Amina Blackwood Meeks, Contributor
MRS. JUDITH Hull Ballah, is the Education Officer responsible for Early Childhood Education in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She is one of more than three dozen or so Early Childhood Educators, Storytellers and other cultural workers persons I have interviewed across the Eastern Caribbean in the last two months as part of a research project commissioned by the Barbados-based Caribbean Support Initiative.
The information gathered will be used to design a pilot project in parenting education using storytelling to be implemented in seven Caribbean territories.
The enthusiasm with which the idea has been greeted has been nothing short of overwhelming. Mrs. Ballah recalled her own experience of utilising storytelling in her capacity as a mother. She would alternate between reading stories from whatever book was available and telling stories from the Vincy folklore. As she recounted, she found it easier to simply read what had already been written, until one night when she was all caught up in her reverie when her three year-old son interrupted with, "Just tell me a story from yu mouth".
So what stories do we know from our mouths? And what value would they have for the babes and young people we encounter? That's what I asked a friend and colleague from the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts as I regaled her with some of the tales I had encountered.
Well, once upon time, life was very simple. On a morning your mother either had bus fare to send you to school or she didn't. In case of the latter, she would wake you up early and you would walk to school. Problem solved. You learned how to cope, using all available resources of which time, and its use, was most valuable. Life was simple. No worry about anybody ripping off your school uniform to find where you had hidden the cell phone your parents were convinced you could not live without. No brand name shoes to reveal your pedigree. You wore the black or brown loafers as prescribed by the institution. And the homily "Do not tek anyting from strangers, especially sweetie", was a sure-fire guarantee against the fabled Blackheart Man, he who would give candies to children and then take them away.
HIV/AIDS
Today, we concluded, there are no stories 'from our mouths' that personify HIV/AIDS, or crack/cocaine or any of the myriad devils our children should tickya which are told in quite the same way our parents warned us from the bogs and the bogeymen.
Yet life is infinitely more complicated with none of the coping mechanisms or inducements to the creative problem-solving techniques that were the daily staples on which the generation once removed was raised.
Remember the trashing your mother would give you if you dared to walk past the neighbour she had just had the worst ding-dong battle with and refrained from delivering the greeting due to your elders? Well today, we seem unsure about who is an 'elder'. Who talks about them, anyway? More, who talks to them? Those ancient stumbling blocks who taught us from their mouths 'To thine own self be true and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man'. Who kept Grenadian/Trinidadian Storyteller Paul Keens Douglas at home at nights with tales of the midnight people Soucuyant, Diablesse and other assorted duppies, causing Paul to reflect today, that if our children heard more of those stories there would be less problems with juvenile delinquency.
Just tell them a good story from yu mout about the jumbies that inhabit every corner they cannot avoid on their way to the party that is not hip if it begins before midnight.
And then there was the tale told to me by the Director of Culture in Dominica, of observing about five teenagers 'hanging out' in animated conversation but none of them seeing the person with whom they were talking. Five teenagers each attached to cell phone, communicating something so urgent it compromised the value of the time and company they were sharing. A total impossibility in the focussed sharing which gives storytelling its magical qualities, an atmosphere that demands 'up close and personal', that depends on connecting with the humanity of the person in your face or by your side, as the case might be.
LIKKLE STORYFEST
Likkle StoryFest, the first Children's Storytelling Festival in Jamaica takes place during the week of May 11-17 with the main event at the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre on Monday May 12 beginning at 9:00 a.m. It is one way to contribute to restoring all that is positive in the stories that we tell 'from our mouths'. In this case it will be in the stories that come 'from the mouths of babes', as the festival will feature young storytellers interacting with their adult counterparts. These will include the teachers designated as Cultural Agents in Schools who will be helping to prepare the young participants.
It is one attempt to get them to research and learn the stories, because we cannot tell what we do not know. And sadly, what too many of us do not know, is how much of the social skills and responsibility as well as the motivation to read and learn reside in the stories we take for granted or treat with scant regard, until some outside entity repackages them for us in wonders for the big screen, on DVD or CD, hitch them on to a copyright, and makes us pay for the pleasure of listening or viewing.
