The Fairytale and the Book

I have always been interested in fairytales/folktales. Partly because they were probably the first truly-formed stories with recognizable beginning, middle and end that I was introduced to. I read Tuntunir Boi, Thakumar Jhuli and a whole lot of folktale compilations coming out of Peking/Beijing and Moscow.(Did I just give out my heritage? I think, I just did. But just for the sake of record, I claim a Bengali middle-class Naxalism-smelling milieu as my true heritage. Which, I believe, makes it impossible for me to claim any ethnic heritage squarely, my readers and friends.) Anyway, I read those in Bangla, and as I began to get fluent in English, I began to read the re-tellings of Hans Christian Anderson and Grimms Brothers stories. Yep, I always thought of them as "English", until I began to be trained as a comparatist and got to know a little bit about the vexed history of folklore and the "tales." What is intriguing to me now, is that, "folktales" came to me in the form of books, not as oral artifacts. Yes, there were stories that my grandmother told me, my mother also told me which she herself happened to hear from her dad, that is, my grandfather, who died when I was only four. But my mother's way of introducing me to folktales, both Bengali and global, was to read them out to me from books. So, in my imagination, fairytales have always been associated with the book. The book as a material object. The book as a form of re-telling. And also, when I think of the book as a mode of re-telling the fairy-tale, I am not just referring to the stories, told in words and alphabets, but also the pictures. If my experience is anything to go by, the illustration in children's books play an important role in telling the story, in giving the children important pointers as to how to interpret the story itself. And those pointers are often visual in their very nature.

I am thinking about these questions more and more as I am working through my manuscript of poems. I started out with the intention of re-telling some of the fairytales/folktales that have appealed to me. Pointing out the gaps, filling them in. But now, I am thinking, that a mere attempt to re-tell these tales isn't enough. I will have to think through a lot of these things in much more details. There are lots of complexities within these forms, within the very processes through which I got acquainted with these forms, which can form the basis of very interesting poem-projects. But for that, I will have to move beyond the mere "re-telling" mode. This morning, I have been reading this micro-essay by Barbara Jane Reyes. I am especially intrigued by her concluding lines:

I don't know where the belief that spoken word is not poetry was bom, how it has been cultivated and propagated, but I do know that spoken word artists have been othered as the fictitious line has been drawn between them and the poets. When talking to students, I don't have the time to linger on where this cleaving began. Instead, let me refer to Juan Felipe Herrera's 2005 lecture, "A Natural History of Chicano Literature":

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you...and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers. If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker. If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker. And that's who forms our poetics.1

This is a fairly self-explanatory statement that I try my best to impart to them. Poetry is not meant to be locked up in inaccessible spaces. Poetry is about paying attention, not just to the stories all around us, but also and especially to how these stories are being told.

While there are lots of things that are of relevance to me here, what I am especially concerned with, at this point, is her concluding sentence. We, as poets and writers, need to pay attention to "how these stories are being told." So, if that's the case, then it becomes an imperative that I pay attention to THE BOOK too, when I am trying to engage with the very tradition of fairy-tales. At the same time, when my mother read these stories out loud to me, wasn't she also exercising a kind of orality, which is different from the talk-story tradition, but nonetheless interrelated?

Now, what it means for me now is that, I need to work harder on this project. Read more, write more, push myself more. Oh well...