Recently I created a list of stories I had crafted and told and stories I would like to tell and roughly categorized these by type: personal stories, fact based stories, myths and legends, wisdom stories and folktales. I wasn’t surprised to see that the highest number of stories were listed under the personal stories category. However, what was surprising was the joy I felt when reading the titles of the stories listed under folktales (including wisdom tales). This was completely unexpected
As a budding storyteller the first folktale I told was from Pakistan, “Diamond Cut Diamond” as part of the requirement in the Art of Storytelling class. And while I enjoyed telling the story as a story, I didn't fully understand what a folktale was. Of course, I had read the chapter on “How to Tell a Folktale” from Liz Warren’s The Oral Tradition Today: An Introduction to the Art of Storytelling. but I was missing a key experience, the delight in telling a story.
After a two-year gap, when I returned to storytelling, I took the class on Multicultural Folktales and I went in with a biased attitude that I wouldn't like folktales. Being a very practical person, I had a difficult time connecting to folktales because of the magical transformations and events skirting on the edge of reality. They seemed unbelievable to me. Another part of folktales that was challenging for me was seeing the value of hope instead of oppression in a story like Cinderella. But what was heartening was that I could tell a wisdom story and that would count because wisdom tales are a type of folktales.
Then I read Rabbi Rossel’s words.
“You craft a story by making choices as to what the story should sound like. Stories sound different to a different generation.
“That’s what the old storytellers used to do in order to make the stories their own..”
These words opened up a whole new world of stories for me to tell. It was like I now had permission to craft and tell a version of a folktale that reinforced the values of our time. In my version of the folktale “The Wicked Stepmother” a Cinderella folktale from Kashmir the passive protagonist changed to one who was active in creating her own destiny. In crafting the Brothers Grimm’s “The White Snake” I took the liberty of changing the protagonist from being male to female giving her the role of saving the prince instead of a poor servant boy going through trials to win the hand of a beautiful princess. Once I found this freedom, I also found the delight in the mystical transformations. My constant reminder, however, to myself when crafting my version of a fairytale is to refrain from overexplaining the departure from reality. I am learning to trust the listeners imagination rather than enforcing my interpretation. While I create the images in the story it is the listener who imagines how the event occurred.
As I evolve as a storyteller I recognise that my responsibility is to continue the oral tradition of not only storytelling but telling folktales because as a Native American storyteller said, “Stories are living things and we keep them alive through telling.”
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