I am Sharoll Fernandez Sinani Keeper of the Heart Portal, where poetry, pulses, ancestors, whisper, and tough dialogue alchemizes into luminous love. Take a breath, step through. Let’s create.

Hello and welcome. My name is Sharoll Fernandez Sinani. I am an artist and educator an Aymara Bolivian woman with a story to tell.

Thank you for joining me for this first episode of our Serious on Constructive Disagreement, collective Memory, art and Healing. In this series, we’ll explore how we can disagree more constructively, how communities remember trauma and how art and poetry can help us heal and transform. This opening episode is all about what this is and why it matters.

Laying out the big ideas and framing the journey we are about to take together.

I invite you to get comfortable as we begin, perhaps take a deep breath with me.

These will be a thoughtful and at times emotional conversation. We’ll start broad with some guiding ideas, and then gently move into a real life story from my homeland of Bolivia that ties them all together. Along the way, we’ll share a short excerpt from one of my poems, and we’ll see how all these threats, disagreement, memory, art, and healing, intertwine

constructive disagreement, learning to listen.

Let’s begin with constructive disagreement. In a world that often feels so divided, what goes what does it mean to disagree? Constructively? It’s easy to associate disagreement with conflict, anger, or a breakdown in communication. But disagreement is and of itself it isn’t always a bad thing.

In fact, conflict resolution experts remind us that disagreement is natural and can even be healthy. It can help us learn more about ourselves and each other.

Think about it. If we all thought the same, we’d never grow. It’s when we encounter a different perspective that we are challenged to reflect and expand our understanding. Of course, and not all disagreements are productive. We’ve all been in arguments that left us hard and hurt, or even polarized. Research in psychology shows that many people tend to misinterpret disagreement as a sign that the other person isn’t listening.

Have you ever felt that way? If you really hurt me, you’d agree with me. It’s a common feeling. We naturally favor those who see the world as we do a little mental quirk known as the halo effect, which makes us view people who agree with us as more likable or trustworthy. And there is another quirk called naive realism.

The tendency to believe that our view of reality is the objective truth. So if someone disagrees, it can almost feel like an attack on what’s right. But what if we flip the script? What if instead of seeing a disagreement as a threat. We see it as an opportunity, a chance to learn.

Studies find that most people, when given a choice, would rather have a conversation where they learn something rather than just be persuaded of something. Constructive disagreement is about how we argue, not whether we argue. It means disagreeing with respect and curiosity. It means I can say, I hear you.

I understand what you’re saying, even if I have a different view. In practical terms, it starts with listening. Truly listening. Even if I end up saying, I disagree, you should feel that I respected your voice. That’s hard. Very, but it’s powerful when people feel heard and seen. Disagreement doesn’t have to diss, descend into bitterness.

It can actually deepen understanding or reveal creative solutions in this series. When we talk about constructive disagreement, we are talking about engaging across differences in a way that builds bridges Instead of burning them, we’ll explore techniques and insights from conflict resolution like active listening, empathy and open-minded dialogue that help turn a potential fight into true, fruitful conversation.

These matters immensely, especially when disagreements are about painful, high stakes issues like history, identity, or justice, those are disagreements that can tier communities and even countries apart if approached with hate. But if approach with compassion and clarity, they can lead to growth and change.

Now let’s layer in the next big idea, collective memory. If constructive disagreement is about how we engage with others in the present, collective memory is about how we engage with the past, especially painful past events as a group, every family, every community, every nation carries its memories. Some of those memories are beautiful and proud.

Others are traumatic and hard to bear, and just as an individual who has experienced trauma might struggle with it for years, communities can collectively carry trauma forward through generations. Researchers have a term for this historical trauma. The idea that trauma isn’t only experienced by those directly affected, but can be passed down affecting the children and grandchildren of those who lead through the original heart.

In many indigenous communities around the world, including my home country, you can feel this intergenerational weight. Psychologist at University of Calgary note, for example, the traumas from things like colonization and forced assimilation can reverberate through generations. The wounds of a grandmother or grandfather, the violence they saw, the injustices they endured, those wounds can leave us car.

On the grand son who never met them, or the granddaughter who only knows the story secondhand.

I’ll share something personal here. My own Imara grandparents in Bolivia carried a trauma of colonialism in a subtle way through language. They spoke Imara fluently, but they wouldn’t reach it to us. They wouldn’t teach it they wouldn’t share it with their grandchildren. In fact, if my brother or I walked into a room where they were speaking Amada, they would immediately switch to Spanish.

For a long time I thought they didn’t want us to know their language. Only later did I understand they were protecting us. In Bolivia, a country with a majority indigenous population speaking an indigenous language like Amara has long carried stigma, a mark of being less educated or provincial in the eyes of the dominant society.

My grandparents had grown up hearing that stigma, feeling the sting of being labeled India negating their language. Was a survival strategy. They gave up a piece of themselves, their mother tongue, so we could grow up speaking the prestige language, in this case, Spanish and face fewer barriers. It was a sacrifice, a quite painful one, as I see it now.

It was an act of love, born from trauma. Colonial violence isn’t only its words and guns. It’s also the slow erosion of identity and pride, and that loss gets carried in memory. I shared that story because it shows how memory and trauma are linked. The trauma of being shamed for their indigenous identity lived in my grandparents’ memory, and it affected how they raised us memory, especially collective memory.

It’s not just about what happened decades or centuries ago. It’s about what we carry today in our cultures, our attitudes, our fears, and hopes. Memory can inspire pride and resistance, like remembering the courage of an ancestor, but it can also perpetrate pain if not addressed in post-colonial societies.

The act of remembering is often a political act. Scholars like Elizabeth Jelling remind us that memory is an arena of a struggle. A battleground where different groups fight to define the narrative of what happened and what it means. Whose version of history becomes the official memory? Who is silenced?

These questions are so important because remembering or forgetting the past is directly tied to justice in the present in this series. When we talk about memory, we’ll often be talking about healing memory, how communities can confront painful stories in a way that leads to understanding and healing rather than more division.

This is where disagreement and memory connect. People disagree about the past all the time. One person’s hero is another’s villain. One group’s tragedy might be absent from the history books or even denied by those in power. How do we navigate those disagreements? How do we ensure that truth is acknowledged, that wounds are at are attended to, and that all voices are heard?

These are big questions and they don’t have easy answers. But they absolutely matter if we want to transform trauma rather than transmit it to the next generation. So we have disagreement and we have memory. One rooted in the present, one in the past, both challenging. This brings us to our third theme.

The transformative power of art and poetry. This is a topic very close to my heart as an artist. When we face painful disagreements or traumatic memories, logic and arguments alone often fall short. Facts are important. I love facts, as you can tell by my citations and footnotes, but facts don’t always heal hearts.

That’s where art comes in. Art, whether it’s visual art, music, dance, or poetry speaks to the heart in different language. It creates a space for emotion, memory, and imagination. So they coexist. And where transformation can happen in ways that a policy paper or a debate might not achieve. This is a growing body of research and real world experience showing how creative expression helps people heal in psychology and public health.

Practitioners have found that engaging in art can help trauma survivors process their experiences safely. Community arts programs have been used to bring together groups who were in conflict, allowing them to collaborate on something beautiful and in the process. See each other’s humanity. For instance, community organizations in Chicago have brought young people from rival gangs together to paint murals.

In doing so, they found that making art side by side can ease tensions and build empathy among people who once saw each other as enemies.

As one program leader put it, it’s always been a healing tool referring to art, creating something with your hands, painting and sculpting. Writing a poem can provide a release and a sense of agency that is deeply therapeutic. Art also has a way of telling truths that might. Be too raw or complex to state plainly around the world, we see examples of art used to shine a light on collective trauma and injustices.

Arts and culture can confront systemic inequities and shift the narrative about a community through creative expression.

In Argentina after ship, the mothers of the disappear took the streets with photos and songs. Those acts of remembrance were both art and protest etching the memory of their children into the national consciousness in South Africa. After Apartheid, the truth and reconciliation process was accompanied by music and storytelling in community forums.

Again, blending art with dialogue. These creative practices help communities not only to remember, but to reframe this. Their stories from victims to survivors, from chaos to meaning, from isolation to solidarity.

I truly believe in the redemptive power of art. It’s not a magic wand that fixes everything. No healing is hard work. But art can open a door in a person’s heart that was slammed, shot by pain. It can let in a bit of light. It can also create a shared space. You and I might disagree about politics or history, but if we stand in front of the same painting and it moves us both to tears in that moment, we found something common.

And human heart gives us a way to communicate. When ordinary worlds fail, it speaks in color, in metaphor, in melody, it can memorialize those. We lost, give voice to feelings we didn’t know how to express. In short, art can transform individual and collective pain into something new. Sometimes it’s understanding, sometimes action, sometimes just the knowledge that I am not alone as one group of survivor artists.

It’s powerfully said, collaborating together, be it. The arts is inspiring, empowering, and healing. We can’t change what happened to us, but we are passionate about having an artistic voice to prevent it from happening to others.

That’s a guiding light for me. And that was the first, our first encounter. I am going to start getting the threads together, and I am really grateful for the time you gave me and for this journey that we just started. I’ll see you the next encounter. 📍

Thank you for joining Inside the Heart Portal. If these converging voices steered you, follow, review and pass the echo on. Until next time, keep shaping memory into fearless presence and communal art.