Intersecting stories

Sometimes, a fictional story and a real-life story – or many stories - can intersect in very interesting and beautiful ways.

This story of "The Camel Bookmobile" initially caught my interest for two reasons. The first was that over a period of three years, my husband Taba and I worked to help set up a library in Srinagar, Kashmir for which many of our friends and family as well as client companies donated thousands of books and well as money for buying books and for their transportation. The ‘library’ first operated as a travelling one, out of two beat-up old trucks, visiting schools on a weekly basis. It was actually set up since the violence in Kashmir had resulted in most libraries being bombed out or shut down, and the students who initiated the project were hungry for reading and learning.

The second reason the book grabbed my attention is because it is located in the remote and troubled areas of north-eastern Kenya, on the border with Somalia – Garissa and Wajir – that I travelled to as facilitator of the India-Kenya Women’s Journey in 2000. I recalled the courageous and amazing work done by Somalian women there, addressing education for girls, income generation as well as fighting gender inequalities and violence against women. Among the women I grew to love – Abdiya, who was part of the traveling team for around six weeks in India and Kenya, and our other local hosts, Sophie, Hubbie and Mama Fatooma who inspired and delighted us, and taught me so much of what it means to commit to making a difference.

The idea for Masha Hamilton's novel, “The Camel Bookmobile”, came when she was driving her three children to the library, and her daughter told her about a camel bookmobile she had heard of in Africa that once had a strict rule imposed -- if anyone in a settlement failed to return a book, the mobile library would not go back there. There was something about the camel library idea and that rule that struck a chord with Hamilton, who within minutes outlined the basic premise of the novel. When the book was in its final editing stages, Hamilton and her daughter journeyed to Kenya to visit the camel library that provided the initial inspiration.

The Camel Bookmobile is told through multiple viewpoints, and each of the main characters is changed in some way by the roving library.

The key character is Fiona Sweeney, a work-frustrated 36-year old American librarian, who tells her family she wants to do something that matters, and to their surprise takes off for Africa where she ends up starting a traveling library. Her work takes her to the arid bush area of northeastern Kenya, among tiny, far-flung communities, lacking proper roads or schools, where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease.

Her mission, as she sees it, is to bring Dr. Seuss, Homer, Tom Sawyer and Hemingway to a world of new readers who will be inspired to change their own lives for the better after reading the masters.

But, though her motives are good, like most of us who have ever traveled to, or worked in, different cultures, Fiona is so burdened by the values of her own (Western) culture, that it is impossible for her to understand the people she is trying to help or even the problems that her efforts are causing for those people.

She finds herself in the midst of several struggles within the community of Mididima, where the bookmobile's presence sparks a feud between those who favor modernization and those who fear the loss of the traditional way of life in the African bush.

The story unfolds from the point of view of each person involved with the camel bookmobile, so you really get to understand the issues and concerns from all different angles.

What it also unfolds is the seemingly unbridgeable cultural differences, the strengths and struggles of nomadic life and of the changes facing the members of that culture today; also the potentially ‘disruptive’ effects that books and what they contain, can have on tribal customs and the very way of life that has sustained the tribes for thousands of years.

Now the part the story hinges on concerns with the fact that, because the donated books are limited in number and the settlements are many, the project’s African director has a firm rule that if a village fails to return all of the books loaned to it, the bookmobile will stop coming to that village.

The trouble begins when one young man referred to as 'Scar Boy', as his face has been ruined by a hyena attack, refuses to return two books. The entire village of Mididima is thrown into a social turmoil that forever changes the lives of its people and Fiona Sweeney.

The Camel Bookmobile is a powerful telling that challenges our fears of the unknown. Even as it captures the riddles and calamities that often occur when two cultures collide, many other questions are raised: Has Fiona Sweeney really done the village any favors by exposing them to a world of new and often alien ideas and cultures? Has she improved their future prospects or has she inadvertently destroyed the fabric that has held the village together and ensured its survival for generations?

Or – more importantly - is the truth somewhere between the two extremes?

ABOUT THE WRITER

I wanted to know more about the writer and learnt that Masha Hamilton started out as a journalist for The Los Angeles Times, The Associated Press and other news organizations, reporting from Russia, Africa and the Middle East. When she began her career as a novelist it’s hardly surprising that she set her books in volatile, real-life situations. Her first novel, Staircase of a Thousand Steps, was a coming-of-age story set in a Middle Eastern village. Her second, The Distance Between Us, was about a war correspondent who found herself in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But with The Camel Bookmobile she didn’t just write a fascinating book; with author M.J. Rose she launched a massive drive to collect books for the camel library, and they also went about raising funds for shipping costs.

Interestingly, Hamilton convinced more than 150 other authors to each donate a minimum of five of their favorite books. And at bookstore signings, she encourages buyers to purchase a copy of any favorite book and donate it to the camel library - and to inscribe it with a personal message -- because while in Kenya, she reports, the head librarian made a point of telling her that readers especially love it when there is a note written in the book from the giver.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The actual Camel Mobile Library Service, overseen by the Kenya National Library Service, that was the inspiration for the novel, operates from Garissa in Kenya’s isolated Northeastern Province near the unstable border with Somalia. It is a predominantly Muslim province, where many were farmers, but are now forced into a nomadic existence by drought or famine. For most of the families, they must follow where their camels and goats go in search of pasture and water, forcing their children to abandon school.

Initially launched with three camels in 1996, the library increased to 12 camels, with plans for more, traveling to four settlements per day, four days per week. The camel library also operates in Wajir, which is even further to the north.

The camels deliver books to these semi-nomadic groups of people who live with drought, famine and chronic poverty. The books are spread out on grass mats beneath an acacia tree, and the library patrons, sometimes joined by goats or donkeys, gather with great excitement to choose the books they get to keep until the next visit. The books are written in English or Swahili, the two official primary languages of Kenya.

The addresses and connections I located for those of you who might like to help the project –or initiate similar ones – are:
Garissa Provincial Library, (For Camel Library), Mr. Rashid M. Farah - Librarian in Charge,

P.O. Box 245, Garissa, Kenya
Or check http://camelbookdrive.wordpress.com/ ; or http://www.bookaid.org/

What I particularly liked finding out is that the project has also begun raising money for the collecting, recording and local publication of traditional stories in the Somali language, which will allow this region to move into the future while respecting and preserving their long held oral traditions and cultural richness.

May all our intersecting stories add to the 'basic goodness' of the world.

Marguerite Theophil

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts:

we need books, time, and silence.

'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but

'Once upon a time' lasts forever.
~ Philip Pullman

And God created the Storyteller

In early cultures the world over, the Storyteller had a place of true value. Before written language was used, historic, religious, and cultural knowledge was passed from generation to generation orally, and as the Keeper of all this collective knowledge, the storyteller was one of the most important people in the community.

This story from Kazakhstan, shows the value placed on storytelling and storytellers:

It was the seventh day. God had finished making the world. Tired, but happy, he suddenly realized he had forgotten to give human beings their brains. God was understandably upset! Calling some angels, he handed them jugs filled with this important ‘ingredient’ and said, "Go quickly, and make sure you give all humans their brains." The angels flew down to Earth and found that there were so many people, there was not enough brain-stuff in their jugs to go round! So they made sure they at least gave each one a little.

God looked down on creation and was really sad to see wars, poverty, hunger selfishness and tears. "I think I know why.” he declared, “These human beings have only got a bit of brain each." So God created a few extra people, this time making sure he filled their brains right up to the top. He filled those brains with sparkling words - stories, songs, poetry and music.
These were storytellers God sent down to Earth, to tell and sing wisdom into foolish human hearts.

While some stories can be deliberately told to perpetuate a narrow world view, most traditional stories can provides the ‘larger context’ within which we are invited to move beyond conflict. Conflict, we have been told, comes from a limited view that looks like you and I are separate. Story has the capacity to hold differing perspectives in the same story, and offer the wide-angle view that invites us to transcend our differences. Most significantly, even if it doesn't solve our differences; it creates something that's bigger than our differences.

In the power to tell a story lies the power to shape our reality, to alter our perceptions, to create new worlds of experience.

The best Tellers are those who also listen, because can come from many sources. In Stories From The Mountains and Beyond, the writer, Granny Sue reminds us:” … We must first hear stories from some source, whether it be another person, a book, our own inner voice, or the physical world around us. We need to be listening and aware to hear the stories being gifted to us daily … stories told with a glance, in a song, in children playing a game. Stories in the wind in the trees, birds calling, water trickling over rocks, the soft swish of snow falling, doors closing, windows opening, swing sets creaking, footsteps, the hum of air conditioners or crackle of fire, car horns, train whistles, elevators …” All these have stories for the teller willing to listen.

David Spangler in an article that discusses the relevance and importance of Telling today writes: “We are a storytelling, story-loving species. Let someone be spinning a good tale at a gathering and watch a crowd collect to listen … If, as St. John says, in the Beginning was the Word, then the Story followed directly after, unfolding the universe from the imagination of God. In emulation of the divine, we have sought to duplicate that moment of creation by being storytellers, too.”

Reading a story is wonderful, but being in the presence of a Teller who gifts you a story from her or his heart is a truly wondrous experience. A kind of ‘field’ is created between Teller and Listeners that creates a space to learn, change and grow.

Today, take time to honor the Tellers you know and have known, and the Teller within you too.
Marguerite Theophil

Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory,
the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another:
a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable
and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth.

This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life:
the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler,
the misunderstanding at the office.

Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.
~ Mary Catherine Bateson

The many guises of Story

The best we leant from a course on World Mythology that Bombay University offered a few years ago was how various cultures have uncannily similar stories – take for example stories of the Flood. A large percentage of the world's cultures have stories of a "great flood" that devastated a previous civilization.

Claims are sometimes made about one culture being older than another, and the actual source, but while some ‘traveling’ of story and borrowing or appropriating has been established, in other cases researchers have not established any clear possibility of migration. Really fascinating are the similarities in stories from distinct cultures which may or may not owe any influence to each other. Some who study this feel that these similarities often attest to our common human imagination, and ways of explaining events, concepts or moral values.

Most people in the West, and those of us from Christian families in the East, are quite familiar with the Noah story. I loved it, and loved my children’s illustrated version of all the animals lining up to enter, never doubting they all would fit and that the ark would float.

My course introduced me to the ancient Sumerian myth of Ziusudra (around 17th century BC) which told of how the god Enki warned Ziusudra of the gods' decision to destroy mankind in a flood. Enki instructed him to build a large boat, which he did, and after a flood of seven days, Ziusudra made appropriate sacrifices and prostrations to the sky god An, and Enlil, the chief of the gods, and was given eternal life.

India has ‘Legend of The Fish’ as its key Flood story. The first record is in Satapatha Brahmana, an important prose treatise on sacred ritual, which is believed to have been written not long before the rise of Buddhism, and therefore around the sixth century BC. But even here, the versions that followed in the Mahabharata, the Agni Purana and the Bhagvata Purana differ from each other - in one, Manu, the main character, is an ordinary man, in another he is a sage, another stresses his royal birth.

I have recently explored the delightful variations of this tale and used it in many tellings. A popular version goes this way: Manu, while one day while washing his hands in the waters of the Chirini river found a tiny fish swim into his cupped palms. It begged him to save it from being attacked and eaten by the bigger fish, saying, “I beg you … I am a small fish; you must save me. The stronger fish devour the weaker; I know that from earliest times this has been ordained as our means of subsistence. Still, save me from this, and I will pay you back well for your good deed”.

Manu, smiled at this unlikely proposal, yet compassionately took the fish and placed him in a jar. The fish grew, and in time it became too large to be contained in the jar. Manu shifted him to a pond, and as he continued to grow and get too large for his environment, at the fish’s request, he moved him in turn to a river and then to the wide sea.

The fish now spoke to Manu: “For your kindness to me, I will tell you that the time for the purification of the worlds has now arrived. Soon the world will be submerged by a great flood, and everything will perish. You must build yourself a strong ship, and take a long rope on board. You must also take with you the Seven Sages, who have existed since the Beginning of Time, and also make sure you have the Seeds of All Things. When I am ready, I will come to you, and I will have a horn on my head. Do not forget my words, for without me you cannot escape from the flood.”

Manu, realizing this was no ordinary fish, did as he was told, and as the floods began, he saw the horned fish come towards him, and cast one end of the rope over its horns. The fish began to tow them through the rising waves.

For many years the fish towed the ship through the water, and at last it came to the highest mountain peak. At its command, they tied the ship to the mountain peak and then the fish said: “O men of wisdom, now know this - I am the Creator of everything. I took on the shape of a fish, and I have saved you from this flood. With my blessings Manu will once again fill the world with life.”

With these words the fish disappeared, and as the floods abated, Manu and all in the ship slowly made their way down the slopes of the mountain and Manu became the father of a new race of living things.

In all of these stories people sought to explain the destruction of an old way of living, preparation for the new and ‘purified’ way of being. Many would ‘go under’ with all the changes, but some could ride it through. Whether people borrowed the Tellings from somewhere else hardly matters; they sought to make meaning and explain Life to the best of their ability.

Aarne-Thompson lists 179 tales from different countries with a similar theme to Beauty and the Beast. There various versions usually three daughters, the youngest being the most kind and pure, her older sisters displaying self-centeredness or selfishness.

Beast, who appears in the different versions in many forms - as a beast-like human, as a serpent, wolf, or pig, is always unappealing, sometimes scary in appearance, but seems to be rich and powerful. At one point the Beauty is separated from her Beast and at that time some tragedy visits him. It is Beauty’s remorse, sometimes shown in the simple act of shedding a tear and sometimes as tedious a task like going to the ends of the earth, that releases the Beast from an evil spell and transforms him to handsome, loving man.

Lon Po Po, a Chinese version of the Red Riding Hood story features three daughters left at home when their mother goes to visit their grandmother. Lon Po Po, the Granny Wolf, pretends to be the girls' grandmother, until the eldest daughter suspects the greedy wolf's real identity. Tempting him with ginkgo nuts, the girls pull him in a basket to the top of the tree in which they are hiding, then let go of the rope, killing the big, bad wolf.

In his introduction to his collection, World Tales, Idries Shah that wonderful collector and teacher of Story, marveled at the extraordinary connections between different cultures held together by similar stories. How did these stories get around as widely as they did? People did travel along routes like the Silk Route and others, and no doubt there were story-tellers among them. Or perhaps there is some innate connection between all human beings that allows them to make up similar tales. Whatever the way, we are all the richer for it.

May we feel the incredible human connection and linkage that similar stories the world over point us to.

Marguerite Theophil

Traditional stories, told orally, contained within them
the history, social laws, spiritual truths, and cultural values
of families and their communities.
We continue to pass stories along year after year,
generation after generation, because their timeless elements
possess an intrigue, a power, and an ability to transform our lives.

~ Robert Atkinson

Alternative Tellings

We watched an old classic again a few days back. Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, that was made in 1950. To me, this is the best illustration of Truth, because at the end of it, we are made strikingly aware of the subjectivity of any of our versions of the truth.

The main story tells of the rape of a woman and the death of a man, presumably by a wandering bandit, and is presented entirely in a series of flashbacks from the perspectives of each of four different narrators.

The ‘holding’ of the story is done through a group of people seeking shelter from a heavy rain storm at Kyoto's crumbling Rashomon gate, as they discuss the recent crime. One of them, a woodcutter, says he was a witness to the crimes.

In each of the four versions of the story, those of the woman, the man, the bandit and the woodcutter, even though the characters and many of the details; there is much that is very different.

In the bandit’s story, he accepts responsibility for the murder but not for the rape, saying that it was an act of mutual consent. The woman's story is that the bandit attacked her, but suggests that she may have been the killer. The dead man's tale, presented through a medium, involves rape and suicide. The witness who says he saw it all, presents a story that weaves in elements from each of the other three, but that does not corroborate any one of the other three stories, leaving the viewer doubting his claim to have seen it all.

As a viewer, trying to make sense of ‘what really happened’ is impossible. You realize that Kurosawa has not made a whodunit; he focuses on something far more disturbingly profound - the inability of any one person to know the truth, no matter how clearly we think we see things. Perspective makes all truth subjective.

Some writers have been drawn to the idea of ‘perspective’ and the shaping of the story. One of my favorites is Donna Jo Napoli, who re-tells fairy tales from other angles. “Beast” has the actual Beast from the well-known Beauty and The Beast as narrator, and the background to his change of form. So too with “ Spinners” the Rumplestiltskin story that moves backwards and forwards in time. Curious about the witch in Hansel and Gretel? “The Magic Circle” paints a different possibility.

C.S. Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces” was the first book I found that dealt with alternative versions, and it was fascinating to read of how Psyche’s sisters saw her story being played out, and how it affected their own lives. My search for more in this genre led me to Howard Jacobsen’s “The Very model of A Man”– in outer form the story of the Biblical character Cain (yes, he who murdered his brother Abel), but a scintillating work on the power of words and language.

There is more. Yukio Mishima sought to enter the mind of the wife of the Maquis de Sade in “Madame Sade” and Kahlil Gibran did this with people who loved and followed Jesus, as well as those who feared and mistrusted him in “Jesus, The Son of Man”.

In Gregory Maguire's “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” and “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” his task is that of questioning stereotypical roles through reinventing and recontextualizing the well-known Wizard of Oz and Cinderella stories.

Women’s voices are often given space through alternative tellings.

“Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys is a moving and beautiful account of the life of Antoinette Cosway, the fictional character who becomes the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Brontë's older book, Jane Eyre.

In the "Penelopiad", Margaret Atwood retells the familiar story of the Odyssey through the eyes of his long suffering wife Penelope. Under the patient wife waiting and waiting for her husband to return, Atwood, in a clever take on an ancient classical Greek-tragedy form using poetry and song and a chorus of Penelope's slave girls, reveals a biting cynicism about Penelope’s thoughts and attitude that gives a timeless feel to this re-telling.

Alessandro Portelli of the University of Rome La Sapienza, a pioneer in engaged oral history points out that, “Many of the most important stories are true but not accurate.” In memory, he reminds us, facts are reshaped to serve the present.

In many counties there are heated debates about the way history is being taught. The fights are generally about ‘whose version of history’. Maybe we need to become more open to an understanding that no version – however attached we are to it - is ever The Version, and alternative perspectives give us a broader understanding of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

May we learn to make space for tellings that differ from our own.
Marguerite Theophil

As things seem
….. Actually, after all,
things are not quite as real or permanent,
terrible, important or logical as they seem.
~ Joseph Campbell

Becoming real

Dusting my bookshelves is the job that takes me an incredibly long time and has less to do with the number of books, and more to do with the fact that many books just beg to be dipped into right then.

Today the book that has me fascinated all over again is an old copy with yellowing pages that I am afraid are going to turn crumbly very soon - Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pincchio”.

I think, as I read the slightly ponderous language of the original, of how I watched the film Pinocchio, with the madly energized Roberto Benigni some weeks ago with a young friend. “It’s so different from the one we have on DVD,” she grumbled, referring to the made-nice Disney version, as we walked out of the darkness of the theatre.

I feel a bit guilty for wanting her see the version that is somewhat closer to the original, and that has darker patches, much like life.

As far back as in 1881, Carlo Lorenzini, a then well-known children’s writer, began to serialize in a magazine for children La Storia di un burattine, The Story of a Puppet, under the name C. Collodi. Later it came out as a book in 1883 and has been translated into eighty-seven languages. I read that there have been around four hundred television versions, and even many doctoral dissertations on the wooden puppet.

In Florence, walking through a magical, almost other-worldly street lined with shops selling puppets, the shopkeepers will tell you that among the most popular with buyers is the Pinocchio puppet. Wide-eyed, long-nosed, with a fixed bemused smile that seems to suggest he is not too sure of his much publicized desire to become a ‘real boy’, he also seems to ask: “Take me with you,” and many do. Over a hundred years after he was ‘created’, Pinocchio’s dream of being needed, of belonging, of being ‘real’, comes true - again and again.

I have often wondered how this old story has caught and held our attention over all this time. Maybe it has to do with the fact that wooden body or not, this is in large part the story of all of us.

Let’s go to the start of the story: if it is the Disney version which most of us are familiar with, the story begins with a lonely carpenter Geppetto, desperately wanting a child and carving out a wooden puppet-child for himself. The book itself starts out somewhat differently with the carpenter discovering a block of wood in his workshop that talked, laughed and cried like a child, shifting it as one commentator said “ … from a Disney fantasy of the human creation of life, to the everyday miracle that is represented by human development.”

Margaret Blount, an authority on children’s literature, writing of this story indicates that Pinocchio “… falls from grace with the monotonous regularity of most humans…” and how the implicit allegory is that it takes a long, long time to really ‘grow up’.

To become truly human, his lessons include learning to hear the voice of conscience – in the story this voice is that of the character ‘Cricket’ - and to learn to appreciate the joys of giving more than the thrill of constantly receiving.

It does not take too much intellectual analysis to identify that these are our lessons too.

Staring out as a self-centered brat, along his journey Pinocchio creates the situations that eventually cause him to lean Life’s lessons. Most of all he learns – through a nose that grows and grows when he tells a lie – about both, the power of lying, as well as its pain and consequences. The environment filled with all kinds of interesting characters – some drawn as good bad, some as bad, some as hard-to-tell-which-kind - acts on him as much as he acts on the environment, and the exchange slowly provides him with the cues to becoming truly human.

Inspite of sounding painfully preachy, specially to readers today, the Fairy with the Blue Hair plays a very special role. Mostly she teaches Pinocchio about love in its many forms, but it is the way she turns up in his life – actually her changing aspects and what they mean – that is a key creative device of this story.

The wooden one first meets Fairy when Assassins are pursuing him. He sees a house in the distance, runs to it and knocks wildly in fear. A window opens and he sees Fairy first as a Beautiful Child, somewhat unreal, with blue hair and a face as white as a waxen image. At this stage, she shuts the window and the assassins capture him. Her role is not that of rescuer here; she lets him go into this part of his learning, lets him handle it himself.

There are parts of the book a movie can never go to, as the scene that pokes fun at the medical profession, where the Fairy arranges for “the three most famous doctors in the neighborhood” – a Crow, an Owl and a Talking Cricket. If you find a copy of the book, the chapter entitled (and no, I do not make this up!) “The Lovely Blue-Haired Child Saves the Marionette; she Puts him in Bed and Calls Three Doctors to See whether he is Alive or Dead,” is a must-read.

All through the story the image of Fairy changes with each reappearance – even turning up once as a “fine goat with blue hair”. She later takes on a more maternal role, and acts particularly tough when it comes to his lying. Though she seems to forgive all, she still has to get him to learn that being loved is only one part of loving.

About the idea of “change” in the story – Pinocchio wonders why Fairy changes so much, from encounter to encounter as it were, but he never changes. Fairy tells him that it is only people who grow; marionettes, or puppets never grow, they are born as puppets, live as puppets, die as puppets.

But in one particularly poignant moment later in the story, the puppet recognizes Fairy in spite of her very unfamiliar appearance. When she wants to know how, he says, “It was my great affection for you that told me.” Pinocchio too is changing, as we begin to see.

It is, in the story, Pinocchio’s acquisition of ‘good heart’ that brings about his transformation. Pinocchio continues to do good and bad, because he becomes human, not a saint, but his newly developed capacities for love and empathy, and above all, hope, is what makes him finally real.

May we all find ways to become 'truly human'.

Marguerite Theophil

Uniqueness and commonality
Stories simultaneously celebrate what is unique about us

and provide bridges to what is common among us.

~ Lucinda Flodin & Dennis Frederick