Hi, Malika Boma, and you're listening to a podcast hosted by the Accelerating Achievement for Africa's Adolescents Hub,
hosted by Oxford University and the University of Cape Town.
This podcast was recorded as part of a series in Oxford in November 2019 to discuss the theme of understanding adolescence in African contexts.
Thanks for listening! Hi.
So we're recording a podcast about storytelling and adolescence, and we're just going to explore how adolescents tell stories,
how stories work for them and how stories work for people generally in terms of presenting their identities and their problems to each other.
The four of us in this conversation, I'm just going to ask people to introduce themselves.
I'm Alex Bouma and I work in literature.
I'm very interested in storytelling and I'm a storyteller myself.
I'm a writer of fiction.
And have a book, and I teach literature at University of the Western Cape and the interesting context almost 2000 undergraduate students.
My name is Caroline Jimi.
I'm a student in global health working on violence against women, and I'm based in London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London.
For me or your body or my academic psychiatrist whose primary interest is in psychopathology,
but I also teach medical humanities so using the novels and poetry and plays to explore how patients are
and how they perceive the illnesses and so on whom perhaps using that as a jumping off place for me.
I was very struck by a conversation involving a couple of us here.
I think it was yesterday where you were remembering back to a radio interview you did with somebody.
You have a person younger than yourself in their early 20s who felt a bit inhibited about telling his story in that context of a radio interview.
And then it was an experience in common that encourage that person to feel more confident about telling their story.
This could you could you just remind us about that situation?
Yes, I can do that.
Maybe it's probably helpful just to set it as a kind of preamble to say that that commonality is one of the things that you would normally use
in a kind of psychotherapy group to help people who are a little bit more anxious about seeing what it is that's happened to them in the past.
So they may then find that somebody say something, then opens up the space with other people,
then to also voice their, you know, their their issues and their bases and the causes of their distress.
So in this particular situation, as a young,
a young 21 year old Nigerian poet and these boxes is ours would have been you might regard him as a 65 year old Nigerian poet,
and we're being interviewed to discuss the nature of fatherhood.
And the idea was whether we would be coming off our own fathers. So that was a kind of theme.
And and he then turned to the to the interview and said to the interviewer, You do not.
I've already told you before before I agreed to do this, but I lost my father to engage and and the interviewer said, yes.
So I say to the both of them, I said, Well, I lost my father when I was 17,
and that allowed the interviewer to just say, Well, I lost my father, and that's quite young.
And he was obvious,
demonstrably obvious that the that the young 21 year old poet relaxed because he had heard that we had lost our fathers at a young age,
but we were then able to talk about it. I then allowed him during the recording of the programme to open up about how that did affected him.
So it's the opening up of a space that that helps people to share stories and
do stories themselves or work as space open an openness to my experience.
I have been working with three girls in Cameroon for the last two years.
I have the impression they're telling the girls, telling them so that their story was a way to find some sort of validation from people.
They would be telling their story,
but they also wanted the person who is listening to understand what she's been going through to validate her feelings and to accept her
as she is and actually try to support her because those kids living on the street call the cold weather and living in the daily basis,
you know, trying to make it every day and not even being sure about tomorrow,
but still making it onto tomorrow and then come back and talk about yesterday.
For them, it's like, Well, I've made it, so I'm telling my story so that people understand what I'm going to in.
They can actually not only understand what I'm going through, but they can also in some way relate so that I don't feel alone.
But because when we do, we usually do the group. We have kids coming like girls coming from everywhere, all of the town.
So I think I have that impression. Sometimes they want to hold someone in the group and they wanted that wonderful feeling to be validated.
And then they also really want to share, you know, what they've been going through.
And are they out of interest in those in those situations when they're sharing their stories, they're seeking validation?
Are there particular things that they do verbally to to get going or to kind of keep keep going?
I mean, like, is it correct or do people say, I don't know yes?
Or am I agree with that actually?
Yeah, I think there is usually a lot of interaction, not one damn that someone will be telling the story and the other will be less.
Yeah, I did that yesterday. Oh, yeah, I remember that like that, really.
And also, I've also noticed that when they're telling those stories, they tend to be laughing around.
But it's not. And sometimes the laughing interrupts like disturb the session.
But I got to realise that they are not laughing. And but I think that's the way to relieve the stress.
Sometimes they feel very uncomfortable sharing difficult things, so they have to find that way to really, you know,
make them feel so comfortable and not trying to be like, Oh,
she didn't she or she was ashamed like that in that competition where they want to get their story out.
But at the same time, they're also afraid of a reaction.
So telling that story makes a difference makes a huge difference because at the end of the day,
they feel like, yeah, maybe we should have been living on the street doing all those things.
We are not alone.
I'm I'm thinking also about echoing patterns, echo like patterns we were just hearing in the poetry session we had earlier about kids.
You know, these school kids that we were talking about, picking up on things in the poems they were reading that corresponded to their lives?
And then I'm thinking also about the women saying yes, or, you know, laughter even is kind of like picking up an energy and kind of feeding it back.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, from the practise of teaching English literary studies,
and I've become really more and more convinced that we need to think about breaking down that
boundary between what we do as a practise analysis of literary texts and actually the stories and and
really focus much more on the by directionality of the of what we do that we create in our teaching
nexus points between texts and ourselves and learn how to insert ourselves into the stories.
So instead of just doing an analysis of what the poem or short story means.
How about rewriting it into your in your own voice, inserting ourselves into that story and transforming it and making it part of our own lives?
The one doesn't replace the other one, but these are ways of of rethinking the relationship between us as readers and literary literature.
So I think increasingly, I think there's a there's a sense that that that stories are not just up to.
It's of study, but that they can change the way we rethink the way we lead our lives and that we can actually
narrate our own stories because that's the point in the end to become the author of your own story.
There's something very interesting about narrative about stories that I talked
about that yesterday that aren't saying that stories are a form of action.
They're not just words on the page. They are the way in which we insert ourselves into the into the real world.
Yes, if I might add something to that, the said. So just speaking at a seminar for a retired psychiatrist about three or four
weeks ago and using as using a fellow and media as a way of doing some work.
But the reason for bringing that up is that in using a fellow, um, I was using it to come back to the self.
So as I say about a fellow that he Othello is a black boy from North Africa.
And even though he's achieved a lot to be a general in the Venetian Army is a bit like me, who is a black African who is an immigrant,
just like he was untrue on the on the superficially you might think is very successful,
but retains all the vulnerabilities that make it possible for a year ago to produce induce jealousy.
This doesn't mean to say exactly what you're saying, that you're using that account that everybody shares.
I don't have to open you up in the big way.
But I can use him and then I can insert myself in it and they look at me differently than, you know, the 15 or so retired people.
And we used that. And then I need to use the same about the the kind of loneliness that being an immigrant does for me, dear.
So she's married to Jay-Z, and she's left her country.
She's put her and her all in with Jay-Z.
And, you know, she's helped to kill her brother, and she's helped him to get the golden fleece and all that sort of stuff.
And then he chooses to marry another woman, and then she's properly socially isolated.
But the emphasis here is on what it does to you where you immigrant because you, you, you, you're kind of detached and dispassionate.
So it's doing exactly what you are doing, what you are. We're doing the storytelling.
We're doing it in the story that everybody knows about. So you have to do a lot of hard work to get that little account, you know?
You know what, William Carlos Williams, what I call the word machine you do.
So you've got that little gem that's already been created for you and then you can use it to open.
But you've got to be confident enough to insert yourself into it because I don't think, you know, if you it makes me 20 years ago,
I wouldn't have been able to insert myself into a story storyline that says an immigrant is vulnerable.
So I'm a bit older. I'm not as anxious as I was. Therefore, I can sit within that story without being anxious about it.
I would definitely want that only 20 years ago.
So again, it depends on when it's ready, when you're ready to be able to do it, on which story it is, and not just any story.
Shakespeare. Oh, well, yeah, you're using the wonderful kind of account.
You know, I love to count because you also write this when you look at your fellow,
one of the other things I'll say this that Shakespeare is understood that in order to make him properly vulnerable, he also gives them epilepsy.
And we are doctors. So it's important that I connect with that.
He's a person who's got epilepsy. And what happened? The disability of that sort?
To your sense of self and a bunch of stuff. So that's how that is, how competent the writer is, that particular writer that is understood,
that is not just being an immigrant that makes him vulnerable, but it gives him another stigmatised condition that makes it even more.
And not only that, he actually that gets him to have a feat in the play deals with.
So so it's not just that he's talking about it in the abstract, but he actually gets it to have a fit in the play.
So yes, he does open up these possibilities for us.
He makes it gives you a room to be a bit detached. He allows you to insert yourself in it because you have quite a bit of detachment.
It allows other people to examine that situation and use it to do some work themselves.
And because you're given the permission to insert themselves in it, they may not do it in language you verbally in public,
but it's going on inside them because they today reassert themselves in it and use it to explore their own lives and so on.
I'm very interested in being part of what everyone's been saying, and, you know, this is to look way to your word for it,
really, but I'm really interested in the embodiment that's also involved with the stories movement over insertion.
We've been talking about, you know, inviting people to be part of stories.
We've been talking about manipulating stories. You know, Hannah Arendt saying that, you know, we we we can use these stories in order to affect,
you know, political change or, you know, to to to create a positive reaction.
But what what also, as part of all of that interests me, is that total immersion is quite primal actually in stories.
It's like sort of rhythm is very primal and poetry, you know, it kind of sweeps us along without really being fully aware.
I think of some of some of the effects, and I was a little while ago yesterday, I was telling somebody because we're talking about Jane Eyre,
you know that Charlotte Bronte novel and I was once listening to that on an audio book.
I knew the story very well, but I just wanted to refresh my memory from certain things I was listening to.
You were driving in the car and, you know, touch was the only time I had a car accident because I was so inside the story.
I drove into a post. Mm-Hmm. So there's there's that.
It's that that way in which with storytelling, we're both.
If we're listening to someone else's story, we or reading it, we are both inside and outside.
As you were saying, I mean, you sort of both inserted and you're also able to try to emphasise which mean empathy involves,
you know, stepping into the other person's shoes. No, I think you're correct.
There's something deeply primal and deeply connected to being human.
The way we tell stories and we have and the way we have told stories, you know, for a hundred thousand years or longer.
And I think so. There's something very deep and and and and affective in stories.
But there's also something deeply ethical in stories because stories are always life affirming, even if they are terrible stories,
which are maybe the cautionary tales that are truly old stories,
the stories we've grown up a firm, life affirming living together in a in a humane way.
Stories celebrate the good. And so stories are different to actually life.
Stories tend to mirror life, and the bi directionality of this is interesting that when we study two stories, we read stories.
We we tell stories, we write stories.
We we engage in an ethical activity as well, which which, you know, to use our words again, which which is able to action something in the world.
So it's something very precious, unique and about stories which we need to hold on to and and cherish and and build on,
especially in our new liberal world,
where often the humanities just really about stories about it is is often seen as not making a valuable contribution.
Yeah, I mean, this is sort of both an instrumental thing which I worry about a bit, you know, using stories to improve the lives of young people.
But then there's also, you know, that way in which these these stories, these poems work in spite, in spite of those U.N. programmes.
You know, they are they that and they are they are just that kind of a power and power of kind of, you know,
a pulse and stories of physical energy moving forward that it can be that can be harnessed to the good.
I I myself, I'm not. I'm not as sure as I think you just were there about the ethical power of stories,
I think is something that does have to be harnessed and that, you know, some really terrible stories can be told.
And I'm just going to kind of go around a small circle here and just ask if you have a kind of closing thought about, I mean,
any of the multiple aspects of storytelling we've touched on, be it embassy, be it for speed identification, be it insertion.
Caroline, do you want to do on time? Yeah, so.
So thank you. So I've been on May, in my opinion,
be we have to talk more about the reinsertion because I'm still going to talk about my own experience working with those girls on the street.
They already are looking at them, so like they're not part of society anymore.
So getting the story really not only validates that, yeah, you're still part of the society,
but it also brings them to the table to talk about the difficulties and to, you know, to people from the society.
And also, this is the I mean to our turn to take those problems,
whatever they're going through and try to, I don't know, bring it to the next level to find a solution.
So I think really bringing them together, as we say, during the harm,
really bringing those you like from the beginning of the process, they have to be part of the discussion from the beginning.
And I think the discussion starts with telling their stories. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, right. One of the things which are really fun,
very interesting in this workshop was sort of some insight from the colleagues from
psychology about what is so strong and important and pronounced in adolescents lives.
So intense interest in in the social, the search for authenticity for for the real, for risk taking.
And I thought to myself, Yes, this is this is these are good things to take into account when when we choose which texts to to study at university.
So that was a very practical way in which, you know, that was a moment,
one of the many moments which I thought was really, really practically very interesting and useful and special.
And Jim, thanks. Yes. The first time to see how those stories work.
You know, I've got a patient of mine many years ago is working prostitute because Caroline's
talking about girls to work on the street or the working prostitute as a patient of mine.
And I could tell you all the stories about that, but I stopped looking after her.
So she moved because I changed jobs and all that. So she moved away and I didn't see her for 20 years and then standing in the canteen,
in the hospital canteen, I've got this woman standing in front of me about to pay and she turns around.
I just said, I bet you don't know who I am and another farmer on earth is this woman.
And just like I thought I was going to panic, I think into mine and I said, Of course I know you.
I said, you had, you know, you had Debbie and Debbie.
You haven't changed. You haven't changed a bit. You said, I should tell you, I said, Let me just say yes, I said, Liar, liar.
But tell me all over again, you know, through your fiction to true.
Yeah, wonderful kind of captured your bags and and I've gone and written the poem about it,
and I've inserted into a poem which is totally about something completely different.
But I'm telling you that story again, and it's a beautiful story. And and and I use it to use it with medical students and they use it for.
I use it all sorts of reasons.
One of the reasons I use it is for the sheer humanity of Debbie that when I tell it, the nobody does it just it becomes irrelevant.
That she was a working girl doesn't mean I.
What comes out of all of it is the wonderful fresh interaction and relationship between Debbie and myself and I, and I can imagine that,
you know, I've got a glint in my eye and she's got this wonderful glow in her eye as we make that exchange in the canteen.
You know, and I think you, we're using it. They're just amazing tools.
They are. You are all the time in, you know, experiencing tiny little human events that become accounts that we give to others,
that we use it to open up human life and use it to show what is ethically right about how you know,
if you want to teach a young medical student how to respect patients who respect the fact that they come from a different social background,
as most doctors are from a middle class background and they don't make a prosthetic before in real life.
And they've never met somebody who is a criminal who's.
They were met a murderer before, and if you are going to be working with a psychiatrist, all of those people, you received them, so you so you,
I have to find a way to get a young person, not to be dismissive and not to be contemptuous,
to regard the real person and to have affiliation with that real person.
And and often it's storytelling that does it. Yeah. You know, he just comes across all that stuff and they can get a real sense.
But they also do with the actual patients. Certainly, the actual patients are paying some account.
They can get them to laugh and then I can laugh.
And then all the kind of funny, awkward accent and the fact that, you know, African happened to be living in England.
All of that falls away and we just become two people in a room together and then we can do the work that we really did.
So it's amazing stuff, but raising stuff, and maybe we can end of that line, tell it to me again and.
Thanks very much for listening to this podcast. Do you have a listen to the others in this series on understanding adolescence in African contexts?