "Why aren't we just African/Black/this-that?" And the answer comes back, with mother reason and father passion in agreement: You are not just anything. Identity is not IKEA furniture; flat-packed and labeled.
It is a living, breathing, sometimes bleeding, thing.
Take the Kenyan child who answers to three names: their Kikuyu birth name, a Christian baptismal name, and a Westernized school nickname. Identity is negotiated. And personally, I might add. It's code-switched. It's sacrificed.
What we call impostor syndrome is often just the dissonance of trying to perform a story we didn’t write. A script written in someone else's font, someone else’s voice.
Narrative as Infrastructure
The Scaffolding of Systems
Power is not brute force or money; power is the story~ Shonda Rhimes
Fiat currencies run on confidence. AND…Confidence is a story.
Capital flows follow brand myths. Constitutions are nation-state novels with legalese footnotes. Policies are just political prose dressed in budget lines. DEI? Let’s be honest…if it requires a line item, it’s probably not embedded yet.
Narrative is the infrastructure of empire. It's why the West could "discover" places that already had names. Why Africa, despite building the wealth of nations, is often a footnote in its own history.
Let’s talk: How many Series A decks collapse under the weight of a story that doesn't match the data room? Founders pitching possibility at pre-seed must pivot to proof by Series A. If your KPIs are chaotic and your customer stories shallow, your valuation is a fiction. Investors want narrative, yes…but not narrative fallacies.
- Diversity statements without budgets are bedtime stories.
- Inclusion efforts without power shifts? Fairy tales.
Narrative as Instrument
The Behavior Shaper
Every advertisement is a sermon on what we should desire~ J.Z.Smith
Narrative is the soft power of our time. Marketing, propaganda, PR, religion; they all play the same chords: belief, belonging, behavior.
Every time you repeat a story, you reinforce a reality. Every meme is a modern myth. Every marketing campaign a secular sermon.
Your mind is a magnet.
- Tell it you're poor, chaotic, undeserving? The universe aligns accordingly.
- Tell it you're calm, abundant, purposeful? The universe takes note.
That’s not Law of Attraction fluff. It’s neuroplasticity meets narrative repetition.
So when women in church(or even worse the service industry) are told not to speak to men directly "to prevent temptation"…that narrative is not pious. It’s patriarchal propaganda, perpetuating the myth that men are weak and women are wicked.
Narrative as Interface
Language Between Worlds
Language is the archive of history, the roadmap of power, and the altar of meaning~ Toni Morrison
Language is a spell. It codes our culture and cues our cognition.
AI? It learns from us. Our biases. Our metaphors. Our myths. Our misogyny. Every prompt trains a machine on what we believe is real.
Poetry and code are not opposites. They are cousins. Both reduce the infinite into syntax. Both translate between realms.
"You do not have to be good," Mary Oliver said. "You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." The wild geese always calling us back into belonging.
In Kenya, to call someone a "storyteller" used to be high praise. Now it’s often an accusation. "Huyo ni mtu wa story mob." But what if storytelling is the truest form of strategy?
Narrative as Immunity
The Shield and the Blindfold
People cling to stories because without them, the world becomes unrecognizable~ James Baldwin
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug. We crave coherence. We clutch onto the stories that affirm us; even if they imprison us.
- Outdated gender roles? Wrapped in respectability politics.
- Outdated business practices? Wrapped in "that’s how it’s always been."
Some narratives protect. Some prevent progress. The suffering story that says kids must struggle to be strong? Let it go.
Love does not require trauma as proof.
Identity politics can become narrative armor. But armor is heavy. And you can’t dance in a suit of steel.
Narrative as Inquiry
Questions in Disguise
Good journalism comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comforted~ Finley Peter Dunne
Who gets to ask the questions?
Facebook and Netflix once traded access to your secrets like Pokémon cards(I read a whole expose complete with document codes). Journalism becomes stenography when curiosity is caged by capitalism.
The CTMU says reality is self-writing code. If that’s true, then every story is a form of software. And we are the bugs and features, the patches and plugins.
We must make our questions sharper. Our metaphors stronger. Our research more resistant to propaganda.
The important this is to not stop questioning.
Narrative as Imagination
The Rehearsal for Reality
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Afrofuturism isn’t fantasy. It’s foretelling.
Narratives allow us to envision what isn’t yet. They give language to longing. They allow us to believe before the budget aligns.
What if friendship, not romance, was the center of adulthood? What if witches weren’t threats but therapists? What if your next version was waiting behind a story you haven’t told yet?
Our ancestors imagined freedom before they tasted it. Our dreams are their data. Our visions, their vocabulary.
Narrative as Intervention
Rewrite. Reclaim. Repeat.
The most revolutionary thing a person can do is simply speak the truth~ Assata Shakur
Narrative is not neutral. It's a knife or a needle. It can wound or it can weave.
The stories we tell about Black women, about conflict, about who gets rescued and who gets ridiculed…those stories are scaffolding societal harm.
But narrative can interrupt. Can you imagine if more women held the pen? If friendship replaced the fairy tale? If a founder's integrity mattered more than their pitch cadence?
We must ask:
- What war am I consenting to by default?
- Whose story am I silently amplifying?
To disrupt the dominant story is to reclaim sovereignty. To reject the single story is to resurrect the sacred.
THE NARRATIVE IS IN YOUR HANDS
If story is spell, then the most radical act is to rewrite.
Narrative is not what happened. It’s what survived.
So:
- Write carefully.
- Weave wisely.
- Rewrite courageously.
And remember:
The first story you MUST believe is your own.
Think you’ll be happy.
Have a lovely Sunday ✨🦋
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