Healing and Storytelling

There is an apocryphal story about an anthropologist who leaves a television in a village in Africa. (We can presume that the village either has regular access to electricity or a generator.) For a while the community gathers around the talking box with great interest. But when the anthropologist returns some months later he finds his gift covered in dust and cobwebs. He asks the villagers why they haven’t been watching it. One of them replies, “Your box knows many stories, in fact many more than our storyteller, but the difference is, our storyteller knows us.”

This comment can be read and understood in a couple of different ways: the village storyteller knows what kinds of stories are most relevant and familiar to her listeners. She knows when and what to tell. Like a mirror, she reflects back to them their own world and their own history, as well as their own potential as moral agents. She sees who they are and she sees who they can be.

On another level, the “knowing” that occurs when a community gathers to listen to a story is a mutually healing experience of recognition and appreciation, occurring on many levels at once. To say that the storyteller knows her audience refers to more than knowledge, an accumulation of facts about who they are. It is certainly this, but it is also the present-time knowing that occurs in the act of telling the story.

I think of it as closely resembling the parent’s interaction with an infant. In his book Scattered Minds, author and physician Gabor Maté writes about the parent’s ability to stay present and track the infant’s changing emotional state. This is what allows the child’s cognitive development to occur in a healthy way. Neural pathways are formed which permit a child to settle, to focus, to trust his or her own judgment.

Storytelling is a similar kind of interaction. Through the medium of speech and gesture, it is a transfer of ideas and images in the form of a narrative, which occurs at a unique moment in time. Even if the storyteller repeats the same story to the same listeners on a different day, the story and the telling will still be different. Why? Because both storyteller and listeners will have changed, even in subtle ways.

The  storyteller’s art involves connecting with the audience and making subtle changes in her telling based on her perception of what the audience needs at that particular moment. Like the parent tracking the child’s facial expression, the storyteller is tracking the audience. She is tuning into their level of interest in the story, but I believe she is also connecting with what the audience needs from the story, whether that means humour, insight, action, or inspiration.

Her ability to intuitively assess the needs of the listening audience not only makes for a more successful telling, it also (I am suggesting) restores, repairs and renews the neural pathways in the mind. There is a potential for both listener and teller to be healed. This is what I mean by storytelling as a mutually healing experience of appreciation. The members of the audience experience the storyteller’s close attention to them. The storyteller likewise experiences her listeners’ willingness to follow the narrative as she unfolds it, scene by scene. She is tracking them. They are tracking her.  Both offer the other an opportunity to rest before the healing presence of a witness.