A Story is a Gift

Writing fiction is an emotional investment and a labor of love. The process of storytelling forges bonds between readers and writers across borders and across time. Storytelling is a process, a relationship, and a journey.

The book as product, though a recent phenomenon, is now widely accepted because authors write to sell books and publishers print them to make money—it’s a business. Storytelling however, is an ancient art. Storytelling was the first placebo; it could heal, it could change minds and attitudes. it was magic and song, myth and history.

Stories can never ever be just a business.

Sufi storytellers have long claimed that stories are gifts. A similar concept is addressed by Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift, that storytelling is an offering, a gift. This concept goes deep into human tradition and civilization. Giving and receiving gifts symbolized peace. It was a token of friendship or love.

Hyde concentrates on cultural traditions of exchanging gifts for the wellbeing and prosperity of the community. “…a gift is a thing we do not get by our own efforts. We cannot buy it; we cannot acquire it through an act of will. It is bestowed upon us.” (Hyde, 1979)

But Hyde refers to books as a gift, even though they are a product he agrees, and insists, that “if a work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift (talent) and if it is received by its audience as gift, then is it too, a gift?” (Hyde, 1979)

Sufis used storytelling to conceal and reveal spiritual messages. They used symbolism, metaphors and similes to narrate so that every story could be read at several levels at once and every reader took away from the tale only what he was ready to accept, to understand, and to value.

An excellent example of Sufi storytellers is Rumi. His poetry is both about human love and divine love; it’s about the human heart and the human mind; the relationship of man with nature, with universe and vice versa. A gift is given without any expectation of return. It is unearned and it is unconditional.

I would also like to differentiate between a writer and a storyteller. All writers are not storytellers, and all storytellers are not necessarily writers. Case in point, the recent Nobel Literature Prize: Bob Dylan. He is a storyteller, not a writer per se.

His songs have touched many, and though the other candidates were just as worthy and great storytellers too, they are known as writers and he isn’t. Why then has he been awarded this prestigious literary honor? Perhaps it’s to do with the concept of gift giving. Bob Dylan changes our understanding of things through his songs and music, an ancient form of storytelling.

Storytelling is a journey that the writer and reader make afresh every time the story is told or read.

I never truly understood this process of reciprocation in storytelling, until I began to write myself. As a reader I was greedy and I devoured books with a sense of entitlement. The textual universe was mine to plunder and interpret and I was insatiable. That was the beginning of my writing career. Only I didn’t know that.

Such an interaction is an esoteric exchange, not too far from Newton’s Law. The exchange happens at an unconscious level, it is a metaphysical exchange. The process is alchemical: it transforms the one who gives the gift—the writer, and the one who receives it—the reader.

Allow me to expand on that.

Even though I’ve used aggressive terms for my years of reading, ‘plundering’ and ‘insatiable’, I use them with a Dionysian abandon. That’s what reading was for me for the longest time. A purely joyous wonderful experience, a whirling of two dervishes, the author and the reader in the parallel universe of words and story, away from reality. A world which exists for the writer and the reader alone.

But always with the whirling dervish is the Sufi. Always with the Dionysian element is the calming reasoning of Apollo.

The process of writing is an alchemical marriage of the Head and Heart. The emotional and the cerebral merge and become the ancient idea that ties with Hermeticism and Sufi traditions, of alchemy, that Art and craft; inspiration and diligence; Dionysian and Apollonian, that this mating of opposites, creates something new. Not something original necessarily, but something new.

There’s a difference. Original is the fruit of genius. Most of us are seekers, novices. Though the stories we tell are ours alone to tell. No one can tell our stories and if they do they will ring false. They will not be gifts but products. The right to tell stories does not come from the outside but from within.

I write because I have stories to tell. Stories of women mostly; Muslim women in particular. That’s a political position. English is my second language. That too is a political site of negotiation, with multiple and simultaneous pasts. This is the position I write from. I’m not romanticizing, diminishing or enhancing any single position or voice. If a writer is asking people to read what they write, the least they can do is make the telling of the tale ‘true’.

A storyteller must be honest in her storytelling. Her voice should be unique, not borrowed. It should be a story, not a political statement.

A story is not political, interpretations are.

Stories are told to communicate, to include, to add to plurality, to engage differences and to inform the dialogue of acceptance and value. Every story comes from a certain heritage,a certain experience. An individual is shaped by many experiences and many seasons.

When I write I feel like a galaxy and all of the books that I’ve read are stars that guide me. I navigate my writing universe with the help of these stars. And who can put a price on a star?

The exchange of a story between a writer and a reader is a transcendental exchange, a metaphysical bond woven with words, like an umbilical cord. A writer cannot exist without a reader.

This amazing gift of storytelling is like the Sufi story template, working at multiple levels. The gift is not just the story, the end product but the alchemical process itself. At another level, the author herself receives the gift through the course of telling the tale, because every story she tells will change the author too.

Art will always reward her supplicants, one way or another.

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Tags: featured, islam, penguin random house, sufi, this house of clay and waterr, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing