Of Seeds and Journeys
by Sam Yada Cannarozzi

"Myth, for instance, has been supposed to belong to the far past. Fairytales come later, perhaps crystallizing during the Middle Ages. And today? We have jokes."
—Dick Leith in Storylines, September 1997

ecently having read an article by Lee Pennington in the Tale Trader, a storytelling publication edited in Kentucky (USA) I got to thinking about stories that travel. Lee printed a version of a story that sometimes goes by the name of "Bad News," mentioning it has travelled around quite a bit. It begins with a simple conversation about getting news from home. The first bit seems to be harmless enough, something about a dog dying or some such. Then the reason for that entails another fact that is more serious, the dog died eating poisoned horse flesh. And on and on until one discovers that the tip of the iceberg, that initial seemingly unimportant detail, is actually the result of a total loss of family and property.

That particular story I knew in two other versions situated far from Kentucky. Here in France there was a popular song sung between the World Wars called "Madame the Marquise." It has an identical strucure describing how the poor lady discovers how her life has been ruined by an apparent tiny detail. The refrain is always the same: "ça va très bien, ça va très bien," reassuringly insisting after each catastrophe "but aside from that, everything is fine." If you look into the Arab world and that famous character J’ha known in Turkey as Mullah Nasrudine, there you can happen upon a story in which the poor mullah by some ingenious wheedling, convinces a merchant who will not share his meal, that his family and possessions too have disappeared in a chain reaction of mishaps. The merchant goes running out of the inn back to his home town, and the Mullah sits down to a nice meal left by the merchant.

It would be risky without research to assume a French soldier heard the story during the crusades, that it was kept in his family until some descendant left for North America with it and that it was kept that way down until today. But I would like to relate some personal experiences on how I have come into direct contact with stories and other examples of the non-written tradition, that seem to have travelled half way around the world or more, with some queries on the how and the why, with perhaps even some conjecture in regards to the quote on the top of this essay. It’s not that myth is one thing, fairytales another and jokes something else, but rather at each stage, the original material is transformed, without losing the essential. So that a joke might just be the seed of a myth, or rather the myth shrunk down to the size of a seed with perhaps the possibility of having it grow back to its full splendor.

In the early 70’s, having completed a university degree in modern languages and linguistics, I also pursued training in the performing arts, everything from movement exercices to bio-energetics. It wouldn’t be until ten years later that this path would lead me to storytelling. But that, as they say, is quite another story. During a workshop in avant-garde theater I worked with Tony Abeson of the Washington (DC) Theater Laboratory. Tony had just returned from a long stint with the visionary Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (with whom I workshopped a few years later.) In a game exercise Tony had us make "the OK sign" by touching index to thumb and then imagining the hands to be a swarm of bees, the whole group would roll, play and cajole, trying to harmlessly sting each other.

Jump two years later to a multi-media cultural center in Burgundy France where I was employed, and during my stay continued with my open-ended training. In a workshop there I had the chance to study some Hindu dance with Rajika Purl from southern India. And lo and behold she showed a mudra, a special sign in the gestural language of the Kathakali style that she said was the bee, hovering about the lotus flower. The form of the hand was different, more ornate; the index finger was curled against the palm of the hand and the thumb was pressed againstthe middle finger. But the way of moving the hands was the same as in our "bee" exercise,

And so I realized: I knew Grotowski had been to India, in fact to study Kathakali. He had passed some of his acquired knowledge on to his group in Poland to which Tony Abeson had belonged. He had remembered that hand sign among others and had taught it at the Washington Theater Laboratory where I learned it. And I had carried it back to Rajika Purl, in fact the source it had come from. Full circle! That gestural "word" for bee had survived a journey of thousands of miles and remained in a sufficiantly recognizable form.

Now we are in West Africa, in Mali, and I am talking with a young griot whose name is Sekou Kouyaté, from a storytelling family. In my performances I use string games to implement stories. (Think of the classic Jacob’s ladder, or parachute, but in more delicate forms). String figures and stories have been collected all over the world, and I always ask wherever I travel if someone knows figures that I do not. Sekou took my string and made a figure he stuck his tounge through and said, "We called this one ‘the mouth’ ," I was stunned. This was the same figure I had learned from a scholarly journal a while back, also called "the mouth" but performed by an Inuit!! The two figures were produced by two separate methods, but the end result was identical. Somehow the tundra and the savana had met through a piece of string woven into a shape that both called mouth,

Now come with me to the international festival in Austria. The story teller is Michael Parent invited over from the United States. Michael’s heritage is French Canadian, and his immediate family had immigrated to Maine. In his repertory Michael has a series of "‘Tit Jean" stories. This is the well-known character who, although young and seemingly inexperienced, turns out to be the cleverest. In one of those stories ‘Tit Jean has a vision of the Lord who will give him one wish. He immediately thinks of riches, his wife who wants a child as she is barren, and his poor mother, who wants her sight. How to satisfy everyone with only one wish? On the appointed day ‘Tit Jean looks the Lord straight in the eye and asks "I’d like my Mother to see her grandchildren eating out of plates of gold!" And in one wish fuifills three desires. Michael Parent willingly classified this very short tale as a joke. And yet. On the last leg of the journey I invite you to Stockholm where with tellers from the Sami people and a teller and kalimba player from Namibia you will find Vayu Naidu. On that Sunday afternoon at the National Museum of Folklore, after she filled the room with incense and announced her story with finger cymbals, she took up the thread leading back to the Great Ocean of Story and told part of the epic of Savatri. As I was listening enchanted, I had a powerful realization. Although the original story of Savatri from Hindu literature was unknown to me, somehow I knew the story. And then it came to me. Savatri lost her husband through a prophecy. Death granted her three wishes except that of wishing her husband back to life. She wishes for riches for her adopted father, sight for her blind adopted mother and children from her husband. In other words she succeeded in reclaming his life without asking for it directly. Her story lasted the better part of forty minutes, in eloquent language, and graceful gesture. But in fact it had been preserved in a five minute joke told by the son of French immigrants on the otherside of the world. So maybe it isn’t so far-fetched to think that some French crusader passed it on to his family who immigrated to North America where it entered yet a different repertory. Now it is common to find various retellings of the classics. Cinderella, for example, exists or perhaps pre-exists in a Tibetan tale. But what most struck me about the three examples I cited here was the incredible precision that was retained over time and space: That of a hand gesture word for bee, the visual representation of the mouth captured in a piece of cord and an epic story in its essence totally recoverable from what innocently seemed to be a joke. The key word here is essence. If one string had been mispulled, or one of the links in the Savatri/’Tit Jean story been muffed, they could not have been passed down. So it is here we find the kernel, that integrity of story and image with which a world unfolds, without which a world crumbles,

So now if I may, come back to the quotation at the head of this essay about the lineage of myth, fairytale and… joke. Perhaps in regard to the art of storytelling, jokes have but a minor place, nonetheless, even if in our video clip, e-mail site, hurried world stories may in fact be created shorter, let us not denigrate the humble laugh evoked by a short humorous story. Because sometimes that little tip is but a doorway back. And because we laugh does not mean we are not serious. Do not the zen koans often provoke laughter that is the sign of enlightenment?

—published in WIP Winter 1998

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