I was walking with my mom down the street near my home in rural Port Kells, BC. Looking to our left, we saw the quarter-acre or so of a neighbour’s garden that he’d recently ploughed–a stretch of dark, moist, furrowed earth. Not for the first time, we wondered what he would be growing there. “That reminds me,” I said, “that I have a great story to tell you.”
It’s a story about how evil entered the world. It had to do with Growing People.
(A puzzled look. “Growing People? Like in The Matrix?”)
Page, Connor. “Turned Earth.” 2021. JPEG.)
Growing People: farmers, gardeners, gatherers, groundskeepers. You know–people who grow.
In those days–
(“In those days,” she repeats with exaggerated solemnity, and we laugh at my overblown narration.)
In those days, they held a great fair, and people came from around the world bringing their finest produce. They all gathered under an enormous white pavilion, where all the specimens were laid out. Giant gourds. Prize apples. Genetically enhanced grain. That kind of thing.
(“Where did you read this?”)
There was music, and it was good fun. Everyone walked around, chatted, and marveled at the things on display. Judges made their rounds, jotting down notes about the most promising candidates. All the while everyone kept their eyes open for the one thing that would take the general prize: the hardiest, most delectable fruit or the most prolific and resilient seed . . .
The judges were about to give a decision, but just then a person stepped up onto the bandstand. This was the one person who’d entered the tent empty-handed. This individual wore a long coat and a large hat that completely covered the face. No one knew where this person came from or if this person was male or female.
This one had nothing to show but a story, and told it: a story of violence, slaughter, envy, and acquisition. By the end, everyone knew that this story–the most delicious fruit and the most prolific seed–had won the prize. “But,” they said, “this isn’t so wholesome; this isn’t so good. Take that story back. We want you to take that story back.”
But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told.
(“So this is a philosophical story?” “Yes, you could say that.”)
One of the wonderful things about Leslie Silko’s story on the coming of evil into the world–included in Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories (9-10)–is its ambiguity. In a way, it explains by explaining nothing. Who is this strange outsider among the witches? How did evil enter this person’s mind as a story? This story of origins works precisely by deferring any absolute origin, refusing to pinpoint anything too exactly (I’m even tempted to read “witch people” as “which people?”). So I think Silko’s story is quite critically conscious of the ways in which stories of origin can ideologically underpin exclusion and violence, even as it celebrates the tremendous power of storytelling. (We could keep these two strands in mind while reading this short and fascinating interview about creation stories. Such stories often boggle our minds and our logics because we still have to ask where the first “stuff” came from . . . )
My retelling is mainly a slavish, impoverished imitation, showing some doubt and hesitation as to the extent of our “retelling” prerogative. But it did make me think about some of the ways in which acts of storytelling are situated, rooted, in the world. You could say that an experience of place gave me a prompt (or an alibi) for weaving this story into the fabric of everyday experience. And the telling, whose dialogic quality I tried to hint at in my transcript above, was inextricably joined with our motion as we continued to walk–the corner we turned, the dips and rises of the road.
This sense of time and place seems strong in oral telling, though it may at times imbue our experiences of reading too. William Wordsworth has a phrase in the eleventh book of the The Prelude for such experiences of spatialized memory that articulate our own stories as well as the stories we might be telling: “spots of time” (258). By chance I just came across this oral reading of Wordsworth’s long, long autobiographical poem (linked on “spots of time”). I wonder what it, along with our own retellings, might tell us about the changes and the life of spoken and written stories . . .
Works Cited
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi Press, 2003.
Leeming, David, and Liane Hansen. “Exploring the World’s Creation Myths.” NPR, 13 November 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5010951. Accessed 3 February 2021.
Wilmer, Clive. “(11) Book Eleventh – Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.” University of Cambridge, 7 September 2011, https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1171068. Accessed 3 February 2021.
Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, Penguin, 1995.
Hi Connor,
I wanted to preface my comment by complimenting your story. I think that writing it as a dialogue is really intelligent, especially given the nature of the assignment. I also immensely enjoyed your mother’s comments; they add a touch of comedy to the story! Also the fact that you set the stage with the walk made the whole thing feel almost like I was there; I think this reflects the connectivity and instantaneity of oral story-telling extremely well.
I really wanted to touch on your comment about the original story, that makes such an effort to distance the witches, and particularly the witch who brings evil into the world, from any recognizable human being, even in the most general terms. The story, or at least the way that King tells it, makes a point of specifying that it was “it was witch people… not Whites or Indians or Blacks or Asians or Hispanics” that bring evil into the world (9). There is also the ambiguous gender of the witch, which you reflect in your own story. You point out that the story is “quite critically conscious of the ways in which stories of origin can ideologically underpin exclusion and violence, even as it celebrates the tremendous power of storytelling.” This is something that I also thought when I was reading the story. So many evil origin stories, from Eve to Pandora, are not shy about specifying who is at fault; and indeed, these (especially Eve’s story) have been used as a foundation for centuries of oppression (in this specific cases, oppression of women). I think this is something that I really like about this story. It doesn’t seek to create a scapegoat, on whom we can pin all of the blame in the real world; it is entirely in the realm of the supernatural. I think it gives a really positive view of human nature: evil had to come from elsewhere because humans are not inherently evil. I love your point about the double meaning of witch/which; I hadn’t thought of this, but it furthers this ambiguity even more!
Finally, I just wanted to ask you a quick question about the quote from Wordsworth you included. You speak of a sense of ‘spatialized memory,’ and I totally understand what you mean by that. I wonder, though, what you think the effect is when a story (such as Silko’s) is so consciously detaching itself from both space and time – the only information we get is that they are in a cave (9). How do you think Wordsworth’s comment plays into something like this?
Works Cited
“‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened’ Is Always a Great Way to Start .” The Truth About Stories: a Native Narrative, by Thomas King, House of Anansi Press Inc., 2010, pp. 1–29.
Hi Victoria. Thank you for your very thoughtful comment. I appreciate, first of all, your kind words, especially after seeing how much (more) tremendous creativity you and our colleagues brought to this task. I could not agree more with your description of how Silko’s story (via King) deliberately avoids scapegoating any one person or (by extension) category of people. You’re absolutely right (I think) to contextualize this with other stories like those of Eve and Pandora, stories that can prove (and have proven) to be electric, dangerous and rather problematic in their effects on the world.
Thanks for your interesting question. I agree with you that Silko seems to be gesture towards an archetypal or mythic setting, rather than a very localized or precise one. Maybe there’s some effectiveness in that the setting is so generalizable–mobile, so to speak. It could be any cave. We could even tell the story in a cave, and then it would be this particular cave, our storytelling reshaping the space. Or (perhaps more likely) our own experiences–personal, cultural–of similar settings may work together to construct in detail the archetypal setting in our minds, making for an image that is, in its own way, localized in space and time . . . Fascinating to think about!
Many thanks again, and all best!