Spanish

When one works with those who have had to leave behind everything, often stories and their deep groundedness in orality is all they have been able to carry with them across geographical boundaries. This is not just a metaphor. It is the ground, the reality of migrants’ lives. How do you carry a lifetime in 30 kgs of checked in baggage? And that is for those who are the more privileged migrants. Travel on a rickety rubber dinghy packed without an inch to spare between people, and you’d be lucky if the life jacket around your neck does not suffocate you. 

In such circumstances, stories become many things - memories, life rafts, entertainment, lullabies, home. 

But for many refugees in the current hostile climate for refugees, stories have become currency. The relationship between stories and their exchange as currency is not new. In traditional stories, one finds storytellers plying their trade for coin. Scheherazade told stories to save lives of women in her husband’s kingdom and herself. But she also told stories in response to the king’s command ‘Tell me a story’. The choice of story was up to her. And that changed everyone’s story in the kingdom. Telling stories has not been divorced from earning a living or saving a life. 

But in the current climate of the importance of ‘personal’ and ‘cultural’ stories in almost every part of our lives, stories take on a commodification where life and death are the stakes that are in play. Right-wing media and discourse trades on ‘stories’ of the parasitic nature of migrants, and on the other hand, sympathetic discourse equally relies on ‘stories’ that reveal the strength and vitality of migrant presence and contributions. Almost everyone speaks through these ‘stories’ – starting from personal instances told in third person that progressively get more abstracted and rarified as they travel over print, tongues and impressions. They sway policies.

En Castellano

Sara Arámbula is an oral writer; a narrator who writes the majority of the stories she tells. A graduate in Pharmacy and based in the south of Sweden, in the region of Skania, in 2006 she decided that she wanted to write her own story as a narrator. She is currently president of Berättarakademin BRAK, an association of Swedish and Danish narrators whose aim is to explore and develop modern oral narration as a form of artistic expression.

Through her answers in the second interview, Sara reveals some of the details regarding her work, and brings us closer to the figure of narrator in Nordic countries.

Spanish

AEDA is an entity that has always shown its support and interest in the project of an European federation of storytelling. Since FEST beginnings, we have considered AEDA part of the federation and we have contributed and collaborated in different areas.

Nevertheless, we have been noticing that the FEST organization and its internal functioning are not in accordance with the principles that we understand belong to an entity like this in matters like the internal administration or the transmission of information to all its members. That is why we renounce to continue being a member of FEST.

We are sorry to have made such a drastic decision, but we trust that in a not too distant future the situation can revert.

Spanish / Catalan / Basque / Galician

WORDS TO BRIDGE THE GAP

Those involved in oral narration spend their lives telling, saying, speaking; we are men and women of the word, of words, and we understand the power which hides behind them.  We know that words can destroy and build, push and hug, injure and cure... For that reason, in these turbulent times, AEDA wishes to condemn all forms of violence, whether verbal or physical, and is sending out an appeal for dialogue, an appeal to create spaces in which to meet and share words, places in which to cultivate words which can bridge gaps, build harmony and bring people together.

This is not just an appeal to our politicians, but is also an appeal to all those caught up in the mayhem of recent days; to journalists, to people from our culture, to public figures, to one another, to you, to us, to everyone.

Translated by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Spanish

When I first started storytelling back in 1993 I was very attracted to telling Inuit stories and used to ask my self~what right do I have to tell this story? When a story is not from my culture, why do you I want to tell it so much and how can I get under the skin of it.
How? When I have not been to where the story comes from?
This was a difficult question to answer.