Telling Stories From Our Lives

The breath of life,
The spirit of life,
The word of life,
It flies to you and you and you
Always the word.

—Maori Proverb—

Our personal stories are important to us. Our lives are made up of stories, stored in our minds as memories and images. As with anything that we do, sharing and giving is important to both us and those around us. We need to share our personal stories.

Since life is a story that is constantly unfolding, telling our own stories reminds us of where we have been and where we may be going. As we think of where we have been in our story, we can begin to understand the patterns of our past that have an influence on the way we behave in the present. Discovering healthy and effective patterns also helps us maintain them in the future. Likewise, as we discover unhealthy patterns and actions, we can learn from these and avoid them in the future.

Telling our own stories also puts us in touch with the myths that surround us. The fallacy of myths is that they are often taken to be untrue. “That is just a myth,” we might say. Whether a myth is “true” or not is not relevant to their functions. It simply does not matter. Myths are our ways of looking at the cosmos to understand how it works and how we relate to all other things. Positive myths are healthy. They remind us that all the things that we see around us are merely tips of extremely huge icebergs. We remember our parents, siblings or friends, but we realize through telling our stories that they are complex and interesting individuals with a wealth of feelings, histories, talents and shared experiences. To individuals who may have no myths, or who may have negative myths, these beloved people are merely icons walking around in a video game-like existence. The tip of the iceberg is all that they can see.

Valuable life ways, constantly threatened by a quickly changing world, can be preserved through the telling of our own tales. As we remember the positive ways we related to events and people in the past, these ways can be reestablished or renewed.

Of course, the simple pleasure of remembering is another reason to tell our own stories. As we tell more and more of our stories, especially as these stories are shared out loud with others, our memories of the events in our lives expand. New paths of reminiscence are taken that lead to new discoveries and new pleasures.

Oral histories are TOLD events. They are oral in nature. Stories, and especially personal stories, are not alive until they have been told. A story is like a seed. Written, it is dormant and dead. It comes to life when it is told, for all of the teller's background, cultures, personal experiences, values, thoughts, and beliefs combine with his or her facial nuances, gestures, and body tensions to bring the story to its fullest living state. Without these things, it cannot be called a story, nor can it be called living. The directness of “telling” our personal histories, as opposed to writing them, has a great impact upon listeners. It allows the teller a natural and effective use of gesture and facial expression. The teller can gauge his/her telling by watching the response of his/her listeners; such responses motivate the teller to become more involved and energetic, and to adjust the volume and language, if necessary.

Another definite advantage of telling one’s personal history is the fresh, undoctored, extremely personal and natural way in which the story unfolds which is “internalized” in the head and the heart. We firmly believe that oral histories are performances that can improve with each telling. While we encourage tellers to practice their stories and to improve with each performance, telling personal stories before they are written, or in addition to written narratives, keeps the performance and the performer from becoming too clouded with trying to “fix” various elements, changing it from his/her natural way of using language, which is one element that oral histories seek to perserve.

Many people lament that we belong to a writing-based culture. We are always writing things down and storing them in archives. While this may be important, there are many advantages to an oral-based culture. In an oral-based culture, the message does not claim all importance as it does in a written-based culture. Instead, the communication itself becomes a principle factor. Values and beliefs, along with the personal background of the communicator are transmitted along with the message. Individuals in some cultures without a written language claim that our culture is barren because of the absence of these organic elements.

The telling of oral histories is one of the most ancient of the arts—and we feel that it is an art if done well. Through the centuries, it has provided not only entertainment, but has also been used to pass on traditions, community and cultural paradigms, and moral and ethical codes of conduct. Personal histories provide a golden thread of awareness in humans. They help us know, question, remember and understand. Noted anthropologist Clifford Geertz has noted that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (5). Those webs can be taken to be culture. Telling our personal histories helps us understand and explore these webs and their many and myriad connections that ultimately make up our communities.

Personal stories themselves, when shared with audiences, are often signatures of cultures in capsule form. They contain archetypes and standards for acceptable cultural behavior. The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once maintained that through the stories of a culture, the entire culture could be accessed and interpreted in a meaningful way. The storyteller gives her or his listeners such interpretation in subtle and entertaining ways, and for ways far more important than the mere ethnography or ethnology of a social group. One of the tacit aims of the personal history performer is to disseminate such information and interpretation through channels that are more spiritual and more subconscious than the anthropologist’s cold ethnographic narrative.

When people engage in the telling of personal histories, a spirit of communitas pervades the entire attending group, regardless of the various backgrounds each individual member of the group possesses. Communitas is a feeling of equality, a profundity of shared, vital and in a way spiritual involvement that a group experiences in the process of ritual or quasi-ritual activities. It is this spirit that is the goal of the oral history performer. We have all encountered feelings of communitas. During a wedding or a particular religious ceremony, for example; perhaps during a family ritual of some kind. All of these rituals and activities have the common goal of reasserting shared paradigms and celebrating the known and common social structures that exist around us. Communitas is the most important step in bringing people together, and in a world in which diversity and variety are not only becoming more prevalent, but are also becoming increasingly sought after, it is vital in creating individuals who value others and other cultures.

Not only are cultural paradigms shared through the telling of personal histories, but personal and individual interpretations of life and the moral and ethic codes that accompany these interpretations are also shared. Society and the individual are brought together in a synergy of experience for both the teller and the audience. This is part of the magic of personal history performances.

The telling of personal histories has an advantage over many other arts in creating a culturally sharing atmosphere since it is so ephemeral and so personal an art. Through storytelling, other cultures and differing personalities can actually be accessed and shared in real and entertaining ways, with narrative that sparks interest in and personal involvement with characters from diverse and varying backgrounds. By telling our stories, we participate in the process of reaffirming qualities of orality in a society that sorely needs it as it becomes further technological and impersonal. In fact, if such orality in society ceased to exist, meaningful and artistic communication would also cease to exist and the very foundations of vital sharing would collapse—and society with it.

Tellers of personal histories are givers. They give their stories to others, hoping that in some way, other individuals’ lives will be improved. They are service-oriented, unselfish, and seek to make others happy. They gladly make their stories available to others.

When the imagination is stirred and feelings and attitudes are explored and reaffirmed, the most fulfilling type of entertainment occurs. The personal history performer brings images and visions of people and places to life for her or his listeners. Such engagement does not numb the mind as movies or television do. Storytelling demands that the audience share with the teller in creating the pictures, scenes, actions and emotions of the story. In this way, the mind is stimulated and exercised, and the listener and teller leave the experience invigorated and energized.

Some personal stories are told to help us heal. "My name is Joe and I'm an alcoholic" is a familiar beginning to a story that will, hopefully, begin the healing process for a damaging story. There is something about telling others about our disappointments that heals us. A broken relationship (and heart) demands that we tell the story to our closest confidant. We need to sing the blues to get over them.

Some stories from our lives we carry around have been feeding us with damaging information. These stories need to be told, and then replaced with future positive stories. While parents or others may have told us "you can't" others will help us replace this negative story with the "I can" story. And our lives will reflect this new story of success. Telling stories that are dark and painful gives us a chance to realize that we are in the middle of our great Life Story, and that the future contains the hope of possibility.

Personal stories are for sharing and for hearing and for seeing and for feeling. As the storyteller paints with words and gestures the varying sensory images in a personal history, the listeners’ imaginations take them to often faraway places, let them meet people they have never met or remember those whose voices have become faint in their memories, and give them an understanding of experiences they may or may not have experienced. This is all accomplished by a portrayal of both the familiar and the unfamiliar-made-familiar as the teller identifies, internalizes, and then portrays the images and events in the story.