Word of Mouth.
Here! Read this!
“Sooner or later would come the turn of the Anansi stories. These were the Negro tales that Pixie had heard as a child in Jamaica. She told them in the dialect in which she had heard them. Each story began in the same way: ‘In a long before time before Queen Victoria came to reign over we …’ Then would come the story. ‘Der lib in de bush one black fat shiny spider call Anansi …’ or ‘Der lib in de bush one king an’ dis king he was de mos’ beautiful king dat eber was, but dis king him hab on BEARD!’ Pixie used to squat down on the floor to tell these stories, playing while she told them with small wooden figures she had made and painted to represent the characters. The stories were very easy to remember, being real folk-tales handed down by word of mouth. Everything forgettable had been filtered from them through the years. Trying one day to tell someone what they were like, I began with ‘In a long before time before …’ etc. and found that the rest followed without any effort on my part. For many years in many places I used to tell these stories that I first heard in Pixie’s studio in the Boltons, and again and again have come back to find the children to whom I had told them telling them for themselves, and more than once I have heard the children of the chlldren to whom I had told them telling the stories they had heard from their mothers and telling them, they too with some echo of Pixie’s Jamaican accents, though they had never heard Pixie nor even heard me repeating them at second hand.”
That’s from Arthur Ransome’s autobiography. He was a story teller. In case you don’t know, he wrote Swallows and Amazon among others. Stories that have entertained and delighted children - and adults - for the best part of a hundred years.
He seemed to be somehow inherently aware of the importance of story telling. An importance summed up in that last, “Trying one day to tell someone what they were like, I began with …” and he tells how generations of children learned and recounted those same stories in the same words.
I am excited by this. It describes for me the flow of the culture but also how different flows of different cultures merge and interplay.
But, in reciting the story in the original words those grand children and great grand children are unaware that they are conveying the substance of a culture that they don’t, in all likelihood, share. That’s not important. We are all human and all may share one another’s experiences of fantasy, joy, grief - life.
