Contextual Reflections: Storytelling

Storytelling
Whether watching German-Partizan movies, or listening to folk “mythologies” we can all the time, in each sentence almost, listen to our wounded pride raising its head, telling us something has been left unfinished. Or we can hear the sobs of victims of the war, those past and recent, in a figurative way reaching into our future. Or we can hear the hate commiting us, already, to another war, to other accidents. But in between these, in moments of peace and belief we sometimes find, as strange as something unexpected, songs and movies about the true life. In these songs, or for that matter storytelling, of other motifs than the above mentioned, there appears something as strange as love, or just sheer joy.

However, storytelling should first of all be considered as a means of survival. All the memories, as ugly as war can make them, saved in ourselves at moments of our most horrifying encounter with what war can produce, are more than anything else, a mean to neutralize that tempered bomb, that monster of a memory. And every time we tell our story of the war, every time we construe that bomb bz telling our story, every time we expose ourselves to it, we express our survival over it, we tame that monster of a memory, while sharing our strength and join others’ strength to overcome the evilness of war.

Therefore storytelling, as a means of survival of war victims (I guess each one of us having gone through it is in a way a victim to it) transfers the message in the present time only when it speaks about its survival, about the value of life over the ugliness of war. As a matter of fact it only reaches the listeners when it tells the story of life having survived over the war machine. What storytelling tries to tell us in fact is to teach us of the value of peoples’ lives. And at the same time save that struggle of war victims for guidance to the future itself, and only, when and if understood properly, in the present, in the comfort of freedom paved by the pains of war first of all, as a victory over the war and all its malignancies, do the victims survive.

B.H.