Why Stories Matter

I love stories. It's the reason I love what I do--I immerse myself in narrative. And I believe stories matter. A great deal. And I don't just mean fictional narrative (although there's nothing better than curling up with a big fat novel on a rainy day in a comfy armchair with a warm mug of tea), I mean stories that we tell each other. Stories can be instructive, they can warn us, but they can also give us hope and inspiration.

I was listening to an NPR program about a lawyer who did some pro bono work for the family of the Virginia Tech shooter. As you can imagine, this family was in shock and grief and pain, and they wanted to figure out a way to reach out to the world and apologize for the actions of their son. And this attorney helped them convey this message--of the deepest sorrow and mourning--of darkness neverending--that they were so sorry for what their son had done and would be grieving until the end of their days. And the attorney said that his office received thousands of messages from around the world--messages of kindness and empathy, reaching out to the family in their grief, and the attorney's voice as he was talking about it, started to choke up and he said that he was overwhelmed at the kindness--that he didn't realize how kind people could be.

I sat in my car mesmerized by his story. Because in the face of such devastating tragedy and horror, there was also this story. A story about a family in grief and people responding with kindness instead of anger and retribution.

And I know that life isn't that simple (as the inner cynic is quick to remind me), but I also know that stories matter. The stories we share with one another, the ones we read, the ones we watch--they matter tremendously.

So on that note, I'm going to leave you with a paragraph from a novel I enjoy quite a bit, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. It's probably my favorite paragraph in the English language--it is a paragraph that I love so much, I wish I had the genius to write such a sentiment, because it feels so true.

"It didn't matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you life in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic."
--Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (218-219)

Tribute to Madeline L'Engle

Madeline L'Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time (1963 Newberry Award Winner) died yesterday at her home in Connecticut at the age of 88. A Wrinkle in Time (and the follow-up book, A Wind in the Door) was probably one of my favorite childhood books. It follows a girl, Meg, bookish and odd, a girl who feels out of place, who is fierce and devoted to her younger brother, Charles. It is about traveling through time, about fantasy, about the power of stubornness and doing the right thing even when it's hard. It gave me inspiration, as I'm sure it gave millions of other young girls and boys inspiration to imagine another world--to believe in the power of stories and imagination and creativity.

I never really read any other works by Ms. L'Engle. She was prolific, mostly writing young adult fantasy works. If you want to read an article about her life and works, go to this New York Times article (click here).

I don't know that she has anything to do with the topic of this blog--mixed race--but she has everything to do with the power of stories (which was the topic I was going to blog about--so more on that for a later post). Her stories, her ability to imagine other worlds, are powerful. And it reminds me, again, of how important narrative is--how important stories are, to give meaning to our lives.

In fact, let me end this tribute with the words of Ms. L'Engle herself on why stories matter:

"Why does anybody tell a story . . . It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically."

Haunted by Waters (a book plug)

Today a friend of mine told me about a book that is soon to be released by Professor Robert Hayashi, an acquaintance I *briefly* knew while I was doing a stint at Mount Holyoke College (Robert was finishing up his dissertation in American Studies at UMass Amherst). Anyway, his book, soon to be released by University of Iowa Press, is called Haunted by Waters and this is a description from the publisher:

"Even though race influenced how Americans envisioned, represented, and shaped the American West, discussions of its history devalue the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. In this lyrical history of marginalized peoples in Idaho, Robert T. Hayashi views the West from a different perspective by detailing the ways in which they shaped the western landscape and its meaning.

As an easterner, researcher, angler, and third-generation Japanese American traveling across the contemporary Idaho landscape—where his grandfather died during internment during World War II—Hayashi reconstructs a landscape that lured emigrants of all races at the same time its ruling forces were developing cultured processes that excluded nonwhites. Throughout each convincing and compelling chapter, he searches for the stories of dispossessed minorities as patiently as he searches for trout.

Using a wide range of materials that include memoirs, oral interviews, poetry, legal cases, letters, government documents, and even road signs, Hayashi illustrates how Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, all-white, and democratic West affected the Gem State’s Nez Perce, Chinese, Shoshone, Mormon, and particularly Japanese residents. Starting at the site of the Corps of Discovery’s journey into Idaho, he details the ideological, aesthetic, and material manifestations of these intertwined notions of race and place. As he fly-fishes Idaho’s fabled rivers and visits its historical sites and museums, Hayashi reads the contemporary landscape in light of this evolution."

It sounds like a very interesting book, and on a professional/academic note, I am interested in seeing how he incorporates his own personal reflections and family memoir into this study of the American West and race relations. Although I haven't read it yet, it has a compelling premise--to think about the ways in which race has always been a part of our understanding of the American landscape, both its geographic terrain as well as its social topography. I think it's easy to think of places that seem largely *white* and absent of people of color and imagine that they were always all-white spaces or not to realize that whiteness is a itself a racial category, one often marked by its difference to others. Anyway, I think the book looks promising and if you are in the mood for something that combines the personal with the academic, this may be a good read.