Becoming The Muse

About

Of Tales By Moonlight and The Lost Art Of Storytelling

Tales By Moonlight and The Lost Art Of Storytelling

A moonlit night, drumbeat and a crackling fire, then someone clears their throat, and a hush falls, without being told, you know what happens… a voice announces the magic word which means Once upon a time…

Paivapo

Everyone says dzepfunde!

Sometimes they switch things up and say

Ngano Ngano Ngano!

And everyone replies Ngano!

Tales by the fire

Call and response… It was a communal contract entered between the storyteller and the audience, inviting you to pay attention, to be more than a listener, to be a part of the story and ultimately learn from it. The storyteller opened the door, and everyone who walked through it is part of what the story becomes.

Stories were more than entertainment; they were archives on survival and culture handed down from generation to generation, packaged in metaphor and folktales from a time long ago, when animals could still talk, pasi pasati parohwa nenyundo, before the earth was struck with a hammer.

Why anyone would strike the earth with a hammer is a story for another night. One, I would also love to hear, as I do not know how that came to be.

The Western literary tradition, is largely a solitary one.
An author sits alone and writes.
A reader sits alone and reads.

a book reader

The story passes between two individuals across the silence of a page. It is a beautiful arrangement…

But our stories were never meant for silence, every story an act of resistance against forgetting who we are. The pen distorts but the tongue remembers.

Now we write more than we talk and read more than we listen and consume viral content fed to us by algorithms, the communal archetypal structure and moral sustenance replaced by rage baits and click bait that we have forgotten that our stories reminded us that meaning is shared and identity is plural…

We are not just individuals navigating a world alone, but people shaped by community, by ancestors, by the light of our homes and the specific weight of the histories we carry.

and that is what we have lost the most in our stories.

WinterABC26 The Art of Storytelling

, , , , , , , ,

Responses to “Of Tales By Moonlight and The Lost Art Of Storytelling”

  1. Benjamin Nambu avatar
    Benjamin Nambu

    Thank you for sharing this insightful message. You have beautiful captured African storytelling traditions and reminded me of my childhood in my little African village where we used to share stories that initially seemed ordinary entertainment but later in life, I realized how so many of them were actually great business ideas.

    Reply
  2. Gary A Wilson avatar
    Gary A Wilson

    Yes Beaton – I can’t but have noticed how true this is for the western reader and writer. (Que Solitary Man from Neil Diamond – just the music because the solitary image will just fall into our laps from the music alone)
    The western way was the only way I was taught about stories, but many of mine came to life first as oral accounts – acted out almost as much as related.

    But what has developed from it is worth calling out. The whole tool kit of the story writer is actually pretty large and effective – and I’d argue more effective to more people that even poetry. Take the 1st or 3rd person voices. Take the notion of a narrator coming from an omniscient perspective as opposed to a first person, non-omniscient character talking or thinking their way through the story. The suspense we can build, the terror we can cause or the heart we can tragically break.

    I don’t know if you ever looked at my heart-warming story about sea horses. Some of those readers have confessed to tears of joy – which both surprised and pleased me of course. I was pleased for the story to have such an impact but am I so cold that the story just didn’t land that way for me or perhaps as the author – I’m just immune to it’s charms?

    Regardless – I thought it was pretty effective story telling.
    https://garyawilsonstories.wordpress.com/240930-1373-st24-anxious-about-sea-horses/

    Hope all is well in tea pot world.

    Reply
  3. bernadette massiah avatar
    bernadette massiah

    Beaton, you are so right, “Now we write more than we talk and read more than we listen and consume viral content fed to us by algorithms, the communal archetypal structure and moral sustenance replaced by rage baits and click bait that we have forgotten that our stories reminded us that meaning is shared and identity is plural…”

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from Becoming The Muse

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading