I have a great story to tell you.

Eons ago, when the divine still walked the Earth in their purest forms and still favoured humankind as their best creation, there was a lonely white butterfly. The butterfly flew from shoreline to shoreline, from city to city, searching for a companion. At the very same time, a little girl was wandering across vast plains trying to catch up to a goddess who had saved her life, hoping to give them her thanks. It was on these very plains, at the edge of a riverbank that the little butterfly found its companion. The butterfly promised the little girl that it would do anything in its power to help the little girl find the goddess who saved her life, anything at all. So their journey began, a little girl and a white butterfly hoping to find a goddess among the vast lands upon the Earth.

The journey was a long one, but it was one that brought bloodshed and wrought havoc wherever the pair went. You see, the butterfly was not lying when it said that it would and could anything to fulfill the girl’s desires. Meanwhile, the girl’s hunger for satisfaction became insatiable, and her desires grew exponentially. The girl had a rapacious lust for power and found happiness in leaving a trail of blood leading from one city to the next. When the girl finally reached the gates of the goddess’ temple, she was drenched from head to toe in the blood of innocents and bedecked in the most exquisite jewellery that could be found. The goddess, having heard the news of the girl seeking her, went to meet the child she saved and was devastated by what she saw.
“Come, child, I will release you from your suffering and save you once more” and with one wave of her hand, the goddess released the girl from her worldly ties and sent her soul towards the stars. The butterfly, escaped unscathed, in search for a new companion.

The butterfly had spent the duration of their journey whispering dreams into the girl’s ears and the girl dreamt them into existence just as much as the butterfly spoke life into them.

“Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to.” (King 10)

Writing the story was the easy part, telling the story was the hard part. A lot of it had to do with the fact that my audience could not relate to the story. Each person already held a preconceived notion of how evil came to Earth and my story was apparently not the right one. There was always a little detail that made the story unbelievable. Having played the role of the storyteller, I was reminded of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk about the dangers of telling one story. Every single story about a culture or a person changes the way that culture or a person is perceived. Every character holds power within their words and the stories that they tell you can control your soul and your entire existence. That is why we should be mindful of the way we speak and the stories we are spreading with our words because words have a mind and power of their own.

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Question 7: At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons.  I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?

Literature, as discussed, is written text often in a bound book that creates, in the 21st century, an archaic aesthetic of having a cup of tea under a cozy blanket with a fire going. A story is, more often than not, the kinds of tales that children are told when they are being tucked into bed, or the horror stories whispered into the pitch black of a friend’s living room. The idea of literature and storytelling has been altered by technological advancements and ravished by time. Today, no child wants to pick up a book to read, opting for the quicker and more accessible digitized versions on the internet. The internet is the best teacher, the best friend, and the best storyteller. The internet impacts literature and storytelling in two ways: (a) the controller of the narrative, and (b) the types of stories being told.

Who controls the narrative?

In the past, it is the writer. The story that they write becomes the sole canon and the accepted truth about the universe they have created. It is a single-dimensional method of communication between the author and the reader. The author speaks the reality of the story, and the reader accepts this as the actual canon. With the rise of the internet in the past decade, this single-dimensional relationship has been altered in unimaginable ways. Audiences now have the power to control the course of a story and the way that it is shared. Movies and TV Shows are a fantastic form of visual story-telling that takes the audiences on a roller-coaster of emotions. Large franchises cast well-known actors and actresses to support their story while monitoring every single outlet for possible leaks.

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Dear Reader,

I am Stephanie, an English Literature and History double major in my final semester here at UBC. It has been quite a journey. One of the most significant takeaways from my years studying at UBC is that narratives should always be taken with a grain of salt. Somebody out there is ready to tell a new perspective-changing story at a moment’s notice and being stuck in a singular mindset is not going to stop change. At all. That being said, ENGL 372 is going to redefine the definitions of home, nation, and its historical connections to storytelling. Colonization has erased, excluded, and pointedly overwritten indigenous storylines and truths in order to create a European definition of Canada. A description that can still be found in contemporary notions about Canada and the ways the nation should be defined. ENGL 372 explores the different forms of storytelling and the power of stories by confronting moments in time where Indigenous traditions are combatted by European violence.

 

 

My experience with Canadian Literature is few and far, but my absolute favourite novel of all time is Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis. It is a novel about two Greek gods giving human intelligence to a selection of fifteen dogs as a part of a wager to determine the parameters of human happiness.  It is an exciting spin on the study of the human condition, one which I absolutely adore. I highly recommend it to dog lovers and those who are a little curious about life.

 

 

 

 

Another text I have really enjoyed is Dead Girls by Nancy Lee. It is a collection of short stories that are centred around the disappearance of 60 women from the Downtown Eastside here in Vancouver. The stories contain considerably dark themes around women and the way they interact with their lives.

 

 

 

In terms of this course, I hope that it will open the floor for discourse about racism and the effects of the colonial legacies left behind. For example, how much of the recent incident involving an elderly man taking his twelve-year-old granddaughter to BMO are remnants of a colonial legacy? What are the effects of this news article on social thinking? Have stories been manipulated by the institutions of power to present particular narratives that have been approved by said institute of power?

I am looking forward to exploring the different facets of storytelling with you!

Cheers,

-Steph

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