History of the World in 100 Tales (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

As a traditional oral storyteller for thirty-five years, with an eclectic repertoire of tales from all over the world, I sometimes refer to the inside of my head as ‘the soup of stories’. Sustaining, delicious, with multiple ingredients, recipes that are followed conscientiously or that are tweaked and added to – who does not like a good soup? The soup is mostly served as live performances in all kinds of spaces, whether formally in designated public performance venues or informally in community settings such as youth clubs and care homes.

However, sometimes these servings find their way into book-shaped receptacles, emerging as anthologies of folk tales or myths. Just as with a performance consisting of a sequence of selected tales, a written journey through these chosen stories is one in which each member of the collection sheds light on its fellows, as well as being worth reading in its own right. In my occasional efforts to tame those internal soupy tidal surges into recipes, I have written several anthologies for The History Press, the more recent having a wider remit than their predecessors.

By its title alone, A History of the World in 100 Tales implies perceptions of human time across a vast span – while referring to all possible physical places on the planet. These invoke a huge mouthful of traditional narratives to savour and swallow. ‘How on Earth are you going to do that?’, many horrified, wondrous and all-stages-in-between colleagues and friends have asked. How indeed? Several possible structures were considered within the recently developed trope of describing 100 examples of something significant through the perspective of a timeline. Perhaps my earliest inspiration was Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, whose radio broadcasts I listened to several times, and whose book I distributed to as many of my friends as I could afford to favour. Is it too obvious to say that given the countless thousands of traditional stories in the world, it is almost impossible to choose those that are most representative of time and place? However, without that almost incantatory formula of 100, I would be swimming or sinking in the soup of stories for the rest of my lifespan. When it comes to the choosing, I am reminded of that Korean story in which the lazy listener has confined all the stories he has heard into a sack rather than tell them. The stories rebel until he sees reason and lets them out by sharing them. I beg forgiveness of all those stories I have heard and not been able to share here in written form for reasons of time and space, forces to which mortals are subject, but which stories easily transcend.

So how to approach this ambitious title? Conversations with historians, anthropologists, cultural attachés and storytellers revealed pitfalls and provided suggestions. My first obstacle was that I am not a historian, although being an outsider perhaps helps me to see how very subjective interpretations of the past are, and how these change, according to scientific discoveries and to the social attitudes that interpret them. However, historians are themselves not necessarily didactic about perspectives. During a conversation with social historian Dr Daniel Weinbren, we discussed his assertion that, ‘history is about a relationship between the past and the present that is always shifting’.

Perhaps more controversially, he went on to say that this interpretation through time is one of the ways we ‘make ourselves feel more “composed”, comfortable or integrated’.

While thinking about individual and collective biases towards interpreting scientific facts and physical archaeological finds, I came across an article in which even the expression ‘through time’, or the term ‘timeline’, are not necessarily relevant or applicable in some cultures. In an interview for Emergence magazine with Tyson Yunkaporta entitled ‘Deep Time Diligence’, he attempts to explain his culture’s approach to time by describing aspects of his language, Wik-Mungkan, which is one of the few intact indigenous languages spoken in Australia today:

So here I am with a title in which the very terms, whether relating to time or place, are so open to question. Working within my cultural linear perception of time and my perspective of the world geography as represented by five continents, I have been playing with another construct, more closely related to my practice as a storyteller. This consists of different kinds of stories, running in my mind along a timeline with the earliest being creation myths that describe how the world was made, all the way through to urban legends of which internet legends are the latest example. This model, with its various story forms of creation myths, pantheonic myths, epics, legends, wonder tales, folk tales and urban legends may be useful for categorising what are known as ‘Indo-European’ traditional narratives, but which do not necessarily apply to other continents. I can go to somewhere near where I live and within a 2-mile radius see the places whose story history comprises examples of creation myth, epic, wonder tale, folk tale and urban legend. Where these genres of story can be found, I have replicated this continuum, believing it to be a timeline of story development relevant to some places and cultures.

However, I could stand elsewhere in the world and the same would not be true. Cultures have developed differently and so have their respective stories, this variety being reflected also in what they represent and how they are understood in their places of origin. One man’s myth, therefore, could be another man’s reality. I have benefitted from the advice to consider the difference between people’s connections to real and imagined events. I can be sure in my own mind about the distinction between them, but I can’t guarantee that everyone would agree with me. Being raised in a place where the Abrahamic faiths are the most common, I have noticed that the stories written in sacred texts can be a source of conflict between those who believe that they are factual, those who think their truths are symbolic, and those who think that they are entirely fictitious – that is one of the reasons why I have not included any examples here.

How then can I justify using stories that have religious importance to other cultures? There are certainly hundreds if not thousands of years’ worth of precedents in the rewriting and retelling of different versions of Hindu religious stories, and many Hindus believe that Hinduism celebrates a plurality of perspectives. I feel less uncertain, therefore, about my doing so here, and being blessed with Hindu Indian adoptive family, feel that I can be immersed in their traditional literature without a uniquely European perspective. I may never know if I am offending people from very different cultures by misrepresenting their traditional oral literature in this book, either in the way I present it, or by the act of including it in this context. If I do offend, I hope that I may be forgiven.

These thoughts are leading to the consideration of a salient topic of our times, and one that is particularly pertinent to this place, England, from where I am writing. The topic is cultural appropriation, which has been one of huge importance among oral traditional storytellers and among whom opinions vary. They vary also among indigenous storytellers from other places, some not wanting their stories told by representatives of a colonial power and some believing that the world needs their stories and that these should be shared. I know storytellers who can be vehement on the subject, proposing that traditional stories, originating from and/or representing their respective cultures, should not be told by others; they are something to be protected. Another, from the same part of the world, has asked me to retell the stories he has shared with me because they have a message for the whole world. I have also been told only to tell stories from my own culture by a person who mistakenly assumed that our backgrounds were culturally similar. However, as one who is entitled to five passports spanning three continents, I wouldn’t know where to start! I write this to reveal a bias that inclined me to write this book.

I have never noticed or been told that people from different countries have objected to my telling a story that comes from their culture of origin, but acknowledge it is a possibility. My own experience is to the contrary, when people have expressed their appreciation at my knowing something about their part of the world represented by a story from that place. Many years ago, when living in London, I worked in settings providing services for refugees who, finding themselves facing discrimination, were pleased that their cultures were being honoured by my telling stories from their homelands. The most poignant example of this kind of approbation was...