Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  Here’s a long night—an endless night—before us,

  and no time yet for sleep, not in this hall.

  Recall the past deeds and the strange adventures,

  I could stay up until the sacred Dawn

  as long as you might wish to tell your story.

  When the story has come to an end, King Alkinoos completes his hospitality by giving the wanderer a dreamguided ship to carry him home: “Clear sailing shall you have now, homeward now, however painful all the past.” In the shelter of Alkinoos’s generous listening, Odysseus can finally land on the shore of his own story, and from there find his way home to Ithaka.

  One of the host’s primary roles is to ensure that stories aren’t used inappropriately. Stories are not ads, sermons, lectures or doctrines. They do not increase productivity, move merchandise or convert the heathen. In The Canterbury Tales, Harry deals with a potential disaster when the Pardoner tries to hijack the storytelling by using his tale to solicit donations from his listeners. He is as drunk as a skunk—not an auspicious way to win anyone’s trust. As if that weren’t bad enough, he begins by boasting to them about how he makes his living using storytelling to persuade stupid peasants to pay for the privilege of seeing his phony holy relics. “I preche nothyng but for coveitise” (I preach only for covetousness) is his foul and cynical confession. Then he tells the pilgrims his story, a famous medieval legend about three drunken, boastful youths who scoff at the power of death, only to bring fatal calamity upon themselves through their greed, sacrilege and violence. At the end of the story, the Pardoner gets caught up in his own con. He starts in on Harry Bailly, of all people, as if he were just another ignorant paisano ready for the gulling: “‘Come forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon / And thow shall kisse the relikes everychone, / Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purs!’” Wrong move. The innkeeper’s righteous indignation still echoes six centuries later. “‘Nay, nay,’” he fumes, “‘thanne have I Cristes curs!… Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech (undies) / And swere it were relyk of a seint, / Though it were with thy fundament [shit] depeint!’” In his rage at this flagrant abuse of a sacred trust, Harry tells the Pardoner to get stuffed: “‘I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hand / In stide of relikes or seintuaries / Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee help hem carie; / They shul be shryned in an hogges toord!’” Yes, enshrined in a hog’s turd. So much for storytellers who use the art for fraudulent ends.

  As the contemporary storytelling movement has evolved, many of the customs of oral culture have been rediscovered and put to new use. Diane Wolkstein, in her great collection of Haitian folk tales The Magic Orange Tree, reports that in Haiti the storyteller calls out “Cric?… when she or he has a story to tell. ‘Crac!’ the audience responds if they want that storyteller to begin. If they do not respond with Crac! the storyteller cannot begin.” Wolkstein’s book has had its effect: at storytelling events around the world today, you can call out “Cric?” and sure enough you will hear an answering “Crac!” In my work, I carry a talking stick and pass it to the storytellers. In northern Canada, native tellers often pass an eagle feather from speaker to speaker. In our houses of Parliament, the Speaker of the House holds a Speaker’s Mace. Such rituals recognize the authority of the speaker, and remind the community of the importance of listening.

  Reaffirming this intimate bond between teller and audience is often the essence of the host’s job. I was once hosting a storytelling evening and a group from Sierra Leone dropped in. We invited them to tell stories and, before the first man took the talking stick, he walked three times around the candles in front of the teller’s stool. We asked him why, and he said that in his tradition the storyteller must circle the tribal fire to thank the community for letting him speak. Other cultures take a somewhat slyer approach. In Tuscany, Alessandro Falassi noticed that the nonna, the grandmother who was the best storyteller in the district, made sure her listeners were wild with anticipation before she opened her mouth. Refusing to tell her stories on demand, she made her audience wait for it. Wait?—she made them beg. “The children had been murmuring since dinner was over. ‘Come on, grandma, tell us a story,’ and they kept it up while the table was being cleared and as the dishes were being washed. The old woman procrastinated… She scoffed and joked, being careful, however, not to give a flat refusal… ‘No, now there is work to be done… But, sweeties, I am dead tired… Who can remember stories! Ah, if I could only remember them.’” Only when she was comfortably ensconced by the fire with a warmer in her lap and a glass of sweet wine in her hand did this master-teller deign to begin. Falassi observes that at these Tuscan gatherings, “almost never have I heard storytellers start out with the story most requested.” My favourite depiction of a storyteller’s need for her listeners’ maximum attention is in Rafik Schami’s book Damascus Nights, a contemporary take on the Thousand and One Nights: “‘I’m going to drink my tea and go,’ said Fatma. ‘You must forgive me for saying that your reception is not worthy of my story. You can’t tell anything to people with faces as twisted as yours.’ Fatma closed her eyes. ‘No!’ she said very quietly, ‘By the soul of my mother, if you can’t come right out and beg me for the story then I am going to leave.’”

  Whether you circle the fire, hold the talking stick, yell Cric!, play the nonna’s game of hard to get or simply say, as Fatma does, that you expect more enthusiasm, the underlying principle is the same. To tell a story well, the listeners must be involved. This is an art of conversation more than monologue. The host, teller and listeners are all complicit in the mission of keeping the stories alive.

  A good host must be willing, as Alkinoos said, to stay up until the sacred dawn. The storyteller’s shire lies in its own time-zone. When stories are told, we leave behind the world of instant noodles, high-speed downloads, split seconds and rush hours. Here people say “Come sit down,” instead of “Hurry up! Hurry up!” In a well-hosted storytelling event, nobody looks at their watch, but everyone always has enough time. Once you step away the clockruled world, there’s no need to keep stories short. In fact, the opposite is true. The late Joe Neil MacNeil, writing about his Cape Breton childhood, remembers that when the neighbours gathered in the evening, “The long tales were the ones that most pleased people….” Pennishish, a great Omushkigo storyteller and oral historian from the west coast of James Bay, Canada, has collected traditional myth-cycles that take ten weeks to tell. I’ve heard him tell many of these, and once he starts, there are no shortcuts in recounting the creation of the world. This kind of marathon storytelling works best in the winter, when the nights up north are very long.

  Most of my own experiences as a host have been at 1,001 Friday Nights of Storytelling and the Toronto Festival of Storytelling. When I decided to follow the way of the storyteller, I wanted to tell to adults as much as to children. In 1978 I approached some friends who ran a small café in the Kensington Market area of Toronto. Markets have always been congenial places for storytelling. Kensington Market—the old Jewish Market—was and still is one of the liveliest quartiers in the city, full of Chinese and Korean greengrocers, Portuguese fishmongers, cheese shops, bakeries, cafés, second-hand clothing stores, West Indian record stores, Middle Eastern and Latin American food stalls and one Jewish department store. The name of my friends’ café was, appropriately enough, Gaffers. They were happy to let me tell stories on Friday nights, between the sets of an unremarkable folksinger.

  Eventually more people started coming for the stories than the music, and the singer left. One night, a friend of mine mentioned that he knew some stories by heart, and might be willing to tell one. I was overjoyed. I had never intended this to be a solo performance, and anyway I was quickly running out of repertoire. So a week later, we had our first open session. After a while it became known as 1,001 Friday Nights of Storytelling and twenty-five years later it is still happening, though it takes place in a church now.

  Here’s how the evening works. The host comes early, sets the ch
airs around the teller’s stool, lights the candles and prepares the talking stick. The crowd gathers, always a mix of old-timers and newcomers. The host dims the lights, stands by the stool and says, “Welcome to a Thousand and One Friday Nights of Storytelling. Who is here for the first time?” The host explains the custom of the talking stick: whoever holds it carries the attention of the group. Then the host asks, “Who has the first story?” and the stories begin. Sometimes there are long pauses between stories, and the host simply waits, knowing people are making connections in their minds and trying to choose the right story for the moment. If it weren’t for the buzz of a light plane banking towards the Toronto Island Airport, or the echo of cheers from the ballpark a kilometre away, we could be back in Harry Bailly’s inn.

  I usually like to stay behind after the evening has wound to a close. Before joining folks at the café across the street I sit in the cloisters outside the church hall. A caretaker once told me that ever since the fire destroyed the original church, he’s heard voices murmuring in the belfry of the old tower—the only thing that didn’t burn down in the fire. “And I hear, from your voice,” says Kublai Khan to his master raconteur Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, “the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.” As I sit in the garden after a long night of stories, I find it heartening that a haunted tower stands sentinel over this tribe of downtown yarnspinners. It reminds me that calamities can be survived, whether of fire or forgetfulness, and that the voices of its storytellers may indeed be the reason a city has a centre, a past, a dream, a story. As for the midnight sounds in the tower, perhaps they’re the whispered echoes of a thousand and one Friday nights of storytelling.

  I used to open the Friday Nights by saying, in my youthful ignorance and enthusiasm, “Welcome to Gaffers Café, home of the world renaissance of storytelling!” In 1978 the storytelling movement was just beginning, but our café was not the only place where this art was reawakening. A group called the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling (now called National Storytelling Network) had, under the leadership of Jimmy Neil Smith, launched a national storytelling festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, a few years earlier. Bruno de la Salle had founded the Centre de la Littérature Orale, just down the street from Chartres Cathedral. In England, Ben Haggarty was busy lighting fires for the English storytelling movement. Diane Wolkstein ran a storytelling series at the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park. Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill, a.k.a. Brother Blue, had started telling stories in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Liz Weir, in Northern Ireland, went through the land like a narrative Johnny Appleseed, planting seeds of storytelling events that brought people together across religious and cultural divides. Chava Lieber was building an Israeli storytelling movement through the Beit Ariela library in Tel Aviv; and Folke Tegetthoff, was beginning to pull together his “Long Night of the Storytellers,” an international ensemble that toured Austria and eventually grew into the major international festival in Graz.

  Through these people and others the idea was catching fire in many countries. In Canada, a group of seven tellers co-founded the Storytellers’ School of Toronto, in 1979. A few years later, tellers from across the whole country created Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada. If my own experience is typical, the story-hosts of this generation were often catalysts who came at the right moment to make things happen. Often it seems like a whole community had simply been waiting for the right place and opportunity to gather.

  As new venues sprang up, traditional storytellers found new audiences for their art. In Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, a wonderful traditional storyteller named Joe Neil MacNeil was “discovered” by the folklorist John Shaw. Shaw had gone looking for Gaelic speakers and his keen interest in MacNeil’s stories encouraged this master teller to remember tales that, as he later told an audience in Toronto, he thought he had forgotten. Shaw’s gentle persistence was the magic force that brought his vast repertoire of stories back. Angela Sidney, a Tagish elder in Yukon Territory, returned home from a storytelling festival in Toronto and inspired her friends and family to found an international storytelling festival in Whitehorse that would feature northern elders and tellers. Camille Perron, a Franco-Ontarian with a rich tradition of Ti-Jean stories, began to appear at festivals throughout Canada.

  Many of the events and gatherings that were founded in the 1970s are still going strong. Even better, new hosts are emerging, with new ideas and audiences. After I did a residency at the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, some of the students started hosting a storytelling jam at the Sleepless Goat, a café in downtown Kingston, Ontario. After doing a storytelling unit at Woburn Collegiate in Toronto, the students began meeting at a doughnut shop down the street to swap their stories. A wind of creativity is carrying new storytelling seeds around the world.

  Sometimes the simple fact of hosting a storytelling evening is a courageous act of social challenge. Liz Weir, a storyteller from Northern Ireland, launched a number of gatherings and festivals where tellers came from both sides of the religious divide. Storytelling was her way to heal a muchfractured history. Here in Canada, there was a referendum held in 1996 in Quebec on the possibility of separating from the federation. In the days leading up to this historic event, Canadian politicians became more and more hysterical in both of our official languages. Thinking that storytellers could build the bridges that the politicians were destroying, we hosted a bilingual storytelling evening in Toronto. Three French tellers joined four English speakers for a show in a downtown cabaret.

  So it was that two days before the referendum, instead of watching the television news, I was listening to Jocelyn Bérubé play a lightning fiddle and whinny like a horse. He was telling the story of Alexis “le Trotteur,” an extraordinary runner from the Gaspé region of Quebec. Jocelyn had heard the legend from his father, who’d heard it from his father, whose best friend had been there on the fateful day back at the turn of the century when Alexis had run the world’s first—and perhaps only—three-minute mile. Fuelled by nothing more anabolic than poutine (an indescribable delicacy eaten in Quebec made of French fries covered with melted cheese curds and gravy) and perhaps maple syrup, this greatest of all Québécois marathoners broke every record held by human or beast. He had already beaten all the local racehorses when a new challenger came to the Gaspé: a locomotive. His race against the “iron horse” was, alas, the last he ever ran. Trying to outsprint the train, the mighty heart of Alexis “le Trotteur” burst. He died by the side of the tracks, the locomotive steamed past oblivious of its mechanical victory, and his glorious career fell to the storytellers to celebrate.

  Bérubé came to Toronto with Michel Faubert and Marc Laberge. They told in French, we—Itah Sadu, Bob Barton, Lynda Howes et moi—told in English, and for one brief and bittersweet evening I understood what Canada could be. The storytellers were doing what our politicians had been unable to accomplish. We weren’t trading lists of grievances, arguing over constitutional amendments, effusing over or shunning our neighbours. We were simply listening to each other’s stories. A wise writer, stating her philosophy of teaching, said: “Put your play into formal narratives, and it will help you and your classmates listen to one another. In this way you will build a literature of images and themes, of beginnings and endings, of references and allusions. You must invent your own literature if you are to connect your ideas to the ideas of others.” Vivian Gussin Paley was describing how storytelling helps her class act like a community in The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter. She was talking about three-year-olds.

  If this works for her preschool class, why not for the citizens of Canada or any other troubled land?

  “Invent your own literature,” as Paley says. Seven stories in two languages isn’t much, but it is surely a beginning. The stories were told by word of mouth, in living voices, and, as Joe Neil used to say in Gaelic and English, “What
the ear does not hear cannot move the heart.” Because these stories were told and heard, I know that hearts were moved. Over a beer late one night we wound up talking politics and the future of Canada and Quebec. My French friends were astonished to find so many eager listeners in Toronto willing to receive and trade stories. They went back up the highway to Montreal vowing to build stronger connections between our two cultures.

  Bérubé made up this French proverb: Life is a pair of trousers held up by the suspenders of hope. Canada, like many parts of the world, is still in a state of uncertainty, still trying to know and claim its proper destiny. Perhaps the greatest value storytellers bring to this public realm is the idea that stories can make a difference in the real world. Change begins when we listen to one another’s stories.

  When a host offers a talking stick to an audience, we must be ready for whatever kind of story the Muse sends. Once when I was hosting an open session at the Toronto Festival of Storytelling, a little boy took the talking stick, perched on the stool and proceeded to tell, in a shrill, unstoppable voice, an absolutely appalling story:

  Once there was a little boy

  and he was running away

  and he came to a big dark forest

  and there was a big hole in the forest

  and then he fell in and he couldn’t get out

  And then his Mommy was looking for him

  but she couldn’t find him

  But then she did and he heard her footsteps coming

  and then she looked in the hole

  and the little boy looked up at her and said:

  “Get me out you fucking bitch!”

  The audience was shellshocked. The boy, in the aftermath, swung his legs back and forth on the stool, knocking my talking stick against his shoes, oblivious of the havoc he’d just wrought.

  People looked at me, waiting for some hostly word or gesture that could repair the damage. At first I was just as speechless and horrified as my audience. The boy’s blast of harsh language threw me for a loop. I felt as helpless as the mother in his story, too late noticing her son’s absence, too late to the rescue. I noticed the young storyteller’s mommy wasn’t looking too pleased herself just at the moment. The silence was excruciating.