The Art of Storytelling
Her passion for keeping traditional stories alive has taken her on extraordinary journeys into the jungles of Malaysia and villages of India. Director of MoonShadow Stories and Creative Producer of StoryFest: International Storytelling Festival Singapore, Kamini Ramachandran, shares with us her storytelling inspiration and how the art of listening is at the heart of community.
This interview first appeared in AKAR Vol 01 Foundations.
What got you started in the art of storytelling?
My childhood was surrounded with family tales, Asian mythology and legends, as well as big Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata because my grandfather was a storyteller. He had the ability to spin yarns and make characters come alive in the stories he told. When my grandfather passed away, I felt the need to re-tell the cultural and traditional stories that I grew up with to my children.
How did you get interested in Asian mythology, legends and folklore?
My inclination to tell Asian stories is largely shaped by my childhood growing up in Malaysia and going to schools in the rural areas of Pahang, Perak, Johor and Selangor. Most of my teachers were Malay and they taught the Malay language through stories, which is starkly different from how children learn languages today. In those days, you learnt a language by listening to your teacher tell you stories. The repetition of certain words or phrases, the nuances in tone, the facial expressions and non-verbal cues supplemented my learning of the language.
Being fluent in Malay gave me the key to being able to read stories and folklore from the region, especially old texts which have not been translated. Plus, I have always had that curiosity about Sang Kancil, and all the other animals in Malay folklore, as well as legendary characters like Puteri Gunung Ledang, Mahsuri, Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat - characters that were part of our school textbooks.
How did you learn about stories from other parts of Asia?
Aside from my grandfather, I travelled a great deal in my adult years. Once I went to a village in Thanjavur, a state in Tamil Nadu, to listen to the women of the village tell rustic, authentic stories from Tamil Nadu. I have also visited the Khasi tribe in Shillong to listen to their stories. In recent years, I went back to Perak to stay with the Temiar tribe, one of the largest Orang Asli groups in Malaysia.
I think it is important to receive or to hear a story from its original source, from the grandmothers and grandfathers who grew up with these stories and who continue to pass on these stories. For one, you are able to cross-check against the facts that you have read from secondary texts. And you are able to hear variations of the same stories because different geographical locations and different tribes will have their own unique version to a story. I’m more confident and comfortable re-telling a story to an audience if I am aware of different versions of the stories.
The ethics of storytelling is also crucial. I do not belong to any of these tribes or communities so it is important that I get their permission to re-tell the stories in my own way. Never assume that a story becomes yours just because someone shared it with you. Some of the stories they share are sacred to the land, so you are not allowed to take the stories out of their place. Some stories serve a certain function to the community, so when you take the stories out of context, the purpose of the stories is lost.
When I am there, I also share my stories with my host communities. By exchanging stories, you will discover commonalities across cultures.
Do you tell your audience about the community from which the stories originate?
I always do. I share with them my experiences traveling to a remote landscape, a forest or a bridge. I show them the pictures of the places I visited before I dive into the story, so that there is no disconnect between story and context. And I highlight that there are different versions to the story, because it is possible that the audience may be familiar with another version of the story.
What would you say is the beauty of storytelling for you?
The beauty of oral traditions is that the storyteller has her right to imagine and give her own style to the story. There is no need for one storyteller to replicate or imitate another. What is most important is that I honour the contents of the story and make sure that I am retelling it as authentically as possible.
Storytelling is an extensive form of art - you will never run out of stories to tell. Furthermore, coming from Asia, and especially Southeast Asia, we have such rich cultures and a lot of lesser known stories. You can say that it is my life’s passion to re-tell these stories as far, as wide, and as many times as I can.
Why is the art of storytelling important?
In today’s world of technology and distraction, the art of listening is dying. In storytelling, only two things are happening - the person telling the story is speaking and you are listening. Nothing else is happening. It forces you to listen.
This is what we are born and hardwired to do - to listen and to speak in stories. But the distraction and disruption that’s happening in our lives is taking away our capacity to listen. So storytelling is the most relevant art form that makes us reconnect to what makes us human, which is the eye contact - looking into somebody’s eye and not into a phone or a screen - and the ability to listen.
Secondly, as a multicultural society, tolerance is crucial. To build tolerance, you need a foundation of understanding, and you can understand a group of people through their stories. Through legends, myths and narratives, you will come to know and understand why someone prays to a God with an elephant head, or why someone else eats with chopsticks. Once you understand, you build tolerance and you can live together and not be afraid, confused or suspicious of one other.
How would you describe the difference between storytelling in Asia and other parts of the world, like the Middle East, Africa or the West?
I would not say that there are actual different methodologies or modes. The main difference is the language. Other minor differences may be the use of musical instruments specific to a country or the influence of particular flora and fauna of a particular location. But ultimately we are all telling stories of people - whether they are heroes and heroines, regular people or people from the heavenly and supernatural world - and their struggles.
The stories are always an adventure. A journey to get somewhere, to overcome something and how along the way you get help, and what you do with it. They have themes of love, adventure, and conquering fear. All these things are common across stories from different places
What is your favorite story to tell?
I work with both children and adults, but I especially love performing to adults because I can explore deeper themes, like in supernatural stories and darker stories. I have always been interested in the darker stories. Recently for ArtWalk Little India in January, I did One Dark Night - Urban Legends and Lore.
One of my favourite stories would definitely have to be Pontianak - the story of a woman who dies in childbirth and a man who wasn't truly loyal to her and how she came back to life. The story did not initially stem from evil.
The other darker ones are also of entering forests and not knowing what lies deep inside. Whether you are bewitched by a nenek kebayan or you enter so deep that you fall into a parallel universe and enter the orang bunian world where you are trapped and lost. All these stories may not have happy nor straightforward endings but that is a reflection of life, right? Life does not actually lead you anywhere specific. It is how you navigate that journey and overcome the hurdles along your way.
Why do you enjoy telling the darker stories?
Oral traditions, folktales and stories function to help you understand the universe around you, to explain things that we as humans are curious about. Like, what happens when we die? How does rain fall from the sky? What is underneath the earth? All these things need to be explained through stories. And if you take away the rawness from the stories, the elements of caution and warning, then these stories cease to be what they were.
Wherever you look at in Southeast Asia, it was a kampung, a village, a community. So imagine the old storyteller under the banyan tree telling stories. Everyone sits around the storyteller - the baby being breastfed by her mother, toddlers running around, teenagers and young couples listening, the elderly who have probably hear the story for the umpteenth time. The storyteller is not going to censor nor tone down the story. There is no such thing as a PG-rating or an R-21 rating. The story is told so that at any stage in your life, you will understand different aspects of the story. That is the beauty of storytelling.
