Nicolás Buenaventura at home with storytellers in Mali.
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Early
on, Colombian storyteller Nicolás Buenaventura learned that “you have to invent
the truth every day.” With several storytellers in his family tree, he treats his
gift with reverence and warmth of spirit
After a few minutes
of introduction, Nicolás Buenaventura realized that for the first time, he
was before an audience that had grown up without listening to stories–street children
who had never heard of The Little Red Riding Hood. It was midnight in Bogotá
and the faces of these youngsters lit up. Once upon a time, people referred to them
as street urchins, but as the country’s situation deteriorated, they simply became
billed as rejects.
So he decided to tell his version of how the world was created. “There was once a
God who managed to resist the unfortunate temptation of making Man in his own image.
First he created the Earth, and when he saw it was round and beautiful, he was left
with lots of teeny tiny bits and pieces. Then he created time and when that started
moving forward, he was left again with lots of teeny tiny bits and pieces.” The children
shouted and clapped as the storyteller rose to a higher emotional pitch to end his
tale. “There’s always a moment in life when you feel you don’t belong in the world,
and that’s terrible. But if you know the story of Tom Thumb, you know that even the
tiniest living thing has its place in the world.”
Buenaventura found his own place in the world through storytelling. The boys in his
neighbourhood were quick to discover his young talent. Because he did not have enough
money to go to the cinema, they clubbed together to buy him a ticket so that he could
tell them the film from A to Z afterwards. Today he makes a living from storytelling
and dreams of directing his second feature film.
Like all his family, Nicolás was born with a storyteller’s gift. His father
Enrique is one of Colombia’s leading playwrights and theatre directors. His grandfather
Cornelio, a tireless conversationalist and professional storyteller, always repeated
that “you have to invent the truth every day.” So whenever he walked down the street,
people would call out: “Hey, Cornelio, make up a little bit of truth for me, will
you?”
Daily
bread
But Nicolás did not get his enthusiasm for storytelling from them. His inspiration
came from Fermín Ríos, a black storyteller from Colombia’s main Pacific
port of Buenaventura. “Fermín told me: ‘I must tell you the story of the boy
who lost his bomboro [a magical realist term that stands for any type of object],
but he never did. The next year, he said: ‘No, you’re still not ready to hear it.’”
Finally, he died and Nicolás had to go searching the world for the story himself.
So far, he has found six versions of it–three in Colombia and three in Africa.
The Colombian ones form the story of the origin of the river Timbiqui. On a visit
to Burkina Faso, he told the story in a village. “Because I was a storyteller, I
wasn’t seen as a foreigner. People realized I was bringing back stories they had
given or lent to us centuries ago.” Stories do not need a passport to travel, he
says. All the world’s people ask the same questions–why are we here, why do we have
to die, what are we made of?–and the answers change from place to place. For ethnologists,
these oral stories stand midway between question and answer.
After visiting three African countries, Nicolás understood how “telling a
story is like putting bread on the table.” This only enhanced his deep respect for
all stories. Perhaps it explains why he staunchly opposes his stories being used
for other purposes, such as by schools to encourage reading. Storytelling, he says,
can’t happen without an audience. There is no set ending in storytelling, and if
there was one, it would be a story in itself. “Storytellers are the cups out of which
people drink stories,” he says.
Do stories change people? “In any case, they changed me. I’m more sensitive now to
life’s nuances.” And do stories change the world? Nicolás replies by telling
what happened to him one night in Bogotá as he was making his way home. “I
was suddenly surrounded by some street kids and I thought ‘I’m going to be robbed.’
But no. Instead, I heard one of them shouting a familiar line at me: ‘he was left
with lots of teeny tiny bits and pieces’. . . . Amazing, no?” |
