Storytelling
A Basic Necessity
There’s this indelible fact where books are concerned, and it’s that there can never be too many. We are all born with a TBR list that will never be finished, a list we add to every day because, let’s face it, every book sounds so good and every cover looks so pretty! And while the task can seem daunting (so many books, not enough time) it doesn’t deter the voracious reader from accepting the impossible challenge.
Human beings have these basic necessities: food, water, shelter, safety, belonging, and when you get further in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, recognition & self-fulfillment. One thing missing from the list though, stories. There is an insatiable need in all human beings for storytelling. Whether it’s to be the storyteller or the story consumer, it’s a desire that has taken on various manifestations to satisfy our story-hungry population. It’s the stories we gather from the news on local and global affairs. It’s the stories we share at the dinner table about our day at work or school. It’s about the way we chronicle our leisure time, creating a journey’s tale from the airport to the resort or from the bed to the couch for a restful day of binge eating and television watching. It’s in the television programs that we tune in for dutifully and the conversations we have about it afterwards. It’s in the books, films, the comedy shows, museum trips, science exhibitions, and the religious services that we attend. And on a more personal level, it’s in the stories that we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and how we are in relation with the world around us. Story manifests and morphs itself at the quest and imagination of the storyteller. If we can dream it, we can tell it.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside.” -Maya Angelou
There is not a day that goes by that a story is not told, and consequentially that a story is not consumed. And with all of this storytelling, we as people, get the privilege of picking and choosing which story to consume and which ones to put off for a rainy day or not to consume at all. This is the greatest choice a human being can have. And to truly become aware of this truth means you are aware that you are the master and creator of your destiny. You are the author of your own story.
Living in a world where we are inundated with stories of white maleness, stories that feed into the dominant narrative and create deluded portraits of a global society contingent on white male validation has, for too long, changed the way we consume stories. There are a lot of possibilities as to the origins of this in the 200,000 years of our human experience; possibilities as to how we’ve come so far and lonely to this state of storytelling, in which stories about people of color are marginalized even though, as a whole, we are the majority of the world’s population. In religion, the origin is perhaps found in the shift from ancient stories that depict multiple gods to the more recent stories that depict the presence of one, who decides your worthiness of his providence. In politics, it’s the dividing of people and telling stories that create superior and inferior complexes to control society; divide and conquer. But this isn’t about the sociopolitical implications of white maleness, it isn’t even about white males, it’s about storytelling.
Unfortunately, so many of us have accepted this dominant narrative as truth. We live within it, and we base our personal and creative stories off of it. For example, in contemporary literature, we set the literary standard to John Green and place Junot Díaz in the periphery. Our imaginations work in the confines of the story structures created by white maleness, to the point that not only do we participate in the denigration of diverse stories, we uphold and protect the dominant narrative at all costs.
After reading the article on the NY Post slamming the NYPL Summer Reading Challenge, Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blatant dismissal of the need for diversity didn’t strike me nearly as much as her sense of urgency that the stories she read as a kid were “the best” stories, the standard stories, necessary to provide the life lessons that they taught her. As if Summer 2014 is the only window of introducing children to literature and that the NYPL was the only reading resource to provide it. To Riley, books such as Peter Pan, The Hobbit, and Charlotte’s Web, which have been on schools’ required reading lists consistently since their publications, should not have been left off the recreational list for the sake of a few children getting to see themselves in literature. There’s this idea in Riley’s argument that the literature suggested by the NYPL doesn’t foster imaginative exploration; that it provides no depth and is just a trivial attempt to get children reading. And while the last part is true, that the library is attempting to get children reading, or to put it more accurately, providing a space and the options for children to read, Riley completely misses the mark on the former. These stories do foster the imagination of children, by giving them characters in the image of themselves. The issue now is if we’ll allow their imaginations to flourish instead of confining it within the limitations of the dominant narrative, a confinement Riley knows so well that she can’t seem to see out of it.
There’s this thing that happens when a book gets into your heart and mind and refuses to leave. Books are experiences, and to some, books are like friends, and we carry them on our spirits everywhere we go. They help us see who we are, they give us a sense of belonging, and they give us frameworks to pursue our dreams and improve on the human experience. Understanding that is to see that those final levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, belonging, self-esteem/recognition, and self-fulfillment, are all reflections of our need for stories.
I can understand the fervent desire to want to give everyone the books that change us, in the hopes that it’ll have the same effect on another reader, but alas, it won’t. All books aren’t going to provide the same experience to everybody. Storytelling, in general, is about trust. Trusting that everyone has their story, whether they tell it or consume it. So as far as books go, we have to trust that the right stories will find us, as children or as adults. And in my experience, good books always find their reader.
