Who's afraid of stories?

She chose to tell a tale about three sisters, and, as it often happens in stories (...and in life), two of the sisters are downright mean to the third.

In fact, jealous, they steal her doll and throw her down a well, now THAT doesn't happen so often in real life, BUT I have two sisters and I can tell you I've been thrown down a good many symbolic wells, sisterhood, brotherhood is a wonderful thing but it's not always a walk in the park to grow up with siblings, I'd like to meet the person who has never in his or her childhood wished one of his/her siblings would disappear down a well.
Now at the end of the tale, all is well that ends well, the girl is in her daddy's arms, the evil perpetrated by her sisters revealed:
"what shall we do to your sisters?" the father asks.
And the main character of my Gazi university student says:

"daddy, you own two other houses on your estate, give one to each of my sisters that they may go away and leave us here to be in peace."
And all lived happily ever after....

"What? wait a minute!!! Rewind! You mean the girls push their sister down a well, tell their father that she's been eaten by a pack of wolves and hope she'll starve... and their punishment is that they each get a house??!"

"Well my student mumbles I couldn't possibly end it the way it did in the version I read..."

In the version she read the ending was the traditional Anatolian punishment for evil doing in fairy tales, namely the perpetrators are asked: "40 katır mı, 40 satır mı?" Which means they are asked to choose between forty mules and forty lines, usually the characters (thinking that they are offered a gift...and thus revealing their utter lack of remorse) choose the forty mules, they are then attached to these mules which are sent running in forty different directions.

Now, THAT'S A PUNISHMENT!

(You'll have to admit it's a little more severe than to receive your own house!)

But my student thought it was too mean, that we shouldn't do this, should't even think it, so... she changed it!

OK, I always tell my students that they are responsible for their own voice, if a story carries a racist, male-chauvinist or violent ideal, for example, you should be aware of it and then decide:

a) if you want to tell the story, and
b) if so, how?

Storytelling is a very powerful tool, it creates a reality, so we should be careful with the messages we transmit.

But it doesn't mean we should take a knife to the story in draw all the blood out of it:

• brrr gone the scary wolf who eats the grandmother,
• gone the woman who suggests her husband should eat his children or loose them in the forest
• gone Cinderella's sister cutting her big toe to try to fit her foot in the pretty slipper.

            

What are we left with?

SOUP!

 

These emasculated stories are soooo boring they could make you cry!

Stories are symbolic medicine, they heal the soul, they help us deal with the fears, the darkness, the evil in us. Not everything is light and breathy inside, and stories address the realities that we can't face directlly and they do it with symbolic narratives.

That's why nearly every single psychological theory out there bases itself on a myth or a tale. It's not any old story that makes it to the holy status of myth or tale, if these stories have been carried by humanity across cultural barriers and across time it's because they hold precious magic.

The truth is there is a part of us who wants to push our siblings down a well, parents sometimes want to get rid of their beloved children, sometimes we want something that is not our destiny so bad that we are willing to cut our (symbolic) big toe to fit the pretty slipper.
And the stories help us through imagination to feel and air out our dark places.

We are the sister who cuts her toe, and we are Cinderella.

Through the story, we remember that we should not cut part of ourselves to fit other people's expectations, that it is madness to do so, that it will lead us to symbolic death, but we also remember that we must not silently suffer and let others impose limits to what we can be, we should not let others lock us up away from our destiny.

Is it scary though? You bet! Is it necessary? More than ever!

The truth is that often the part that makes us shudder in a story is the very part that heals us.
You may have noticed that my well meaning student, sooo worried about the effect of a violent narrative on her audience, did not find it necessary to edit out the part where the sisters throw the youngest sweetest of them down the well, she did not edit out that they mercilessly told their father that she had been eaten by wolves, she did not edit out that they hoped she would starve, and ALL this they did because they wanted her doll!!

Nope, my student had no problem with the utter victimization of a character in the name of jealousy, this is a reality of life that we are accustomed to: we are jealous of others, and as long as we don't go overboard we don't mind admitting it:

• "look at that girl's hat, how cool, I've been looking for something just like that!"
• "I can't believe people are buying Dan Brown's terribly written books by the millions while I can't even find an editor for my manuscript, readers have no taste for real literature these days..."
• "This girl who hardly ever reads an article got an A on HER paper, while I got a C? I bet the instructor doesn't actually READ the papers he just looks at the length of the student's skirts"...

You get my drift, we share jealous feelings all the time, and though jealousy is not a color that always looks good on us, we feel it sometimes, and we don't totally guilt it out of sight.

Now the part she did edit was another violent feeling we've all experienced and one that we don't so willingly admit feeling: REVENGE

No one HERE has ever taken or even felt the desire to take revenge on anyone, no sir, that's not a feeling on our register, people hurt us, they throw us down wells, and leave us to starve...
What do WE do? Why we give them houses of course!

We say:

• "no problem, don't feel bad about it, with the current economy, I'll get a new job in days, go ahead and hire your incompetent sister in my place, I've been here 20 years, it's high time I discovered what's out there!"

We say:

•  "Of course I don't mind, go ahead take that parking space right from under my wheels"

We say:

• "Daarling, you couldn't possibly have known this was my husband you were sleeping with!"

No?

We feel so guilty about our desire for revenge, that we even edit it out of stories, but the truth is that stories are one place where we can safely imagine and take these revenges and free ourselves of the load we carry.
So?

• Kill the sisters!
• Put the step-mother in the barrel with the forty snakes and let the barrel roll down the hill!

And feel the release. I'm not advocating that we act these out in real life, but that we stop holding these feelings, that we admit that all feelings are natural, we are not evil for feeling them, and that we finally give ourselves permission to experience them, to FEEL!

What is the taste of your revenge? What is its smell? Where in your body do you feel it, where is its tightness? Where is its release?
Only when you familiarize yourself with your demons, your fears, your feelings, can you hope to free yourself from the power they hold over you. And stories help us do just that.

I can already hear some people say:

 "But but but...the children, what about the poor innocent little children?"

Children have a deep symbolic life too, they know how to play games of make believe, how to use their imagination to act out the feelings they can't express otherwise.
Children need stories that speak to the whole range of their emotions.
Who can say that children know no jealousy, hold no feelings of revenge, never have a violent reaction?

Pretending these things do not exist, banning them from stories we tell children is not going to make the feelings go away from the children's minds, it's only going to create a taboo where there once was a wonderful opportunity to openly communicate, share and express feelings.
It's telling the child:
"How evil you are to seek revenge on those who hurt you! See this nice little girl? She gave her sisters houses to thank them for their evil deeds, remember...next time your brother hits you on the head and runs away with your doll, give him your desert! Or YOU'll be the evil one!"
Like THAT's not going to traumatize them at all!!

Now (I know this post is getting really long) let me tell you what REALLY got my knickers in a twist!
Just about a week after this class at Gazi university, my students were invited to tell stories at a mall.

I won't even begin to list out all the things that were wrong with this venue, but storytelling is practically inexistent in Turkey and they are taking every opportunity they can to recreate this tradition.

One of my students told a story in which, at some point, (brace yourself, it's coming...) a hunter killed a bear!

No sooner had he finished his story that a raging woman came screaming at him, an elementary school teacher of 30 years she'd NEVER seen someone as RUTHLESS as my student....how dare he mention death in front of children!!!
Apparently, (this very knowledgable authority informed him) death is a topic which should only be mentioned by psychologists!

Storytellers should stick to? Living things, with no revenge, no violence, no jealousy?

Now I'm trying to understand how these people think children will react when their turtle, their dog or God forbid...their grand-pa will die? (Or maybe these will also stop dying once we've stopped talking about it?)

Should this really be the first time they ever encounter death? Wouldn't death happening in stories have been a good heads-up to inform them that life is not endless? A good opportunity to start a healthy conversation?

In today's wired and televised age, how long till they find out about death in much more gruesome terms from the TV?
It's very different to mention something and let them create their own mental pictures, from actually showing a film, invading their brains with images they would have never created themselves, which can be very traumatizing.
Storytellers mention things but they do not present actual pictures so what the child understands or sees is only proportional to what he is ready and able to imagine.
So, all the gruesome, blood-spurting images that come to OUR minds when we imagine a woman being dragged by mules, kids don't have that. We have these images because we copy-paste them from war films we've watched but normally kids have not and should not have seen these.

I don't believe that we can ever hope to raise children in a vacuum, nor should we wish to, imagine the shock when they'd actually have to enter reality? It would be like going through another birth canal:

"So remember sweetie, how we said that everyone lives forever, that no one goes hungry, that no one cheats, no one steals, no one experiences anger, violence and hatred? Well that was no exactly true... Now WELCOME TO THE WORLD! Read all the fine print, good luck adapting, here is the number of a good psychologist, he'll go over all the details with you."

 

Instead? Let's tell good stories to our kids, stories that touch us, let's be scared together, hide under the blankets if necessary, until the evil witch is caught, until the dragon is slain, until we have acknowledged and faced our fears and they no longer have a death grip on our hearts.

Storytelling is not about strutting your ego on stage, it's about baring your soul.

She's sitting alone, at her table, hunched over a glass of sparkling water, the most boring drink you can order at this colorful Parisian cafe, where chalked signs advertise Hydromel, the honeyed liquor of Greek gods, little known drinks from French regions.... I settle on something I can't pronounce, and hope it's turns out to be something I can drink.

She looks so out of place, in the cramped cafe where shrieks of joys keep erupting and loud kisses pop on cheeks every time another storyteller comes in, she waits patiently, she sometimes nods at someone, quietly.
Then the stage, which is set up in the old 'cave' of the cafe (the basements of Parisian building tend to be gorgeous wine cellars) opens, and she is the first downstairs, she sets her glass of sparkling water on the table right in front of the stage, and waits. It's open mic stage for storytellers at 'le cafe des trois arts".

Three of four storytellers come up before she finally steps on stage, she turns around to face us, and at first I can't recognize the grayish old lady anymore. I can't quite pin it, same gray bobbed hair, same hunched shoulders and marine sweater, it must be the mischievous grin, she smiles like a child who knows something really funny and can't belieeeeeve we have not heard it yet!
She starts, in the most humble way, to tell us a short story collected in a village in the 19th century by a priest.  It's a simple joke about a man who falls in the stairs and breaks his leg, the doctor prescribes a plaster to be applied "where your husband's hurt his leg" but the leg won't heal...so, the doctor is called back, and he asks why the wife did not apply the plaster, "oh but I did just like you said, I applied it in the stairs...seeing how that's where my husband done broke his leg".

That's it, simple short, like my mom would say, it wouldn't be worth breaking three legs off a duck (idiom for: it's not mind blowingly great).

But the thing is this: we were all riveted, and when she delivers the last line, everyone is cracking up. Now I know you're going to say: "it's open mic night, people are generous with their laughter both because they hope people will also laugh when they themselves are on stage, and because they've had one too many glasses of Hydromel the honeyed liquor of Gods."
But it's something else.

She doesn't gesticulate on stage, occupy the stage, hypnotize us with magnetic eye contact, or even add poetic or brilliant images to the story. Nope. I'm pretty sure her version is 99% what it was in the book she read it in, and I bet she neither rehearsed it with rehearsing buddy, nor questioned the symbolic of tale, nor even wondered why she liked this story, and picked it, and wanted to tell it. It seems she uses none of the tricks of the trained storyteller, but a wonderful storyteller she is, there is no doubt about it.

After the open mic, while the featured storyteller is warming up for the second part of the evening, we're back in the cafe, this time all at the same table, and I'm the one having the boring sparkling water because telling my story left me thirsty and let's face it, you can only drink so many glasses, of apple cognac, no matter how local it is.

French storytellers are drilling me on Turkish stories, but I want to find out more about my mischievous lady, I've seen her real face on stage, I know it, she can put the mask back on all she wants, I know the sparkle in her eye, and the light that burns bright inside, the woman is a riot, pretending to be invisible.
Big cities will do this, some people let themselves fade away.

I ask, she spills.
The story comes right out:
She never thought she would ever step on a stage and tell stories in front of an audience, but she was magically attracted by a storytelling workshop some 4 years ago.  She thought she'd just watch once, decide it wasn't her, and walk back to her one bedroom flat and her cat. You see she was not what you'd call performer material, No mam, not the type!
But she liked it, decided to stay, she's been doing it for years now, her first open stage? She never even got on stage, she was waaay too scared! But the next she did, and she has been at it ever since. My mom told me that she has seen her all over, she's always there, anytime there's an open mic, she comes with hunched shoulders, quietly sips her mineral water, steps on stage and cracks everybody up. "I'm not really sure why, but ever since the beginning I've always told these village jokes, they're almost a specialty of mine, it's strange....(she seems thoughtful, but really she is checking me out from the corner of her eye)...it's strange considering I'm not really what you'd call a funny person!" She can tell I'm not buying it and she cracks the weirdest smile, it looks like she's biting her lower lip, while lifting her upper lip to reveal a row of straight teeth, but the mischievous childish glint in her eye is back, I know her, and she knows I do, she's a funny woman, who only gets to show it once in a while, with the power of storytelling.

The thing is this...how come a shy woman can climb on stage, and tell a memorable story that will remain in people's minds for years, even though she has none of the stage tricks of professional performers?

Because storytelling is not theater, it's not a stage art, (even though it often happens on stage), it is not about strutting your ego on stage, it's about baring your soul. Showing your authentic self.
And what's more you shouldn't do it for all to see, but in the service of a story that touched the aforementioned soul. The story chooses you. It says: "tell me, with all you've got, use your inner self as the plate to serve me on, but remember, when the food is good, no one notices the plate".

And this funny woman, she reads stories that crack her up, at home with her cat on her lap, and the glint in her eye comes, and I imagine she thinks: "now this, I absolutely HAVE to tell someone!" And what she shares when she shares the story with a group of strangers in a Parisian cellar, is a part of herself that most people never get to see.

Why do we have to show our authentic selves when we tell?

To me this is what storytelling is about, it's about, through stories, connecting soul to soul, as humans, and recognizing we are all connected and one, through the large soul which we call: humanity.