I feel certain that those of us who have made a career out of oral story-telling sometimes ask ourselves about the meaning of what we do: its significance, its scope, and its personal, social, emotional, and symbolic value. Why?
It can often be a difficult question to ask, when there are so many other things that need to be addressed first, such as administrative, economic, logistical, and technical tasks, to name but a few. There is no doubt that our ‘romantic’ calling overrides and outlasts the performance of all of these tasks. We sometimes have to overcome complications of all different kinds: work-life balance, scheduling and those who schedule our performances, difficult audiences, bespoke commissions, market needs and demands, bureaucracy, tax complexities, fines, compensation, fashion, social media posts, literary trends, and weird requests.
It can be difficult to survive such chaos while at the same time pondering the deeper, existential meaning of what we do, and more difficult still to rise above the mundane toil of the work to prioritize our motivation, our raison d’être, and remain true to these values.
Over the course of this essay I would like to share my personal reflections/opinions on this topic, seasoned with my personal and professional experience, my back-story, my trans-national migrant being, and my way of living in the world. A reflection that seeks to answer a question for me: What is our role as story-tellers in the face of the emerging discourses and narratives of our time? What is – or what ought to be – our attitude, position, commitment, or contribution to social justice? Ought we? Or is it something that has nothing to do with us?
My answers are based on two initial premises and the conclusions drawn. Over time I came to understand that oral story-telling cannot and should not take responsibility for changing someone or changing the world. That is asking too much of the story, and imposing such a colossal burden on a story is to partly distort what it is for. And the second is that oral story-telling is a historical and artistic product, and its beauty, whether aesthetic, symbolic, or cultural, ought to outweigh any possible social utility that it may have.
Having said this, I believe that oral story-telling and the performance of our profession as people who tell stories can contribute to challenging all those discourses and narratives filled with hate, violence, and intolerance. In my opinion, we have an ethical choice of accepting our role in this mission. This is what I believe for a host of reasons …
Why do we tell stories orally?
I became an oral story-teller for two main reasons. First because ever since I was a teenager I discovered that I wanted to live my life by generating a form of expression full of symbolic beauty, describing and constructing realities out of the charm of the artistic method, and because I felt that this made me happier; all this I found in stories. Second because I grew up in a place where enforced silence led to oblivion and to things, places, and people becoming invisible, and I thought it was important that they should be remembered and survive and be learnt about, and it was through story-telling that I found a way to make this happen. I do confess that along the way I have strayed, I have lost my way, and I have erred. I have done things that were a long way off-course, whether out of ignorance, or mistrust, or fear, or a multitude of other reasons. From some mistakes I have learned and from others I am still trying to learn the lessons. But the unstoppable march of time brings new challenges and makes it necessary to go back to those roots so as not to get lost along the way.
Silence as a strategy and words as resistance
Enforced silence continues to be a strategy that power uses to maintain its authority. Every day we hear more words and more discourses saying this in people’s mouths and hearts. Words and discourses that talk about hatred of what is different, specific ways to understand and inhabit the land, and new meanings for words such as war, homeland, woman-man, safety, and hundreds more. Words and discourses that are repeated thousands of times in the knowledge of the enormous power that this entails and that urge us to think in particular, absolute, and universal ways. Repetitions, repetitions and repetitions that start by no longer hurting the ears and the heart and end by building pseudo-realities about people, groups of people, nations, populations, collectives, places, and ways of thinking and feeling.
Words, discourses, repetitions spread through the media, information systems, algorithms, pulpits, proclamations, assemblies, social media, books, football stadiums, and ultimately influence our way of describing and understanding the world.
This leads me to the first of the premises I want to share. It is important to accept a reflection on how we see ourselves in our profession. I believe, like many other people, that oral story-telling is an alternative form of communication and expression; a form of human mediation at an emotional and inter-cultural level that transmits experience and diverse forms of learning.
Oral stories from the oral tradition, from adaptations of quality literature or from one’s own creation, are full of all of this: they tell us about history, they tell us about experiences, they tell us about places, they tell us about cultural features, they tell us about gastronomy, they tell us about solutions, they warn us, they give us ideas, they motivate us, and other subjects that tell us about the depth of humanity. The beauty of symbolic and aesthetic language talks to us in very profound allegories that sometimes we are not even aware of.
It is there in the content of the stories that we find the first source from which to drink, making our words a fresh torrent to counteract the arid cloud that seeks to standardize our words, our discourses, our loves and hates, our thoughts, and our way of life.
The world we want told in a story
To tell is to create. In the present moment of the story we create images and live realities. We open the door to imaginary worlds where anything is possible in the here and now of the story. For the people who tell stories and who listen to them a magical consensus is created in which we decide to believe. I believe that we can commit to sharing in the creation of those realities which are already present in the stories and which the new discourses seek to hide, forget, or extinguish. Realities in which the peoples and characters of our stories respect and live in communion with nature; where discernment can overcome force and mindless violence; where wisdom represents the fundamental tool for resolving problems; where men and women can undertake arduous adventures, face up to monstrous villains, solve problems, and ultimately prevail. I believe we can contribute to creating the images of another possible world through words and stories.
Daring to Listen
There is no doubt that this storm caused and fed by so many discourses filled with hate, intolerance, and a uniform description and interpretation of the world, is fed by the silence of others. Silence as a punishment, a sentence; silence as a tool for oblivion and invisibility. In this way the dominant discourses are those that we hear in ever more limited terms, in simplified language, but methodically calibrated to connect. As such I believe that the mere fact of listening to another, especially to another voice, one that has been silenced, is of itself a transgressive and transformative act of connection. Listening, recovering, interpreting, converting into a story, and recounting are a valuable step in this direction. Older people, migrant populations, rural communities, marginal communities, the outskirts, other people, collectives with new identities and thousands more, desperately want to be heard. Their voices, their stories, and their desires are an inexhaustible and valuable resource for narrative professionals who find in them new stories to tell and to multiply as a part of that kaleidoscopic mirror that we are as humanity and that unites us rather than divides us.
Telling, Interpreting, Re-interpreting
Old tales tell us about the present. According to scholars specializing in the historical analysis of folk tales from the oral tradition, these stories originated as a reaction to the social, cultural, political, economic, and ethical contexts of different populations at different historical times. However, many of these structures, plots, and motivations stem from profound human considerations, questions, concerns, explanations, and resolutions that are always relevant. Those heroes and heroines, those younger brothers and sisters, those small animals in danger and other archetypes, have their analogues in our contemporary world: they are the different people, the populations, the landless people, the victims of discrimination, the excluded, the impoverished, the victimized, etc. That is why their teachings and experiences have value in the present. To be conscious of this allows those of us who tell stories orally to interpret them and re-interpret them with the meanings, the symbols, and the aesthetics of today, reviving their plots, which are not all that different from modern plots, finding in the structure and socio-cultural function of the story a tool to convey hope in the possibility of transformation and the triumph of justice.
Human Libraries; spaces for listening and mobilization against hate speech.
To close, I would like to share an exciting experience I have had the good fortune to contribute to, thanks to the initiative by ASAMBLEA DE COOPERACIÓN POR LA PAZ (through projects funded by a variety of public-sector schemes organized in places such as Seville, San Juan de Aznalfarache, Algeciras, Tarifa, and La Línea de la Concepción) and some Public Libraries in Andalusia.
This is the BIBLIOTECA HUMANA [HUMAN LIBRARY] project as a space for Peace, Tolerance, NO racism, and against Hate Speech. This initiative (in conjunction with the international Movement of the same name) has the aim of contributing to the creation of sustainable spaces for listening, respect for difference, interaction, and construction of the social fabric.
The project involves a process of engaging with various groups; older people, teenagers at high school, members of associations with different aims, immigrant populations, reading clubs, and the users of public libraries. These are the people who become human-books at the Human Library.
The first part of this process offers various tools through which to commence the process of recovering the personal, family, and social memory of the participants. Subsequently we offer a setting for technical training in order to tell those stories orally, and finally we organize community events through which to share the stories, and above all to listen to one another, talk to one another, get to know one another, understand one another, and be moved.
In this way the human-books tell their own personal, family, origin, and migration stories. They describe their way of life, the things they eat, the reason behind their customs, their day-to-day lives in their places of origin, the skills of their trade, and much more. They do so in front of other collectives who are expressly invited, before their classmates, and before those people who attend the public and open sessions.
The conclusion that all of these events have in common and that is evident from the subsequent conversations that they foster is that the human-books and the listeners have so much in common.
A special feature of this initiative was the creation of catalogues of these human libraries so that they can be re-activated, re-convened, and listened to again (these are available at the school libraries, the associations, or the municipal public libraries).
Jhon Ardila – A Columbian story-teller based in Seville since 2009. In addition to his narrative profession he is also involved in university teaching activities relating to human rights and a variety of artistic social-intervention projects linked to human rights and social transformation.
