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
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