oral storytelling

I remember going up to my grandparents' house way up in Buffalo, NY when I was really little. My grandpa and father would go hunting for the week, and I'd stay and have a girls-only week with my grandma. During these visits, my grandma would always tell me elaborate bedtime stories. I would come up with the characters, and she would weave them into webs of words that lulled me to sleep. She told me about the adventures of the little ceramic bird figurines that sat on the shelf above the bed. She told me about when she was young, and how she met my grandpa. But my favorite stories were those she told about Glitter and Daisy, my imaginary friend and her pet hamster. I still remember some of the stories today, and the characters are a memory of my grandma that I hold close.

My mother's family is from New Orleans. My grandmother still tells me stories all the time - about made-up characters, about her childhood, or about things that happened just yesterday. We sit out on the porch and watch the hummingbirds in the garden, and her Cajun accent becomes a bit stronger as she remenisces about growing up in the Ninth Ward. My favorite story that she and my grandfather tell is the one about how they met - he had just dropped out of seminary school and was going to join the Peace Corps, and she was on a young women's retreat. He had gone to say goodbye to a friend who worked at the camp where my grandmother's retreat was taking place, and ended up joining in their campfire sing-along. He says he was instantly smitten with my grandma, and got her phone number that night. My grandmother always promptly adds that she could only fit him in for a date on Sunday afternoon because she already had 3 dates on that weekend! That part always made me laugh. My grandpa ended up staying home and married my grandma a year later.

My personal experience with oral storytelling has been mostly through my grandparents. My father's family is mostly Polish, and stories were very prominent in my grandparents' and great-grandparents' childhoods. They, in return, handed down their style of storytelling to their children and grandchildren. My grandmother often let me come up with the characters that she told me about, and then let me fill in the blanks in the stories. She told me that was how her mother and grandmother had told her bedtime tories, and it made her much more fond of stories because she got to have a say in what happened. My mother's family is French Cajun and Irish, so many of the stories that side of my family tell have some New Orleans flavor and adventure, and are always shared over a piping bowl of gumbo.

This week in class we are talking about oral storytelling and its influence on different cultures. We are currently reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which tells the story of a man and his life as part of the Igbo tribe in Nigeria. In the Igbo culture, oral storytelling is extremely important. The style of Achebe's writing is highly influenced by Igbo oral tradition in the way that he structures his sentences and uses figurative language. In my exploration of the Igbo people through Things Fall Apart, perhaps I will learn from the oral tradition of African culture. But for now I still have to finish reading the book!

Love,

GlamingoGirl