Today I had breakfast with a woman who has at her finger tips and the tip of her tongue 10,000 stories. She is Yaqui and has published the poetry she has written of her ancestors, the land and its plants and animals, and the traditions. She said she is a renegada, interesting word, no? To re-deny. It must come from people who deny traditions. However, she clearly saw traditions as a blessing. What she must denounce is the absurdity of tribal politics, a topic I will cover with an altar cloth and holy water and leave aside for another day.
She told me that when she was young they would go out into the desert to find willow wood and out of it they would make a simple cross. The cross would be dressed as an old woman and they would hang her at the front of their house and talk to her as a grandmother. She protected the home and the family. The old woman cross hangs there for many years until it becomes very old and is falling apart. It is then replaced.
She said that all of her poetry came from the cadence of speaking that she had learned when her grandmother told stories. The evening would come and they would build a large bonfire on the desert and she would tell them one story after another, some lovely, some sad, some full of fear and dread. I had to sit and wonder if the way we tell stories has not been damaging. In the past, people sat together and the story telling was more ritualized. People faced each other and made eye contract. Today, we read books, our eyes often on the book, not peering into the child's eyes.
She also told me that she had learned that unless you could tell a story simply, in few words, you did not understand its essence. The mark of a good storytelling was that gift of few words.
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When I lived in the US, a long time ago, we had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I used to record things off the radio all the time...KPFK and a couple other non-profits. One of the best things I ever recorded was N. Scott Momaday reading from his book, The Way to Rainy Mountain. You could HEAR the way he was raised, listening to story-tellers. He had a wonderful voice, and all the cadences were from oral tradition...just wonderful. Of course, those tapes, which I might still have somewhere, are now covered in Galapagos mold and would be useless even if I still owned a tape player. I tell (not read) stories (just 3 little pigs and that type) to Ariana all the time, and she is riveted, but she will still say quite often, "You need a book."
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