This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/16/ancient-tales-fairytales-myth-refugees-canterbury-tales
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Ancient tales are back in fashion – for telling it like it is | Ancient tales are back in fashion – for telling it like it is |
| (5 months later) | |
| As military helicopters buzzed overhead on their practice manoeuvres for Donald Trump’s visit last week, 120 secular pilgrims straggled through some of the UK’s most ancient woodland. Now in its fourth year, the five-day Refugee Tales walk is both a political statement and a healing ritual for survivors of the infernal limbo of indefinite detention for the “crime” of being unwanted immigrants. | As military helicopters buzzed overhead on their practice manoeuvres for Donald Trump’s visit last week, 120 secular pilgrims straggled through some of the UK’s most ancient woodland. Now in its fourth year, the five-day Refugee Tales walk is both a political statement and a healing ritual for survivors of the infernal limbo of indefinite detention for the “crime” of being unwanted immigrants. |
| Its template is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: in the day, you walk; in the evening, you eat, drink and make merry. Above all, you tell stories. This year’s included The Social Worker’s Tale and The Erased Person’s Tale. As most of the refugees are too frightened or traumatised to tell their own stories, writers are brought in to do it for them. The erased person was represented by a rabbi, Jonathan Wittenberg, whose own family came to the UK as refugees, and who spoke chillingly of the “bureaucratic erasure” now practised in what were once regarded as “islands of refuge”. | Its template is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: in the day, you walk; in the evening, you eat, drink and make merry. Above all, you tell stories. This year’s included The Social Worker’s Tale and The Erased Person’s Tale. As most of the refugees are too frightened or traumatised to tell their own stories, writers are brought in to do it for them. The erased person was represented by a rabbi, Jonathan Wittenberg, whose own family came to the UK as refugees, and who spoke chillingly of the “bureaucratic erasure” now practised in what were once regarded as “islands of refuge”. |
| There is something immensely powerful about harnessing a 14th-century story cycle in the exposure and expiation of a 21st-century injustice, and Refugee Tales is not alone in making use of ancient templates. UK publishing, in particular, has teemed over the last few years with adaptations of the great myths of world literature. While modernising the classics is nothing new, the proliferation feels significant. Kamila Shamsie recently won the Women’s prize for fiction with an updating of Sophocles’ Antigone. August alone will see new novels from Pat Barker and Michael Hughes inspired by Homer’s Iliad, the latter using it as the basis for an exploration of the Irish Troubles. So what is going on? | There is something immensely powerful about harnessing a 14th-century story cycle in the exposure and expiation of a 21st-century injustice, and Refugee Tales is not alone in making use of ancient templates. UK publishing, in particular, has teemed over the last few years with adaptations of the great myths of world literature. While modernising the classics is nothing new, the proliferation feels significant. Kamila Shamsie recently won the Women’s prize for fiction with an updating of Sophocles’ Antigone. August alone will see new novels from Pat Barker and Michael Hughes inspired by Homer’s Iliad, the latter using it as the basis for an exploration of the Irish Troubles. So what is going on? |
| Unsurprisingly, given the bellicose nature of Greek epic, many of the updates deal with extreme political situations | Unsurprisingly, given the bellicose nature of Greek epic, many of the updates deal with extreme political situations |
| Unsurprisingly, given the bellicose nature of Greek epic, many of the updates deal with extreme and violent political situations. But cultural alienation is also a recurrent theme. Shamsie’s Home Fire uses Sophocles’s story – of a sister who insists on burying the corpse of her insurgent brother – to investigate the competing claims of state and kin on two families of modern British Muslims. Another recent award-winner, Preti Taneja, used King Lear as the ur-text for a novel about the disintegration of a family of Delhi plutocrats. | Unsurprisingly, given the bellicose nature of Greek epic, many of the updates deal with extreme and violent political situations. But cultural alienation is also a recurrent theme. Shamsie’s Home Fire uses Sophocles’s story – of a sister who insists on burying the corpse of her insurgent brother – to investigate the competing claims of state and kin on two families of modern British Muslims. Another recent award-winner, Preti Taneja, used King Lear as the ur-text for a novel about the disintegration of a family of Delhi plutocrats. |
| These writers are not only underlining the stature of subjects that might otherwise be undervalued (we all know how often family stories by women get dismissed as domestic trivia). They are also signalling that the conventions of the novel, that 18th-century invention, may not be broad or deep enough to encompass the turmoil of our globalised, turbo-capitalist world. | These writers are not only underlining the stature of subjects that might otherwise be undervalued (we all know how often family stories by women get dismissed as domestic trivia). They are also signalling that the conventions of the novel, that 18th-century invention, may not be broad or deep enough to encompass the turmoil of our globalised, turbo-capitalist world. |
| Ancient stories not only provide models for works of literature, but a means of making sense of our lives, as any number of fairytale analysts will tell you. Last week, an Italian theatre company invoked Aladdin to give a platform to immigrants held in Florence’s Sollicciano prison. I noticed this because days earlier I picked the same tale to frame a talk to a group of teachers about the power of collaborative storytelling for recent arrivals in a culture where they might otherwise be denied a voice. | Ancient stories not only provide models for works of literature, but a means of making sense of our lives, as any number of fairytale analysts will tell you. Last week, an Italian theatre company invoked Aladdin to give a platform to immigrants held in Florence’s Sollicciano prison. I noticed this because days earlier I picked the same tale to frame a talk to a group of teachers about the power of collaborative storytelling for recent arrivals in a culture where they might otherwise be denied a voice. |
| Released in its Disney incarnation in 1992, two years after the birth of my first child, Aladdin has been part of my family life. Whatever you think of Robin Williams’ bumptious blue genie, could there be a better metaphor for frustrated creativity than an ancient being awaiting a boy to liberate him from the prison of an old lamp? | Released in its Disney incarnation in 1992, two years after the birth of my first child, Aladdin has been part of my family life. Whatever you think of Robin Williams’ bumptious blue genie, could there be a better metaphor for frustrated creativity than an ancient being awaiting a boy to liberate him from the prison of an old lamp? |
| There is nothing intrinsically childlike about the genie: he’s a free spirit, an emanation of the collective unconscious, present in everything from David Bowie albums to pizza packaging and plant catalogues. (In a rather wonderful footnote, the Aladdin story didn’t exist in the original Arabic version of One Thousand and One Nights, but was added by an 18th-century French translator who had picked it up from a Syrian storyteller, so it is itself a cross-cultural construction.) | There is nothing intrinsically childlike about the genie: he’s a free spirit, an emanation of the collective unconscious, present in everything from David Bowie albums to pizza packaging and plant catalogues. (In a rather wonderful footnote, the Aladdin story didn’t exist in the original Arabic version of One Thousand and One Nights, but was added by an 18th-century French translator who had picked it up from a Syrian storyteller, so it is itself a cross-cultural construction.) |
| The genie is to the Disney generation what Anansi is to African and Caribbean storytellers, what Ariel and Puck were to Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoers, and what the fairy godmothers are to the Sleeping Beauty. We need these unruly and sometimes wicked spirits to articulate both our potential and the dangerous power of our rebelliousness. | The genie is to the Disney generation what Anansi is to African and Caribbean storytellers, what Ariel and Puck were to Elizabethan and Jacobean theatregoers, and what the fairy godmothers are to the Sleeping Beauty. We need these unruly and sometimes wicked spirits to articulate both our potential and the dangerous power of our rebelliousness. |
| In his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim fed European fairytales through the mincer of Freudian psychoanalysis, writing that each was “a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity”. | In his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim fed European fairytales through the mincer of Freudian psychoanalysis, writing that each was “a magic mirror which reflects some aspects of our inner world, and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity”. |
| Trump and Putin’s unholy alliance could lead to war with Iran | Simon Tisdall | |
| The one story that didn’t fit his therapeutic model was Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in which an interloper wreaks havoc in a family home, eating Baby Bear’s porridge and breaking his chair. “At its end there is neither recovery nor consolation; there is no resolution of conflict, and thus no happy ending,” he wrote. All of which made it perfect fodder for subversion by the great English mythmaker Roald Dahl, who concluded in his Revolting Rhymes that it would have been far better all round if the bears had simply gobbled up the “nosey thieving little louse”. | The one story that didn’t fit his therapeutic model was Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in which an interloper wreaks havoc in a family home, eating Baby Bear’s porridge and breaking his chair. “At its end there is neither recovery nor consolation; there is no resolution of conflict, and thus no happy ending,” he wrote. All of which made it perfect fodder for subversion by the great English mythmaker Roald Dahl, who concluded in his Revolting Rhymes that it would have been far better all round if the bears had simply gobbled up the “nosey thieving little louse”. |
| As the helicopters of the 21st century’s own Goldilocks buzz off to his next diplomatic encounter, he leaves behind no consolation, no resolution of conflict, but surely a revitalised fable. As Dahl so presciently put it: “A judge would say without a blink, / ‘Ten years hard labour in the clink!’ / But in the book, as you will see, / The little beast gets off scot-free.” | As the helicopters of the 21st century’s own Goldilocks buzz off to his next diplomatic encounter, he leaves behind no consolation, no resolution of conflict, but surely a revitalised fable. As Dahl so presciently put it: “A judge would say without a blink, / ‘Ten years hard labour in the clink!’ / But in the book, as you will see, / The little beast gets off scot-free.” |
| Great stories tell it not as we would like it to be, but as it is. We, the bears, are powerless. We can only carry on walking and talking – keeping “vigilant witness”, as one Refugee Tales speaker put it. | Great stories tell it not as we would like it to be, but as it is. We, the bears, are powerless. We can only carry on walking and talking – keeping “vigilant witness”, as one Refugee Tales speaker put it. |
| • Claire Armitstead is associate editor, culture for the Guardian | • Claire Armitstead is associate editor, culture for the Guardian |
| Refugees | Refugees |
| Opinion | Opinion |
| Migration | Migration |
| Classics | Classics |
| comment | comment |
| Share on Facebook | Share on Facebook |
| Share on Twitter | Share on Twitter |
| Share via Email | Share via Email |
| Share on LinkedIn | Share on LinkedIn |
| Share on Pinterest | Share on Pinterest |
| Share on Google+ | Share on Google+ |
| Share on WhatsApp | Share on WhatsApp |
| Share on Messenger | Share on Messenger |
| Reuse this content | Reuse this content |