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Turning lives into stories

Many people assume storytelling is an art that belongs to writers. In fact, we are all story tellers. The only way we can make sense of our experiences is by finding connections that can form a meaningful narrative. Stories transmit social and cultural values across generations. We are the sum total of all our stories. Storytelling takes many forms, from writing our biodata, to shared memories with friends, revisiting family albums, or more formally as writers, poets, singers or film makers.

 

Homer’s epic stories, the Iliad and Odyssey, written in Ancient Greece, established the masculine ideal of the courageous warrior, and the glorification of war. It came to define heroism in Europe, seeping from the actual battlefield into cinema and computer games. 

 

Arabic epic literature best known through The One Thousand and One Nights, abounds with fantastical adventures, animal fables, proverbs, the supernatural, humorous and moral tales.  Pakistani folk lore centres around ancient love stories. The Ramayana and Mahabharat, while depicting wars, also made the more obscure religious texts accessible to ordinary people, generating many more relatable deities such as Krishna, Ganesh and Hanuman.  

 

Hollywood has emerged as the most powerful source of modern mythology, creating archetypes of lovers, criminals and family drama, with far reaching global influence. The war film genre became a propaganda machine glamorising war and heroism, and stereotyping the enemy. 

Native Americans were depicted as brutal savages, defending a land that was ‘destined for white people’, Black Americans were presented through the lens of slavery, shown to be simple, naive or dangerous, Black American actors pushed back to claim centre stage, and the recent film, Killers of the Flower Moon, attempts to correct the perception of Native Americans.  Arabs once fascinatingly exotic with genies, flying carpets, and horses galloping in the desert, soon became violent Palestinians, and post 9/11, depicted as evil terrorists.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet symbolizes the perfect love story across the world, and Che Guevara the perfect rebel to all those who want to defy the establishment from Peru to Pakistan.  Parveen Shakir became the voice of the modern Pakistani woman, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Habib Jalib the voice of protest. The definition of an advanced society is its ability to go to the moon, rather than the eradication of poverty.   

Narratives can also be inverted. The 2022 biopic of Elvis Presley highlighted his inspiration and respect for Black music, challenging the all-white American image promoted in the racially divided America of the 50s and 60s. America was uncomfortable when Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and refused to fight in the Vietnam war, but he has now become a much-revered icon proving his words true : ‘I am America, I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me.’   The narrative of the suffering of the Jewish Holocaust has been sidelined by the current brutality of Israeli attacks on the civilian inhabitants of Gaza and the West bank, and as a consequence of their support of these attacks, USA, Britain and many European countries have lost the image of the upholders of human rights.

Even the story of Superman created by Jerry Seigel, is being revisited as a symbol of the loss of the Jewish homeland, as the planet Kal-El (Hebrew for ‘All is God’) blows up, and Superman is sent to Earth (America) in a spaceship not unlike baby Moses in his reed basket. 

 

Pakistan too is in a maelstrom of shifting narratives. The ignorant masses have turned out to be politically aware. The awe of the powerful has turned into disappointed contempt.   In his paper ‘Anti Hero’, Mathew Mezey writes ‘Over the last 30 years we have lost the respect we once had for all experts and professionals and most notably politicians’ - a phenomenon called the ‘decline of deference’.

 

Yet society needs its heroes: those extraordinary people who show what is possible for a human being to achieve. Heroes defend the defenseless and downtrodden, and represent the triumph of good over evil, and are, as Ahmed Mian puts it, ‘A beacon of hope in a troubled land.’ In the words of Chief Dan George, ‘If legends fall silent, who will teach the children of our ways?’

 

Durriya Kazi

March 12, 2024

Karachi

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

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