The Art of Story Telling

There is always someone in the family or one’s circle of friends who becomes the designated story teller. who possesses  the art of taking ordinary facts and enthralling the audience with suspense, humour or high drama.  As the old saying goes “ the truth is in the telling”. The ravi, the raconteur , the dastan goh were the centre of all social gatherings. A bazaar in Peshawer  is named after The Q issa Khwans  of Peshawar, who entertained travelers in cafes with stories.  Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani’s The T̤irāz al-ak̲h̲bār , was a manual for storytellers. The Daastaan e Amir Hamza has been told and retold in several versions including the  illustrated Hamzanama of Emperor Akbar.  Ghalib Lakhnawi  wrote in 1855 a “There are four things,in this dastan: battle, courtly assemblies, enchanted worlds and trickery (razm bazm t̤ilism aur ‘ayyārī ).

Story telling is the oldest form of transmission of knowledge.  Visual story telling from cave paintings, Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs, to narrative painting, photography and cinema. Oral histories and religious beliefs, moral fables and fairy tales and poetry were gradually preserved in written form. However, even in the written form, the voice of the narrator is always present. For every story there is a story teller, whether a scientific paper, an account of historical events or fiction writing, And where there is a story teller,  there is inevitably a point of view  determined by the context  of time, social values, and intention. Narration aims to influence the readers or listeners, to make them share the narrator’s perspective.    In its most innocent form, poets or song writers want the listener to understand their emotional experience. At its more manipulative extreme may be the writing of national histories, which while factual, leave out events that do not conform to the desired self-image of a nation.

The idea of a point of view is a natural way of viewing anything. The artist and photographer makes an aesthetic choice about what to include and what to exclude in a composition, but as Elliott Eisner says, the arts not only teach that there can be more than one solution to a problem, but also that there many ways to see and interpret the world..

William Faulkner in his  novel, The Sound and the Fury, presents the downfall of the aristocratic Compson family from four different perspectives. Lawrence Durrell does the same in the Alexandria Quartet. One of the most famous and influential of multiple story telling is the Thousand and One Nights or Alif Layla wa Layla,  its original  Arabic title, which created a unique literary genre. It tells the story of Scheherazade, who recounts stories all night to the ill-tempered monarch, Shahryar, who vowed to marry a new virgin every day, and have the previous one executed. Scheherazade, a well read, wise and accomplished woman, volunteers to marry Shahryar. Her mesmerizing skill at story telling keeps her alive night after night until Shahryar falls in love with her and is transformed into a benevolent monarch.

 The appeal of A Thousand and One Nights is its structure, while the stories themselves were adapted or added to across the ages, from Sassanian times to its Persian form, its Baghdad version with the addition of Khalifa Haroun Al Rashid,  the Cairo version, adapting ancient Egyptian folklore of demons and magicians.  It became popular in Europe after it was translated into French in the 18 C, and then in English and other languages. It influenced many well-known European writers from Joseph Addison to  HG Wells, DC Comics, Japanese  literature and Manga and a number of films, operas and music compositions, the most famous being Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”.

 

As Fakhr al-Zamani advises, the moral purpose of the story teller is not to tell the truth but to “win the heart of some afflicted person, and ease a frustrated mind”.

 

 

Durriya Kazi

August 24, 2020

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com