In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken

Listening is the first act of writing (thoughts on listening, oral tradition, and exercises for my paid subscribers)

Photo by SHIMO yann on Unsplash

I was recently asked who taught me be a writer, and my answer is that it took a whole village of parents, teachers, friends who gave me those life-changing novels.

But lately, I remind myself to acknowledge my grandfather who taught me the first, underrated skill of writing: listening.

My grandfather was the first storyteller I ever really knew. He was what West Africans refer to as a griot, a preserver of oral stories, passing on the tradition to me. And I am biased of course when I say he was the best. But he was good. Not good just in delivery alone, but good in his ability to remember.

This is what we undervalue in the oral tradition of storytelling: it is more than just entertainment. It is a repository for culture, and values, but it is also a tool for sharpening the memory. Every single story is told about the same characters, in the same way with slight variations accepted, and with the same lessons. They are committed to memory, and my grandfather knew how to memorize them the same way he memorized history passages from textbooks.

I would sit at his feet, the warm Haitian afternoons thick with sounds of the neighborhood: vendors, donkeys and mules braying, roosters and hens and guinea fowls clucking about, children’s laughter and crackling fires in the evening. I would beg, and beg all day for stories, and he made me wait. It’s part of the fun, you see. The adults enjoy being begged, because the stories are not just jokes. They’re treasures.

He would bring me buckets and basins full of mangoes and sugar cane from his crops and I would position myself on a straw mat on the floor. He would sit on a chair. And I would listen as he told stories of Bouki and Malice—tricksters and opportunists whose wit and mischief could outsmart kings and spirits alike. And he always started, as tradition demands, with call and response.

“Krik?”

“Krak!”

This is the knock on the door of storytelling, how the griot makes sure you are listening, you are ready. My grandfather’s stories were rich with imagery, moral lessons, and vocabulary that I, a young city slicker, was unfamiliar with. I distinctly remember him telling me a story about Bouki and his horse.

“Epi, Bouki sele chwal la!”

I could not figure out, for the life of me, what sele meant. Even though I spoke the language, the brand of Creole I was familiar with was still colonized, so much that that I did not know the true name of things until I returned to the country with my parents and my father had to teach me the definition for words we never use in the city. I had to learn that when we spoke of the kanari, we didn’t mean a bird, but we meant the clay jug in his kitchen that kept the water cool like a refrigerator.

So it took us a while to realize that I had sele wrong, that it didn’t mean to “salt” a horse — why on earth would you salt a horse anyway? You wouldn’t salt a horse! No, he meant to “saddle” a horse.

Through the oral tradition, I was taught to listen not only to what was said, but to what was left unsaid, what was said differently, what was said beautifully or poetically, using terms that were otherworldly, words that were vivid and rich and new.

This is how I learned storytelling, when I think about it. Not from a book, not from a diagram, but from inheritance.

Years later, I would sit in university classrooms and learn about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Shape of a Story.” And though I admired the clarity of their graphs and arcs, something in me today resists the conventions of western storytelling as absolute.

Because sure, the hero has a journey, and Vonnegut’s chart does follow beautiful curves, but Black, Caribbean, Indigenous, diasporic storytellers have also mastered rhythm in poetry and in verse for centuries. We have myth and magic, migration and memory.

We have storytellers, griots, who carried history in their memory, in their voices, in their heads, not their notebooks. Here is what I mean:

In Haitian paintings, I have always been fascinated with the naive art that depicts animals in the jungle: leopards, giraffes, tigers and lions hiding in the bush. When I was young, I couldn’t understand how or why a people living on a Caribbean island was so obsessed with the recreation of animals you’d see on safari.

Until I ask myself: what if these paintings are conjuring ancient images from memory? What if centuries after the TransAtlantic slave trade, we are here remembering what our landscape looked like back home where our tribes still coexist with zebras and elephants? Of course, it’s also possible that these are actual biblical references (Garden of Eden scenes featuring Adam and Even hidden in the foliage). But what if?

Ask a Haitian woman to give you a tutorial on wrapping her hair in a turban. She doesn’t need to watch a YouTube video for this. Her hands just know what to do, mostly because we have grown up surrounded with mothers wearing headwraps and turbans, but ancestral memory carries here too where our great, great grandmother and aunts wrapped fabric around their heads before starting their day.

Even after we crossed the door of no return, and traveled through seas, we carried memory with us. We needed a way to remember who we are and where we come from. Memory must be sharpened, always, like a blade against whetstone. Telling stories around the fire is how we preserve memory.

And our stories weren’t bound by rules. Where they came from, our stories wandered, sang, circled and repeated themselves, extended themselves into teachable moments, explained the world to us and the origin of things. They remembered. If you don’t believe me, go read Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard or Ben Okri’s A Famished Road.

In order to sharpen my memory and help preserve these stories so that I can pass them on as the tradition demands, I’ve begun to spend time lately with my friend, folklorist Liliane Nerette Louis. Together, we discuss folk medicine, and we exchange stories. I try to take notes when we meet, but mostly, she tries to get me to practice so I can remember how to tell these stories to my children, and later on, to an audience.

Liliane is a master storyteller and published author of Krik? Krak! When Night Falls and Other Stories (now out of print). She is a regular participant at the Florida Folklife Festival, and is in the process of launching the Haitian Folklife Society. At eighty-nine years old, she has built a name for herself in cultivating the art of Haitian cooking, healing through natural remedies, and sharing stories.

In this excerpt below, listen to Liliane help me through the process of remembering stories I no longer know how to tell.

To decolonize storytelling is to remember that narrative doesn’t only belong to the West. We can be writers without having read Dostoevsky or Austen or Tostoy. Stories belong to everyone and they’ve been told since the first caveman drew them on a wall of a cave. Narratives live in the drum, in the song, in the oral pulse of people around the world who understand that story is not always a line, but sometimes a circle.

When I write now, I still hear my grandfather’s voice, soft, almost like a hum, like cotton. His rhythm reminds me that storytelling is really about survival of generations through story, after story, after story. One Krik? Krak at a time, we keep us going.

So let’s sharpen memory and practice ways in which we can tell stories by relying on our sense of hearing and listening.