“My story of how you’re not going to believe me when I tell you this…” By William Byland
I remember the first time someone asked me what was “wrong” with my grandpa, who was at the time only 58, with a half head full of blackened and ever thinning hair. My grandpa had just stopped in the middle of the place where he had worked for twenty-five years, a Ford paint shop that wore age much like he did, haggard and full of hard lines that spoke of years of working with harsh chemicals, all in the name of shinny new “fixed” used cars. He had been spouting a thundering story full of tears and his own inner demons as he faced a machine that scared him beyond his control, an old Windows 97 computer, “The mark of the beast will come from these things...” and he said something about devils and hellfire and how is fathers before him fought for independence and a flag that he can’t even fly in his yard anymore. His boss, the foreman, looked me in the eye, with the question that he really wanted to ask me, even though I was only 11, hiding behind the proper question of the word “wrong” when all he wanted to ask was if the man I called Pa was crazy. Sadly yes, yes he was. He was a crazy storyteller. In my family, we are all story tellers, when we don’t take our meds and even more so, setting beside the nightlights of our darkened conversation rooms (living rooms).
I didn’t even watch TV at night until I was 18 years old because it was a long held tradition in my very very old family (The Byland’s go back to the time of Kings and Queens; we even have a historical attraction, Byland Abby, in England that our family still owns) to tell stories to one another prior to bed. So when I noted that we were studying research that supports that storytelling is literacy, I was again captivated immediately.
“Human beings narrate to remember,” no truer line has been uttered. Faulkner did it to provide the world with a sight of his frazzled mind, and I do it every night to try to be like him. We lie, as all great people have before us, but a true storyteller also communicates the truth of his or her generation so that our children’s children will know what our lives were like and so that they can learn from our oil spills, broken levies, and botched wars, not that they will or that we have, but at least we can say we tried. To me, literacy is reading and writing, and if you have ever told a great story, you are doing just that, writing the truths of your mind’s eye with words while someone else reads your words with their ever growing ears.
I know too much about Sudan.
Francis Bok, author of the begging quote of this article and of one of the best books I have ever read, Escape from Slavery, came to our school to give a speech about being a refuge and more over, about what it means to have unique knowledge in a world full of people who never even bother to watch the news, and when they do, they say that’s sad and continue eating their dinner plates full of food that many would give up his or her life just to taste. His telling of his escape from slavery left everyone in the audience, all teenagers mind you, speechless. He talked of the killings, the brutal rapes, and the torture of his people in front of his eyes, all in the name of racism and bigotry. But what I remember best was his ability to tell a story. The man was more impressive than even his book, which will become a work of literature in my opinion, could ever do. I could actually feel the words “Kaffir” and “Nigger” pounding into my chest like a shot form an anti-riot gun. If that is not literacy then I have no idea what literacy is.
Also, I have a very good friend who lives and works with the refuges in Darfur right now. He digs wells and sees the greatest human travesties that have befallen this great world in a very long time. It is interesting to hear his stories, through his broken, all too manly yet tear soaked voice over a SAT phone once a month, about women who are too afraid to go out into the fields in order to save their own lives because the Janjaweed will rape them as they tear their limbs off one at a time, and how their children’s fathers had their scalps removed to become ornaments on an ever growing necklace for some faceless solider of hate. My friend is an English teacher by profession, a hero by circumstance, and one of the best story tellers I have ever met. His stories are all more powerful because in the great literate tradition, his stories represent the truth of a heritage, that like it or not, our generation will inherit, along with the name of “Useless Bystanders”.
He also talks of their social literacy’s as he sees them tell the great stories of their peoples around camp fires and in dilapidated tents. He told me that their stories are like interesting history books that record time from the beginning of their race until the current, full of life and energy that we cannot force out of our American textbooks and into the minds of our own children. It is interesting to me that when a kid cannot sit still to read a book, we label him ADD, but are we really just saying that he prefers the long and time tested history of storytelling instead?
It is obvious, or at least I hope so, that I think that storytelling is not just literacy, but it is the heart of what makes us writers, readers, and even human. We spend far too much time labeling our children with special letters, so many in fact, we have to print books so that people can figure out that SS, RA, ADD means separate setting, read aloud, and attention disorder. We should spend more time figuring out why they are the way they are. I have BAD ADD, but really, I just have issues setting still because I am so use to people talking to me or telling me a great story. Also, we try to label children when there is something wrong with them, but in reality, it often steams from the fact that we are doing a crappy job understanding what they need. For example, I have many Black American students and Hispanic students, and they are all labeled ADD. How ridiculous is that? Why not just say, ADD, instead of ethnically different from the norm of what education was built for? Perhaps we can add new letters, ADD, ED. And that is the problem, wither we want to admit it or not, education was built for rich white kids, and I get so very angry every time I hear someone say, “I wish we could teach like we use to in the olden days when education meant something,” yeah, it meant something all right, racially isolated education, keeping the dominant on top and the “anything else” category making burgers at McDonalds. More to the point of this article, we try to teach children through literature and stories that are focused on the individual, when many students, from other countries like Sudan or even Mexico, simply do not understand this egocentric mentality, especially American Literature, where the focus is on one guy on a horse instead of an entire village. These students come from a place where the individual is important, but the group is more important. You will rarely see a child from Mexico complain because his mother works too much because in his mind, he has an entire group of women and men that serve as his parental unit. (Given, that is not always true of American born Mexicans, but I am referring to immigrants).
Also, we block access to literature to students because the stories are written and not told. It is for this reason that it is important that we accept storytelling as a form of literacy and that we being to look at our evaluation standards, and develop them to include those that come from backgrounds that support this type of literacy: Native Americans, Black Americans, African Immigrants, Hispanic Immigrants….and even little Red Neck boys from the South, with grandfathers that tell the stories of their families and religious beliefs, even when it makes them look nuts in front of a foreman, in a garage, built for fixing used and dent cars. WE need this, America needs this, and I needed this.
William Byland