Stories that should be told.

Nobel Laureate (1992) and St Lucian poet Derek Walcott once stated, “The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination.” Is it not the imagination that has brought us the developments the world now enjoys? Buildings that tower, bridges that span vast distances, medical advances that have people now walking when paralysed, science launching into the realms of the previously impossible. These all existed in the mind(s) of those that imagined beyond the here and now. And how is this imagination developed? Not by fingers scrolling through mindless reels on a cellphone, nor spending hours vegetating in front of a television. Reading and losing oneself in the world thus created is where the imagination runs riot. Where colours are most vibrant, where the world of anything is possible exists.

Professor Dorian Haarhoff, South African-Namibian writer, poet and a storyteller par excellence, reminds us that each of us has a story to tell but few actually are given the space to tell. ?Years ago I shared “The Stolen Child”, a poem written by William Butler Yeats way back in 1886, when he was 21 years old. It is a reverie of his homeland Ireland, written almost as a fairytale. I remember wondering if the young people would get the gist of the story- they more than did so! One student, a girl born and raised in the then Northern Congo wept as she recounted part of her childhood and how she missed that world filled with the simplicity and wonder of nature she had been surrounded with. ?I cannot remember her exact words but I do remember that she hoped that one day her dreams would come true and if so that the world she lived in would always be radiant and never be dim with prejudice. Powerful thoughts!

We need to give space for the imagination that lies within each one. How wonderful would it be if a young person, immersed in the Shakespearean world of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, sat down and penned a rewrite of one of these immortal works in her/his own milieu, with characters drawn from the village of her ancestors. This is where the imagination can take us. And our young people are not going to get there, nor understand the beauty of our different cultures and backgrounds unless we grow our youth together and more than that, we read…and read.

Allow me to end here with the words of Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, words he quoted from one of his books “Indaba My Children” as I sat at his feet in the 1980’s and listened to his story : “My child never must you doubt for one single moment that there is a God, because to deny or doubt the existence of God is the greatest form of madness there can be”… God is more in you and is more part of you than you are in any part of yourself. Your soul is immortal because God is immortal”

?Let us allow space for our stories to be told.