What Survives When Reality Is Under Threat?
My Conversation with a Poet Who Outlived a Dictatorship
Recently, I spoke with an incredible woman named Alicia Partnoy.
Alicia, as my 13-year-old daughter would say, is a “Grade-A-baddie.”
One day, in 1977, the dictatorship in Argentina simply took her. She was just this young mom…and {BAM}…she was instantly separated from her 18-month-old daughter, blindfolded, and locked inside a secret detention center called The Little School.
And while she was imprisoned, Alicia did something interesting: She wrote.
Not in order to build a following or to get published, but for a reason WAY more primal: to preserve reality before others could erase it.
Little poems, scraps of memory, fragments of witness. All of them breadcrumbs…something that people could point to…and eventually follow.
A few decades later, those exact fragments, words written in dark corners where hope was a ghost, became hard evidence used as testimony in trials against the very dictatorship that imprisoned her.
As someone who nerds out on brand & culture, hearing Alicia’s story made me realize how small a word like “content” is. “Content” is a fine catch-all, but Alicia was doing more with her writing.
She was leaving an artifact.
We live in this super strange, perplexing moment where it’s increasingly hard to know what’s real, what lasts, or what to even trust. And if you find yourself the one people expect to lead, navigate, and communicate “said moment,” no one would blame you for feeling foggy on what the strategy should be right now.
“Should we lean into rage bait?”
“Should we optimize the optimization?”
“Should we make the cuts quicker?”
“Should we say the thing we know will perform?”
Listening to Alicia, I kept coming back to the same center:
Make messages that become artifacts.
Things that orient people vs. distract them, that are steeped in human experience and emotion, that make us lean in vs. lean back.
This is the work.
Clarity + meaning = what get results after the fog lifts.
Just ask Alicia (who, by the way, comes off INCREDIBLY joyful in this interview for someone who experienced such suffering…something I can’t stop thinking about).
Or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify