© Guy Vivien, Paris
Haiti’s Mimi Barthélemy: telling stories is a political gesture. |
Storytellers
in Latin America have gained a cult following in the past decade. Some are delving
into ancient traditions, others are spinning stories with a distinctly post-modern
edge
Halfway through his
performance, Diego Camargo notices that he’s forgotten one of his characters. He
asks the audience for permission to go backwards and finds the rebel climbing a tree,
crestfallen and upset. To convince him to return to the story, Diego promotes him
to the rank of main character, giving him the assurance that nobody will ever drop
him halfway through a tale again.
To hear stories like this, fans turn up in numbers every year to the International
Congress of Oral Storytelling, an event held since 1995 as part of the annual Buenos
Aires Book Fair. Last time round, over 800 people flocked from Argentina and neighbouring
countries, all keen to hear stories old and new, but also to learn how to tell them–those
subtle tricks of timing and voice, of gestures and facial expressions.
Many were teachers eager to get children to read by adapting stories from world-famous
authors, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ray Bradbury, and telling them in the
classroom. According to Nora Fonollosa, a narrator and researcher into children’s
literature, pupils often go to the nearest library to look for copies of a story
they have heard, and if they can’t find it, ask for another book by the same author.
But this enthusiasm is not confined to schools. Juan Moreno, from Argentina, stopped
teaching literature 17 years ago and began a new life telling stories and legends
from around the world in theatres, bars, universities and libraries. If they happen
to be in French, English, Portuguese, German, Italian or Hebrew, he tells them in
the original language. He also runs workshops for psychologists, lawyers, housewives
and grandmothers. What does he teach to people from such different walks of life?
“The value of the spoken word,” he says. “Words that heal and restore, that can give
life but also take it away.” Learning this is very important for a lawyer involved
in mediation, he says, but also for social workers in hospitals and senior citizens’
homes. He remembers what a despairing woman once told Dora Pastoriza de Echebarne,
the pioneer scholar of oral storytelling in Argentina: “When I heard you tell the
story, I didn’t feel sad any more.”
Witches
and goblins mingle with spirits of nature
On a more material note, storytelling is said to have its bonuses. It’s usually better
paid than acting in a theatre, and even more enticingly, has lots of travelling thrown
in. Cuban storyteller Fátima Paterson has already been twice to Liverpool,
in England, to tell stories accompanied by her musicians. Every year, there are congresses,
festivals and seminars, such as those in Bucaramanga (Colombia), Monterrey (Mexico)
and Aguimes, in the Canary Islands.
After 15 years of slowly taking root, storytelling is now flourishing in Latin America.
According to Argentine anthropologist Adolfo Colombres, the wave is not so much a
revival of Latin American narrative traditions, but simply an enthusiasm for oral
communication. In countries where few people read, “oral narration strangely enough
encourages people to write,” he says.
The continent’s storytelling traditions are nevertheless very rich, a mingling of
three historically oral societies: the indigenous Indian, the African and to a lesser
extent, the local Spanish. “The European tradition of witches, goblins and fairy
tales mix in with Indian and African traditions of the spirits of water, jungles
and mountains,” says Bolivian writer Victor Montoya. “There are spirits that defend
nature and severely punish those who harm it, such as Marimonda in Colombia and Coipora
in Brazil. Then there are the ships condemned to sail the seas forever, never reaching
port, such as Caleuche in Chile and the Barco Negro in Nicaragua. And beautiful women
who seduce men but when you kiss them, their heads turn into frightening skulls.”
Fortunately these traditions are still alive. Oral storytellers, such as the Colombian
Nicolás Buenaventura (see next article) and Mimi Barthélemy, from Haiti,
are spreading them and linking up with other oral traditions.
Barthélemy was born in Port-au-Prince and gave up the comfortable life of
a diplomat’s wife to compile traditional Haitian folk tales and make them better
known throughout the country and beyond, in Latin America and Europe. She travelled
to villages to listen to local storytellers and read books on Haitian anthropology
in Washington libraries.
Kindling
pride in oral heritage
One of the stories she collected was about the ogre Bakulu Baka, who swallowed the
sun and left the country in darkness until a benevolent god arrived with a machete
and liberated it. “When I tell stories,” she says, “I mention Haiti and how voodoo
and Catholicism mingle there. In one of my performances, the gods of both religions
join hands in common cause.”
Telling stories is a political gesture for her. “When I’m before an audience, I stop
being somebody else’s lady. I become Mimi, a modern-day woman speaking in public
places.” Does she feel she’s just lending her voice and body to a tradition? “Certainly
not,” she retorts. “It’s not just folklore. I break with tradition because I give
my own version of a story. By telling them in French, not just in the original Creole,
I open up these stories to the world in a novel way and place them in a completely
different context.”
Spreading this tradition is very meaningful for Haitians, she believes. When they
listen to stories, her compatriots come into close contact with an ancient tradition
that is part of their heritage. They feel proud of belonging to a civilization that
has invented such characters and stories. For an impoverished Haitian minority living
in French Guiana, for example, listening to these stories is a mirror that can give
them a more positive image of themselves.
For each place gives rise to its own style. In Colombia, for example, a movement
of urban storytellers has sprung up in several towns, despite a tendency to associate
the form with exaggeration and lies. Most of those involved are university students
between 17 and 35 years old. Although they do not claim to be inspired by any special
tradition, they are hardly cultural rookies: “We always know something, whether it’s
about music, film, theatre or literature, and we take the story from there,” says
Carolina Rueda, one of the students.
The daughter of an impassioned bullfighting fan, Rueda studied literature and worked
as a theatre actress. From those experiences, she created a narrative about bullfighting
based on stories she had heard since childhood, with some extra help from books about
the sport. The structure of her show is rather like a bullfight, with six parts,
like the six bulls that traditionally feature in an afternoon performance.
Narrative
tricks
The storytellers have dropped simple, linear narration and delved into the language
of films and advertising. One of them tells a half-hour story about a 30-second TV
spot in which a drop of tomato sauce falls from the 22nd floor of a building and
sets off a gun-battle in the centre of Bogotá.
Diego Camargo, the storyteller mentioned above who lost one of his characters in
the midst of his performance, has also written a tale in 174 two-syllable words.
But because it is difficult for the character to kill himself with three-syllable
“balazos” (Spanish for bullets), he asks the audience to allow him a bit of poetic
licence and ends the story with a loud “pum-pum!” (bang-bang!).
Through such narrative tricks, the new movement is breaking with tradition, culling
inspiration from post-modern authors such as Italo Calvino and his If on a Winter’s
Night a Traveller. The Colombian storytellers have thus managed to capture a media-educated
urban audience for their art, which is filling public squares and theatres.
Using both ancestral and post-modern tales, the storytellers are reviving among Latin
Americans the ritual of listening to stories, those priceless moments of communication
that begin for us all with the first stories we hear from our parents and grandparents.
They are occasions that can spark novel feelings and reactions in a world ruled by
the ever-present screen. A direct one-to-one communication, between an audience and
a real human being who looks you straight in the eye and invites you to summon up
your imagination so you don’t miss the only story in the world that just might save
you. |
