Let us imagine a scene that predates writing, even the first school. A woman discovers in her child's fragility the evidence of a shared destiny: she will not always be there. From that awareness of finitude is born a gesture that founds not only education, but the ethics of orality. And so, she begins to tell stories, so that death does not interrupt the transmission of what makes living together possible. Before the mark and the stone, the spoken word was care, shelter, and hospitality; a way of receiving the other in their vulnerability and bequeathing them the world before disappearing. Orality appears as responsibility, bond, and safeguard of what we hold in common.

UNESCO has finally conceded what any grandmother already knew: that oral traditions are the flying carpet of humanity's intangible cultural heritage, the space where a community transmits its values, its memory, and its knowledge of the world from generation to generation. It is the most universal, democratic, and tenuous way of preserving what a culture considers worthy of being remembered; tenuous because it depends, always, on someone deciding to keep saying it aloud.

The human being is a homo narrans; narrating converts experience into memory, meaning and story, and rescues time from its own darkness. Orality is the original form through which human beings have given themselves a world in which to live together; reading shapes interiority, telling invents the art of living in peace. Homer was a voice long before he was a text; the rhapsodes carried him in memory and reconstructed him before different audiences, adding, adjusting, responding to what each gathering longed to hear. Writing came later to fix him in place, and in that fixing, we gained permanence and lost presence. A story does not fully exist until someone speaks it to someone who listens.

Odysseus takes ten years to reach home, not because the sea is so wide, but because he does not yet know how to narrate what has happened to him. The Cyclops has no munus, no obligation to give or receive, and so devours his guests. Only in the court of the Phaeacians, seated, with wine, before an audience that receives him, does experience become transmissible and the journey find its end. When that transmission is broken, experience congeals, rots, becomes trauma or noise. Oral narration reopens that enclosure as a threshold of interpretation and restores existence to its condition as a shared world. Not as therapy; as an act of undiminished humanity.

That restitution carries a prior condition that no technology can replace: the presence of bodies. Stories live in the body; they were born to be told aloud, in the dark, with the intonation that makes fear into pleasure and danger into knowledge. The spoken word exists only in the moment of its utterance; it is the most fleeting and most alive of human acts. When the Greek actors declaimed Homer in the open-air theatres, they were not performing literature; they were returning to the assembled bodies something that belonged to them. Presence creates a responsibility that technological distance cannot sustain; narrating demands being there, exposing oneself, allowing oneself to be affected; it demands a body, a voice, a face, and hands that answer for what they say.

Orality cannot restore the communicability of experience if there is no one to receive it. Momo, the girl who lives among the ruins of the amphitheatre in Michael Ende's novel, is above all a listener. Her ethics lie in listening in such a way that whoever speaks before her finds, in the mirror of that listening, what they did not know they needed to say. The neighbours come to her with accumulated silences, half-lived lives, and leave with answers she has not given them; they have given those answers to themselves because someone listened. Momo does not only tell; she invites others to tell. And what threatens her world, the Grey Men who steal time, represents the substitution of presence by efficiency, of encounter by procedure, of orality by entertainment. The ethics of orality rests in the listener; a hostile ear destroys the story before it ends, a hospitable one makes it possible before it begins. To narrate is not merely an offer the listener may accept or decline; it is an interpellation that makes the listener a witness, and to be a witness is already a form of moral responsibility. Without that hospitality, there is no narration; there is only the wardenship of words.

Florence, 1348. The plague. Ten young people abandon the stricken city and withdraw to a villa in the hills. For ten days, they tell stories; it is how they rebuild their identity in the face of chaos, how they work through the death surrounding them without being devoured by it. To narrate is not to evade; it is to weave words together. Narrative identity allows the past to be reinscribed in an open plot in which each subjectivity recognises what it has lived without being reduced to it; the possibility of telling oneself differently, not to deceive oneself, but to avoid being defined by the institution that classifies, the file that summarises, or the stigma that precedes them. And that reconfigured story requires a memory to anchor it. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché la diritta via era smarrita. What saves Dante is not strength nor intelligence; it is the memory of Virgil, of Beatrice, of all he has loved and lost. Narrated memory does not deny the fracture; it reinscribes it in a sequence where interpretation and beginning to remain possible.

That recovered memory demands bringing to light what the social order would prefer to keep silent. There is a way of doing this that looks like a game and turns out to be a trap: place two words together that have nothing to do with each other and wait for what neither contained on its own to germinate between them. The teacher does not create the story; the teacher lays the snare so that the story that the narrator did not know they were carrying can emerge. Whoever dares to tell what the order would prefer to be silenced steps into an ethical act; they speak with truth, with risk, and with responsibility for what they say; this is what the Greeks called parrhesia. Oral traditions have always been a vehicle for subaltern memories, for versions of history that never reached the textbooks; in that sense, orality is the maieutic of the other story. But that same art can also draw out what would be better left unsaid or say it in a way that closes rather than opens. The difference between an ethically open and an ethically closing narration does not lie in the content; it lies in what happens to the listener: if they leave the story with more interpretive possibilities than they had, the narration has been ethical; if they leave with fewer, it has been symbolic violence in disguise. The ethical foundations of orality are not natural properties; they are demands that must be upheld against the tendency of every story to

become dogma, of every narrative community to become a tribe. Narrating is not easy. It is, perhaps, the most exacting ethical task there is.

Orality also contains an equalising dimension that no other form of communication has been able to replicate. In the Canterbury Tales, the one who narrates best is not the noblest; it is the most human. The spoken word establishes a republic of listening: anyone may listen and tell, needing only to be alive and to have memory. The communitas is what the branch feels when it loses a leaf. An ethnologist observed how the story of an old woman who narrated her own grief in the third person, as though it were already someone else's story, had become, by the time she returned to the village, a fable that the children of the tribe enacted with gestures and play of voice. What is held in common is not chosen; it is inherited, and only narration can transmit that inheritance without betraying it.

The stories of oral tradition survived for centuries not in books but in the mouths of women; the mothers, the grandmothers, those who wove and told at the same time. The oral narrator is not an author in the modern sense; they are a link in a chain. They owe a debt to those who told them and bear a responsibility toward those who have not yet been able to listen; those who tell, those who listen, and those who will come after form a chain whose breaking is always a loss. This is why the death of an elder is always an epistemic catastrophe; not only is a life lost, but a cord of stories is also severed. What digital hypomnesis can store is data; what dies with the elder is the embodied experience of having lived among those data and having learned to narrate them. That loss has no backup.

The ten ethical foundations of orality that this journey has sketched in broad strokes, the communicability of experience, the corporeality of presence, the hospitality of listening, mutual recognition, care of the self, enabling memory, the maieutic of the other story, the democratisation of the word, intergenerational transmission as ethical responsibility, and critical and artistic pedagogy, are not an abstraction. They are practices humans have performed for millennia: Odysseus, when he learns to narrate his shipwreck; Scheherazade turning one night into a thousand; the young Florentines telling stories to hold the plague at bay; Dante, when he converts hell into a school; the BenaLulua elder transforming her grief into a fable for the children of the tribe. The scene of the story is one of the few that survive as a space of unmediated community; without screen, without algorithm, without intermediary between voice and ear. To narrate is an ethical act. Not because we say so. Because it has been demonstrated, night after night, by the warmth of a fire.

All the foregoing could be condensed into a single sentence. I have spent years trying to show rather than merely state: to tell to live together is the foundation of orality. Not to teach, or to correct, or to save. The Ulysses of the Odyssey travels to feed his vanity; the Ulysses of Joyce travels to dignify his wife, Molly, and his love dignifies her while dignifying himself. What distinguishes one model from the other is not technique; it is the willingness to listen. When a library burns, what is lost is not only the past; it is the possibility of the future that the past was sheltering. Every time someone tells what power would prefer forgotten, they are transforming absences into presences; we

call that the epistemology of resistance. Time and education, the sub-Saharan oral tradition proclaims, defeat the monster and restore the community. No shortcuts. No algorithms.

And if all of this is true, and I believe it is, not because I have theorised it but because I have heard it, then the question that hovers in the air is philosophical: if we are so immensely clever, why can we not make ourselves happy? For the first time in history, the human being's narrative supremacy is being challenged; artificial intelligence is already beginning to tell persuasive and addictive stories. What AI produces is hypomnesis, retention, accumulation, the calculation of probabilities; what it cannot produce is anamnesis, living memory that springs from the liminal experience of finitude. The danger is not only technological; it is ontological. The stories that arise from the trembling of skin and the awareness of death cannot be replaced by a digital server that operates without ever having felt fear, without having lost anyone, without ever having needed someone to listen. The narration that erupts and interrupts is, still, the only place where that second way of inhabiting the world, as guests, can take place. But it makes it possible, which is exactly what a good story should do. The rest, the methods, the theoretical frameworks, the decalogues, come afterwards, and come in good time. But after the tale is told.

Andrés González Novoa – PhD in Education, Tenured Assistant Professor (Profesor Permanente Laboral) at the University of La Laguna (ULL), coordinator of the narrative program Palabras Prisioneras (Prisoner Words) at the Tenerife Penitentiary Center, director of the ULL's Cultural Classroom for Oral Storytelling, and member of the organizing team for the Los Silos International Storytelling Festival, the Garafía Fiesta de la Palabra (Festival of the Word), and the Puerto de las Letras (Port of Letters) in Playa de Santiago. He is also a children's literature author with fifteen published works and a professional storyteller with over thirty years of experience on stage.

I ask myself about that primal human need: why did human beings, way back in the beginning, need someone to tell stories? And I ask myself about the same need in the middle of the 21st century: Why is the need still there? I would like to hazard a path towards a possible answer, one that could shed some light on the role of oral story-tellers in today’s world.

It is tempting to say that story-tellers existed and continue to exist because they pass on popular memory and identity. Although this may be a commonplace, it is nonetheless true. However, it is quite likely that handing stories down in this way has almost always occurred naturally, without any premeditation by the story-teller or awareness of it by the listener. In other words, I am not so sure that the stories were told because everyone knew that those tales, myths, or legends ought to be kept alive in popular memory, and as such the community needed story-tellers. I doubt any awareness of that role in the past and I doubt that people today who listen to stories have these matters on their mind. And yet, through story-telling, memory, identity, and a sense of community get passed on anyway. I think of those little fish who hitch a ride on the back of a whale. The whale (the story-teller) may or may not be bothered by this and may or may not notice them, but the fish will still get their ride because the whale has no way of shaking them off. Memory and identity are the stowaways of story-telling. But either way, I am not convinced that passing on memory and identity were what the community were asking story-tellers to do in the past. I also think it’s not what they ask for now.

We might consider entertainment: the tribe, the family, the town would all want to have a good time, and without nightclubs or cinemas, or bars or stadiums, the story-teller had a role. This seems much more logical: we get bored, but if someone could tell us a story, we wouldn’t be so bored. However, this role was also fulfilled (and probably with greater success) by those who could make music, or those who could dance, and later on by jesters, acrobats, actors, puppeteers, comedians, and entertainers. If the role of story-tellers had been to entertain, I don’t think they could have survived the competition. Nowadays it would be a lost art form. But what we see is that every day there are more story-tellers, festivals, and narrative spaces.

And so the question is Why? Why did communities need to have story-tellers?

Maybe it was it for education? But they already had wise elders, masters, and teachers for this purpose. Was it to use stories as a vehicle to deliver moral and ethical teaching, standards of behaviour, or social norms? Perhaps, but priests, judges, chiefs, older people, and adults in general also had that role. So why did communities specifically need there to be story-tellers? Simply out of the need to know stories? Of course, but then the story-tellers could have disappeared when writing came in, but that never happened. Then came radio, cinema, television, YouTube, Netflix and Spotify, and yet the number of story-tellers never stops growing.

Why did and why do communities seek out story-tellers?

Clearly the figure of the story-teller can embody many of the aspects mentioned above (stories, entertainment, symbols, memory, identity, morality, education, etc.), and that contributes in part to the fact that we are not extinct yet. But I don’t think that any of those things are what is essential. I endeavour to look further back, much further back. I think that in earliest times, when the nomadic tribe found a good cave and lit a fire to get through the night, when those men and women implored one of their own (with words, with looks, with silence) to tell a story, what they were looking for was something much more simple than all those things we have contrived in recent years to justify our art.

It was something that was linked to mere survival: all they wanted was to keep awake, because wild beasts were roaming outside.

In the beginning, the mission of the story-teller was to keep the adults awake.

That was what the community wanted from the story-teller, because for as long as they were awake, the fire wouldn’t go out, and if the fire didn’t go out, the beasts would keep their distance, and if it was winter, they wouldn’t perish in the cold. And in order to fulfil this important role, the story-teller would talk, tell tales, recall, invent, repeat, shout, go quiet, gesticulate, imitate, howl, hesitate, ask, listen, and start again. It wasn’t something that anyone could do, and not any story would suffice. If the tribe were not interested in the story, they would feel sleepy (and that put everyone at risk). The story-teller would think, select, choose, and improve, and above all would repeat stories that worked, those that his predecessor would tell. He was not concerned about passing down memory or identity; he was not concerned about whether he was educating anyone, he wasn’t even thinking about that. Keeping his people awake was the only thing he really cared about: it was a matter of life and death.

Over time (and when I say time, I mean centuries; I mean millennia), the best stories, those that kept the audience alert for longest, the most popular stories, the most requested, would travel along the ways and reach the story-tellers of other places. Obviously, the stories that made the deepest impression on human hearts were those that survived. Stories became increasingly important and earned their place outside of the cave, beyond the fear of the wild beasts, because they said important things, because they contained wisdom, law, paths, questions. Some of these ancient tales worked thanks to their story-tellers; the majority, despite their story-tellers. At some point in history, with large and densely-populated cities, with so many story-tellers and stories going around, it became ever more important to be a good story-teller in order to stand out: to know how to capture an audience, often made up of strangers, in a public space. But as there were no longer so many dangers, as people could now sleep safely in their homes, the role of professional story-tellers was no longer so clear. The community already had the tales and anyone could tell them. Now each family could choose its story-tellers: a grandparent, an aunt, a neighbour. A professional story-teller (an artist) was no longer required. Then people had stories in books, in libraries, in bookshops, in films, on the radio, on television, and story-tellers lost their monopoly over stories. And yet they never disappeared. In the 20th century they had to re-invent themselves and compromise, it’s true: the promotion of reading became something of a Faustian pact for oral story-tellers. Books gave them an opportunity to survive: talk about me, and I shall rejuvenate you. Story-tellers seized this lifeline and since then have started to dedicate themselves, to a large degree, to telling stories to encourage children to read. Governments – some more than others – were prepared to put money in, but not to fund story-telling for adult audiences, which for a long time (at least in Latin America) was relegated to informal spaces, almost never remunerated, in bars or squares or university campuses, and sometimes in cultural centres or libraries, but with such a loyal following that ultimately it inspired groups to set up festivals where story-telling for adults was always on the bill, with shows that were normally packed.

In summary: story-tellers never gave up telling stories for adults, and adults never gave up listening to them. Why? Why did they prepare (and still prepare) stories for adults under such limited and poorly-paid conditions? Why do we defend this profession tooth and nail, and refuse to let it become just a branch of reading animation, or just something aimed at children? Where do story-tellers get their profound and deeply-rooted conviction that what we do is not just important, but essential?

And why, when there are shows for adults, does the audience respond so well?

I believe that the answer goes right back to the beginning: this is the twenty-first century and we no longer live in caves, but the wild beasts have not gone away and someone has to keep the community awake. The beasts might not have fangs any more, but deep within them everything remains dark. Maybe what kept them at bay was never the fire, but rather a united community. The story-teller tells the story and the audience feel that they are part of a wider whole, even if they have never met before. In contrast to other art forms, such as theatre, a story-teller doesn’t seek to make you uncomfortable: the intention is to find a place where people want to remain, ideally all through the night, because for as long as we are together, no beast will be able to devour us.

Story-tellers offer the only thing they have, which is words. Those words have travelled from very far away to offer humans a sense of every epoch. The community attends story-telling sessions not to encourage themselves to read, but because in the depths of their hearts they feel the need to learn to face up to the wolf, and they want to do so in the company of others so that the wolf will stay away while they are still learning to vanquish it. And in order to do that, they need to trust each other, and before they can trust they need to feel that they are in a space, a place, in a context that is real.

In a story, nothing is true and yet there is no deceit. Everything the story-teller says is true. The intimate and shared emotions are true. There are no promises about the future or revisions of the past, because the story-teller is talking about paths that even though no one knows them, we have all walked down; about woods in which no one has got lost, but where we have all found ourselves alone at times; about beasts that cannot exist in the real world, and yet appear to be worryingly recognizable. When we doubt everything we are told and all the images we see and the authorship of every text, hearing someone standing on a stage telling an age-old tale is, as Estrella Ortiz used to say, to return to the true word, amid so many unwanted messages we hear.

What do the audience want when they listen to a story being told and give story-tellers a role beyond encouraging people to read? Or to put it another way: what does a story-telling session offer that no other art or leisure activity offers?

We are driven to listen to stories by a kind of unconscious certainty: for as long as there is someone telling stories; for as long as there is an audience listening to stories; for as long as we are together defending our freedom to create, imagine, and lose ourselves in the woods of our stories; for as long as we build spaces of Truth, the beasts will never be able to get close, because when someone tells a story, a fire is lit, and the heat from that fire stays with us for a long time, and the memory of that fire allows us to see the lies, the manipulation, and the hate of today’s world, and also the truth, the beauty, and the love; to distinguish, as Italo Calvino used to say, in the midst of hell what is not hell, and to nurture it and give it space.

Those of us who tell stories know that we have a key to hope in a world dominated by the most terrible beasts, who always come back, never tiring.

We need to light that bonfire all around; fill the world with stories, because to tell a story, to listen to a story, is increasingly an act of resistance.

That is why, I believe, the community still wants story-tellers.

That is why we still exist.

And I think that being aware of this role can answer many questions about the reach our profession has.

Andrés Montero (Santiago de Chile, 1990). Writer and oral story-teller, author of the books ‘El año en que hablamos con el mar’, ‘La muerte viene estilando’ or the essay ‘Por qué contar cuentos en el siglo XXI’, inter alia. By 2027, his books will have been translated into more than ten languages. Since 2012 he has dedicated himself to telling stories professionally, and is a founder of the La Matrioska Company, with which he has taken his stories across Chile and to festivals, fairs, and gatherings in over fifteen countries in America and Europe. He has trained as a story-teller with different masters, from which we may highlight the Chilean Paty Mix and the Spaniard Pep Bruno. On stage, he tells both his own stories and those of the universal oral tradition. As a teacher, he has run over 30 initiation workshops on oral story-telling in Santiago de Chile and ten courses or creative writing. Together with Nicole Castillo, he runs the Escuela Casa Contada, presents the television programme ‘Los cuenteros en ruta’, and he co-ordinates the International Oral Story-telling Festival ‘ChileCuentos’.

I feel certain that those of us who have made a career out of oral story-telling sometimes ask ourselves about the meaning of what we do: its significance, its scope, and its personal, social, emotional, and symbolic value. Why?

It can often be a difficult question to ask, when there are so many other things that need to be addressed first, such as administrative, economic, logistical, and technical tasks, to name but a few. There is no doubt that our ‘romantic’ calling overrides and outlasts the performance of all of these tasks. We sometimes have to overcome complications of all different kinds: work-life balance, scheduling and those who schedule our performances, difficult audiences, bespoke commissions, market needs and demands, bureaucracy, tax complexities, fines, compensation, fashion, social media posts, literary trends, and weird requests.

It can be difficult to survive such chaos while at the same time pondering the deeper, existential meaning of what we do, and more difficult still to rise above the mundane toil of the work to prioritize our motivation, our raison d’être, and remain true to these values.

Over the course of this essay I would like to share my personal reflections/opinions on this topic, seasoned with my personal and professional experience, my back-story, my trans-national migrant being, and my way of living in the world. A reflection that seeks to answer a question for me: What is our role as story-tellers in the face of the emerging discourses and narratives of our time? What is – or what ought to be – our attitude, position, commitment, or contribution to social justice? Ought we? Or is it something that has nothing to do with us?

My answers are based on two initial premises and the conclusions drawn. Over time I came to understand that oral story-telling cannot and should not take responsibility for changing someone or changing the world. That is asking too much of the story, and imposing such a colossal burden on a story is to partly distort what it is for. And the second is that oral story-telling is a historical and artistic product, and its beauty, whether aesthetic, symbolic, or cultural, ought to outweigh any possible social utility that it may have.

Having said this, I believe that oral story-telling and the performance of our profession as people who tell stories can contribute to challenging all those discourses and narratives filled with hate, violence, and intolerance. In my opinion, we have an ethical choice of accepting our role in this mission. This is what I believe for a host of reasons …

Why do we tell stories orally?

I became an oral story-teller for two main reasons. First because ever since I was a teenager I discovered that I wanted to live my life by generating a form of expression full of symbolic beauty, describing and constructing realities out of the charm of the artistic method, and because I felt that this made me happier; all this I found in stories. Second because I grew up in a place where enforced silence led to oblivion and to things, places, and people becoming invisible, and I thought it was important that they should be remembered and survive and be learnt about, and it was through story-telling that I found a way to make this happen. I do confess that along the way I have strayed, I have lost my way, and I have erred. I have done things that were a long way off-course, whether out of ignorance, or mistrust, or fear, or a multitude of other reasons. From some mistakes I have learned and from others I am still trying to learn the lessons. But the unstoppable march of time brings new challenges and makes it necessary to go back to those roots so as not to get lost along the way.

Silence as a strategy and words as resistance

Enforced silence continues to be a strategy that power uses to maintain its authority. Every day we hear more words and more discourses saying this in people’s mouths and hearts. Words and discourses that talk about hatred of what is different, specific ways to understand and inhabit the land, and new meanings for words such as war, homeland, woman-man, safety, and hundreds more. Words and discourses that are repeated thousands of times in the knowledge of the enormous power that this entails and that urge us to think in particular, absolute, and universal ways. Repetitions, repetitions and repetitions that start by no longer hurting the ears and the heart and end by building pseudo-realities about people, groups of people, nations, populations, collectives, places, and ways of thinking and feeling.

Words, discourses, repetitions spread through the media, information systems, algorithms, pulpits, proclamations, assemblies, social media, books, football stadiums, and ultimately influence our way of describing and understanding the world.

This leads me to the first of the premises I want to share. It is important to accept a reflection on how we see ourselves in our profession. I believe, like many other people, that oral story-telling is an alternative form of communication and expression; a form of human mediation at an emotional and inter-cultural level that transmits experience and diverse forms of learning.

Oral stories from the oral tradition, from adaptations of quality literature or from one’s own creation, are full of all of this: they tell us about history, they tell us about experiences, they tell us about places, they tell us about cultural features, they tell us about gastronomy, they tell us about solutions, they warn us, they give us ideas, they motivate us, and other subjects that tell us about the depth of humanity. The beauty of symbolic and aesthetic language talks to us in very profound allegories that sometimes we are not even aware of.

It is there in the content of the stories that we find the first source from which to drink, making our words a fresh torrent to counteract the arid cloud that seeks to standardize our words, our discourses, our loves and hates, our thoughts, and our way of life.

The world we want told in a story

To tell is to create. In the present moment of the story we create images and live realities. We open the door to imaginary worlds where anything is possible in the here and now of the story. For the people who tell stories and who listen to them a magical consensus is created in which we decide to believe. I believe that we can commit to sharing in the creation of those realities which are already present in the stories and which the new discourses seek to hide, forget, or extinguish. Realities in which the peoples and characters of our stories respect and live in communion with nature; where discernment can overcome force and mindless violence; where wisdom represents the fundamental tool for resolving problems; where men and women can undertake arduous adventures, face up to monstrous villains, solve problems, and ultimately prevail. I believe we can contribute to creating the images of another possible world through words and stories.

Daring to Listen

There is no doubt that this storm caused and fed by so many discourses filled with hate, intolerance, and a uniform description and interpretation of the world, is fed by the silence of others. Silence as a punishment, a sentence; silence as a tool for oblivion and invisibility. In this way the dominant discourses are those that we hear in ever more limited terms, in simplified language, but methodically calibrated to connect. As such I believe that the mere fact of listening to another, especially to another voice, one that has been silenced, is of itself a transgressive and transformative act of connection. Listening, recovering, interpreting, converting into a story, and recounting are a valuable step in this direction. Older people, migrant populations, rural communities, marginal communities, the outskirts, other people, collectives with new identities and thousands more, desperately want to be heard. Their voices, their stories, and their desires are an inexhaustible and valuable resource for narrative professionals who find in them new stories to tell and to multiply as a part of that kaleidoscopic mirror that we are as humanity and that unites us rather than divides us.

Telling, Interpreting, Re-interpreting

Old tales tell us about the present. According to scholars specializing in the historical analysis of folk tales from the oral tradition, these stories originated as a reaction to the social, cultural, political, economic, and ethical contexts of different populations at different historical times. However, many of these structures, plots, and motivations stem from profound human considerations, questions, concerns, explanations, and resolutions that are always relevant. Those heroes and heroines, those younger brothers and sisters, those small animals in danger and other archetypes, have their analogues in our contemporary world: they are the different people, the populations, the landless people, the victims of discrimination, the excluded, the impoverished, the victimized, etc. That is why their teachings and experiences have value in the present. To be conscious of this allows those of us who tell stories orally to interpret them and re-interpret them with the meanings, the symbols, and the aesthetics of today, reviving their plots, which are not all that different from modern plots, finding in the structure and socio-cultural function of the story a tool to convey hope in the possibility of transformation and the triumph of justice.

Human Libraries; spaces for listening and mobilization against hate speech.

To close, I would like to share an exciting experience I have had the good fortune to contribute to, thanks to the initiative by ASAMBLEA DE COOPERACIÓN POR LA PAZ (through projects funded by a variety of public-sector schemes organized in places such as Seville, San Juan de Aznalfarache, Algeciras, Tarifa, and La Línea de la Concepción) and some Public Libraries in Andalusia.

This is the BIBLIOTECA HUMANA [HUMAN LIBRARY] project as a space for Peace, Tolerance, NO racism, and against Hate Speech. This initiative (in conjunction with the international Movement of the same name) has the aim of contributing to the creation of sustainable spaces for listening, respect for difference, interaction, and construction of the social fabric.

The project involves a process of engaging with various groups; older people, teenagers at high school, members of associations with different aims, immigrant populations, reading clubs, and the users of public libraries. These are the people who become human-books at the Human Library.

The first part of this process offers various tools through which to commence the process of recovering the personal, family, and social memory of the participants. Subsequently we offer a setting for technical training in order to tell those stories orally, and finally we organize community events through which to share the stories, and above all to listen to one another, talk to one another, get to know one another, understand one another, and be moved.

In this way the human-books tell their own personal, family, origin, and migration stories. They describe their way of life, the things they eat, the reason behind their customs, their day-to-day lives in their places of origin, the skills of their trade, and much more. They do so in front of other collectives who are expressly invited, before their classmates, and before those people who attend the public and open sessions.

The conclusion that all of these events have in common and that is evident from the subsequent conversations that they foster is that the human-books and the listeners have so much in common.

A special feature of this initiative was the creation of catalogues of these human libraries so that they can be re-activated, re-convened, and listened to again (these are available at the school libraries, the associations, or the municipal public libraries).

Jhon Ardila – A Columbian story-teller based in Seville since 2009. In addition to his narrative profession he is also involved in university teaching activities relating to human rights and a variety of artistic social-intervention projects linked to human rights and social transformation.

Why and for what purpose do we tell stories?

What use do they have in these times?

What (ethical) responsibility does the storyteller hold?

It is not the first time I have asked myself these questions. Way back in 2001, I wondered what the point was of someone telling a story. An acquaintance had passed away (too young, athough there is no set time for dying), and the world was facing yet another war following the fall of the Twin Towers. Death, lies, and misinformation were the order of the day… I remember asking the question out loud, and a friend, a nurse, told me: "Diego, I do what I can, you do what you can… if we want to help, each of us heals in their own way". Then, as a bond or consolation, she offered me some verses from Mario Benedetti's poem "Por qué cantamos" (Why Do We Sing)*, and although I already knew it, it sustained me in a different way.

If every hour arrives with its own death
if time is like a den of thieves
and the airs are no longer so good airs
life is nothing more than targets moving

and you: you would ask us why we sing?

And those verses resonate in my head yet again in these times: because years pass, technology evolves, phones, washing machines, and refrigerators are increasingly intelligent… but what about people?

I would say that we live in turbulent times, but I’m not sure if that's true or if it's part of another story: I remember sitting down, not too long ago, to watch the Rocky saga in a burst of nostalgia and being surprised because they mentioned "the Crisis". As if in the history of humanity, just like in stories, the same narrative tropes were used to make us think, feel, and look in a specific way…

if our braves, they stayed without embraces
the homeland is almost dead because of sadness
and the heart of man is now shattered
even before that shame explodes

and you: you would ask us why we sing?

It is complicated to open a topic like this and not touch upon the political side. But everything could be considered politics, right? Or is that just another prefabricated phrase that leads us to think, feel, and look in a specific way?

if we are far, as far as a horizon
if there is where trees and skies did stay
if every night is some absence, always
and every arising is a disconnection

and you: you would ask us why we sing?

And just like Benedetti, who looked for an answer to why we sing, I began to look for answers as to why we tell stories.

we sing because the river is raucous

and when the river sounds/ sounds the river

We tell stories because voices are ringing out (and when voices are heard/ ring out…), we tell stories to get closer (to each other; to ourselves; to the fire—a fire, even if imaginary, from another era), we tell stories to look at each other (looking without looking, contemplating and marveling at our humanity)… we tell stories to humanize ourselves (which, apparently, in these times, is also something people need… or so some voices say).

we sing because the cruel has no name

and in change, its destiny has a name

We tell stories (I tell myself), to maintain hope and so that something sustains us…

we sing because the child and ’cause of all

and because some future and ’cause the people

We tell stories (I like to believe) to give meaning to everything we see; to be able to handle, in some way, the reality pushed upon us through our senses…

we sing because of the survivors

and our dead want us to sing

We tell stories (as I say in one of my shows) because, just like in the tales, someone survived to narrate that story and it must not be forgotten… 

we sing because the screaming is not sufficient

and is not sufficient the crying nor the rage

We tell stories (and there is some hope in this) to give voice, to amplify the voice, to spread the voice, to plant voices, so they don't go extinct, but rather take root and endure…

we sing because we believe in people
and because we will triumph over defeat

We tell stories (I repeat to myself, like a sermon) because we believe in the word that connects us and brings us closer and embraces us and defeats fears and overcomes oblivion and even death…

we sing because the sun recognizes us
and the fields have the scent of spring
and because in this stem or that fruit
each question has its answer

we sing because it rains over the groove
and we are militants of the life
and because we can’t nor we want
to allow the song to turn to ash.

We tell stories, in the end, because we cannot stop doing it… at least I can't… but I don't know if it's enough.

In these strange, liquid times we live in, the story (the word) has become a weapon (or perhaps it always has?).

So the question repeats itself once again and expands: in this era of post-truths and fake news, does storytelling have something to contribute in these times and in this context? And beyond that, do we, as storytellers, have the ethical responsibility to show these other uses of words and narratives, to take a stand in some way?

As you can see, I have more questions than answers. And that is how this newsletter was born. But precisely because we live in these times, it has been very difficult to assemble. I asked more than a dozen people for their point of view on this matter, and the discussions have been long (sometimes too much), sometimes vague, other times complex; on other occasions, they couldn't find the words, time, or strength to sit down… because the world continues its course and drags us along with force… My cousin Hubert used to say that "we dedicate ourselves to what is important and end up forgetting what is essential".

So I am drawing upon the words of three people who have guided me with their particular forms and styles to help us understand other perspectives that can move me from within (perhaps, just like what happens with a story, these visions and reflections will move you too). 

The first article I share, titled "Why?" I requested knowing that we would find some answers, but undoubtedly, lots of questions and reflections as well. The storyteller Jhon Ardila had already written for the AEDA newsletter before, around this topic, so it seemed like a beautiful proposal for him to reflect "out loud" once more. His reflections, and the echoes of his echoes, still resonate within me.

As if he had heard my internal turmoil, storyteller and writer Andrés Montero set out to write the second article I share with you, "Why do oral storytellers exist?". His prose and thoughts accompany me, making me smile from time to time.

The third article I share, "The Ethical Foundations of Orality" belongs to storyteller and writer Andrés Novoa. It has been a pleasure to wander through his musings and peek into this journey between the literary and storytelling. His decalogue of ethical foundations is an invitation to think and rethink/ reimagine the craft.

As I said, many voices are still missing. So many that it is more than possible that this newsletter will become a living document or have a second part. And I am more than sure that there is no single answer to those questions: Why do we tell stories? Is it of any use at all? Do we have to maintain an ethical stance? What responsibility does the storyteller hold? Each person will craft their own answers and change them throughout their life, as their perception of themselves and the context they inhabit change.

However, I believe that yes… that storytelling sustains me and helps me understand myself as a deeply political person: I choose what to tell and how to do it… and I choose why I do it… Now, the meanings, woven into the multiplicity of intersubjectivity, will vary from person to person, and even in me, as I listen to other positions, other visions, other reflections…

Thank you for coming close to this fire… Any reflection you offer will be welcome.

P.S.: If you wish to listen to Benedetti's poem in his own voice, please follow this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaK0Q6M13lU",Mario Benedetti - Por qué cantamos

*Pereyra, Pablo. 2024. “Why Do We Sing?” Medium. The Howling Owl. July 31, 2024. https://medium.com/the-howling-owl/why-do-we-sing-f48214d9561b. Translation from the poem “Por qué cantamos”, de Mario Benedetti (Benedetti, Mario. Cotidianas. Vol. 11, Biblioteca Mario Benedetti. Madrid: Visor, 1998).

This Newsletter No. 107 – What responsibility does the storyteller hold? has been coordinated by Diego Reinfeld.

Articles by: Jhon Ardila, Andrés Montero, and Andrés Novoa.

Once upon a time storytellers would often travel around sharing knowledge, myths, stories and news from neighbouring towns and cities. What news do we storytellers share nowadays? This question was very much in my mind on a recent trip to Switzerland.

As I packed my clothes, I wondered how the survivors in Gaza were managing to keep some kind of dignity. With drinking water being so scarce, little would be left for washing clothes and baby’s nappies. Water is life and the well in Gaza is drying up fast. As I swam in the cool waters of Lake Geneva, I visualized a powerful magic wand letting clean, refreshing water flow so that everyone in Gaza had enough to drink, to cook with, to clean their wounds, for personal hygeine and for anything else they need. Sadly, this magic wand was not powerful enough to protect the ten people murdered as they queued for water with their jetty cans on the 13th of July, six of them were children.

As I packed a 2-week supply of dogfood into my car, I wondered what stories the surviving dogs in Gaza would share about their situation. What were they eating? How has the constant noise of exploding bombs affected them?

In Lausanne I found a crate of fresh apples and sandwiches beside a rubbish bin. I wished I had a magic carpet to tele transport the food to Gaza where Israeli forces have killed over 1,000 aid-seekers in Gaza since May. The weaponizing of food means that desperate, hungry people now face the inhumane choice of starving to death or risk being killed while queuing for food. My magic carpet would take people to safe home where they could eat, sleep in a comfortable bed and share stories of better times.

A few hours later I watched my son dance classical ballet, and I wondered how human beings can create such incredible beauty and such atrocities at the same time.

On the way back to Spain, I spent the night in Carcassonne, France, a beautiful medieval citadel which was the site of much conflict in the past. The crusaders looted and burned the city, expulsing the Cathars who had sought refuge there, stripping them of their clothing before forcing them to leave. Now Carcassonne is a world heritage site visited by 4 million tourists each year. As I was falling asleep, I recalled the AI video that went viral about Gaza being converted into a tourist resort and I prayed that the day will not come when tourist guides will be telling the stories of the victims of this genocide to millions of thoughtless tourists.

Early the next morning we awoke to find the streets of Carcassonne full of paratroopers with rifles and military helicopters hovering overhead. The gunshots were deafening, and I was literally frozen with fright before being pulled to safety behind furniture. I tried to make sense of the situation. Was France at war, if so with whom? When things eventually quieted down, we ventured out, picked up some of the hundreds of spent brass cartridges that littered the streets and fled the city. Only hours later did we discover it had just been a training practise, although we saw no signs to alert us to this. But how would we have reacted after hundreds of sleepless nights, weakened by grief, hunger, hopelessness and nowhere to run to? I dreamt of converting the brass cartridges into a trumpet that could express the frustration, anger and helplessness that so many people are feeling about what is happening in Gaza.

All these incidents made me question the role that we storytellers can play in such a polarized world. What can we do to help keep the stories of the people in Gaza alive in the face of adversity in a world where arms sales seem to rule over humanity? Many UK-based storytellers have found a way through the internet.

David Heathfield, an English storyteller, cofounded the project “Tell a Child in Gaza’s Tale” with Haneen Khaled Jadallah, a theatre teacher from Gaza. The idea of the project was to give voice to children in Gaza through oral storytelling. David has been bringing visibility to the plight of people in Gaza at storytelling festivals and other events. He has also been very active on his Facebook page, posting about the cause every day since the 10th of November 2023. There you can find links to young Palestinian storytellers telling folk tales from Palestine and other countries around the world as well as a variety of short stories created by the children of Gaza themselves. David encourages storytellers, teachers and students to retell these stories and send them to be uploaded onto this YouTube channel. You can find more details in this article.

Another storyteller, Dafydd Davies-Hughes, from Wales has been posting poetic, provocative stories on his Facebook page which help to shed light on the daily life of the people in Gaza. Dafydd kindly gave his permission to include the following story.

Is all you need to do
“One loaf of bread please baker! “
Politely asked the child.
The baker wiped his apron,
Leaned and wryly smiled.
The boy was young yet rather tall,
Though perhaps that was his face,
Thinned and harrowed - with a brow
Too furrowed for his age.
“Ah!, replied the baker
“For that I’ll need some flour! “
He fetched a sack from out the back
And handed it over the counter.
The boy reached up and took it,
Tucked it under his arm,
“I’ll be straight back”, he promised,
Then out the door he ran.
An hour passed - then another.
The baker went to the door.
Stood looking up the ruined road,
At the rubble strewn on the floor,
At the yawning holes in the shop facades
That had long ceased selling goods,
At the dusty footprints on his steps
Where the boy had lately stood.
"Come out! Come out Palestinians!
We've flour for your bread!"
They waited till the square was full
Then shot them in the head.
The baker looked down at the palms of his hands,
At the step where the child had stood,
Fetched a sack from out the back
Then closed his shop for good.

Other storytellers have been communicating with Hala, a 16-year-old girl living in Gaza, via Facebook messenger. They encouraged her to share her thoughts, dreams, fears and experiences in a book The Gaza Girl: Gaza Diaries. Perhaps one day this book will be as famous as The Diary of Anne Frank and storytellers will be retelling her story.

But is it safe for storytellers to tells stories to support the cause of the people in Gaza in such a polarized world? The issue is very sensitive in countries like the UK where the government have banned the group Palestine Action and proscribed them as a terrorist organization. You can mention the word ‘Palestine’ and the word ‘action’ separately, but if you mention these words together you could be accused of terrorism.

At Glastonbury festival, 2 performances caused a lot of controversy: Kneecap, a rap group from Northern Ireland known for their socially conscious lyrics, led a crowd of tens of thousands chanting ‘free Palestine’ and Bobby Vylan, led chants of “death, death to the IDF’ (the Israel Defence Forces). Consequently, many of their programmed summer events were cancelled. Other artists labelled as terrorists are out on bail and are not allowed to perform in certain cities.

UK based comedian Reginal D. Hunter is being prosecuted for jokes he made on Twitter by the pro-Israel lobby group, Campaign against Antisemitism (CAA). A couple denounced him as being antisemitic after hearing his jokes and Hunter and his agents have received hate mail and death threats. This is a targeted assault on the freedom of expression and may serve as a warning to any storyteller who supports the Palestinian cause.

We never know who is in the public and how our stories may affect them. Some years ago, in a storytelling residency I facilitated in a school in the Sierra de Madrid, some students chose a tale from the Jewish tradition to perform at their end of year event, and this resulted in a boycott from parents who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. A simple folktale can cause ripples!

So, what do you as a storyteller tell nowadays? Perhaps you hear the call to join the whirlpool of storytellers supporting the cause of the Palestinian people by telling folktales from this ancient culture or retelling a story from the Tell a Child in Gaza’s Tale project or sharing something from The Gaza Diaries in your session. Some storytellers feel comfortable relating “If I must Die” by Refaat Alareer’s the murdered Palestinian poet and others prefer to simply tell stories of peace and conflict resolution.

So, what will future storytellers say about the storytellers of 2025? Do we still share knowledge, myths, stories and news from neighbouring cities and countries? Do contemporary storytellers tell stories with a cause?

Jennifer Ramsay

This article is part of our Bulletin n.º 104 - Cuentos con causa, coordinated by Carmen Ibarlucea

Here you can read the article in spanish

Spanish / Catalan / Galician / Basque

The associations AEDA, ANIN, LA FAULA, GNOA, MANO and NOGA, and all the storytellers constituting their membership, publicly express dissatisfaction with the practically years-long freeze in the budgets allocated to storytelling sessions and events in many of the public libraries in which we work.

Telling stories live before an audience requires effort and a great deal of preparation, ranging from the selection of stories and the narrative resources to make each story compelling, to the handling of often complex situations when working with dozens of people of differing ages and interests.

Professional storytelling is a demanding occupation. It requires continuous training over and above the years of experience gained through working in schools, libraries, theatres and public spaces before very different audiences in a wide variety of contexts. For that reason we believe fair remuneration is necessary, in order to allow us to meet the costs involved in our profession.

Those of us performing in libraries are engaged in artistic work rooted in tradition. Storytelling, when carried out professionally, is a relatable, stimulating activity which is highly valued by all audiences, whether they be babies, schoolchildren, teens or adults. 

As self-employed professionals we pay our dues with respect to the social security system, income tax, and civil liability insurance, while in addition we bear many other associated costs, such as a vehicle or transport, living expenses while working away, and administrative costs. We recommend that you read this article, which explains everything in more detail. 

To put this declaration into context, it should be noted that since 2020 the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has increased by almost 20% (see here) while the Interprofessional Minimum Wage has increased by some 50%. In some libraries and institutions running reading promotion campaigns, fees for storytelling professionals have not only not increased accordingly, but have remained virtually unchanged for years. This article on “How to Create a Storytelling Budget” may shed some light in that regard. 

We also believe that on many occasions there is a justifiable grievance when compared to other cultural, sporting or leisure activities which enjoy fairer budgetary provisions. 

For all of the above, storytellers throughout Spain urge those responsible for allocating and approving budgets, and those planning activities in public institutions, to give our craft and expertise the respect we believe it deserves, just as the public does.

This declaration is signed by all the storytelling associations in Spain:  AEDA, Spanish Professional Oral Tradition Association. – ANIN, Storytelling Association (Catalonia) – LA FAULA, Catalan Professional Oral Tradition Association, GNOA, Andalusian Oral Tradition Guild – MANO, Madrid Oral Tradition Association – NOGA, Galician Oral Tradition Collective.

Feliz / Feliç / Feliz / Happy 2025 Zoriontsu