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104 3 the nguni artist The Collapsing of Time I wish to talk with you, while my thinking-strings still stand. The San storyteller |hán̆‡kass’ō ongenile Masithathu Zenani, a Xhosa storyteller, told me, “The art of composing imaginative narratives is something that was undertaken by the first people—long ago, during the time of the ancestors. When those of us in my generation awakened to earliest consciousness, we were born into a tradition that was already flourishing. . . . Members of every generation,” she said, “have grown up under the influence of these narratives.”1 While I was collecting stories among the Xhosa, I was walking along the lower reaches of the Drakensberg Mountains and arrived, one morning , at a homestead where some women were working. When they saw me, they asked me what I wanted. I told them that I was hoping to collect tales. The women were amused. They later told me that they would have understood had I been interested in oral history, oral poetry . . . but tales? They said that tales were as common and routine as washing clothes, as working in the fields, as raising children. And I said that that was precisely why I was interested in gathering tales. Two observers wrote in 1920, It is at evening around the fires that the tales are told, especially on dark nights, when the people cannot dance so comfortably. Many of the tales are known far and wide, others in lesser N The Collapsing of Time S 105 areas. But, however often the people hear them, they never seem weary of the repetition. They never say, “Oh, that’s an old tale,” or make sarcastic references to chestnuts, but enter into the spirit of the thing all the more for knowing all that is to come. They heard the tales first as children from their mothers or grandmothers, but nevertheless they will, with no trace of boredom, come in with their ejaculations just at the right points, take, it may be, a sentence out of the narrator’s mouth, or even keep up a running echo of his words.2 The Storyteller Time collapses, and we are in the presence of history: it is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with these explosive, emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seeming inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to our present intellect: it is always available to our hearts and souls, our emotions. The storyteller combines our present waking state and our past condition of semiconsciousness, and so we walk again in history, we join our forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes our collapsing of time, our memory and reliving of the past. We never live wholly in the present, for much of our temperament, our nature, our character is rooted in the past: our emotional life has its origins in and its impetus from the experiences and images of history. The storyteller brings us unerringly into those spiritual centers of our lives, making us for the moment consciously aware of something that is a constant part of our unconscious lives. This emotional core is what largely dictates our actions and our thought, our decision making, our vision. Storytelling contains the humanism of the people, keeps them and their traditions alive despite life’s daily vicissitudes. Time obliterates history. The storyteller arrests time and brings her audience into the presence of history, the heart and substance of the culture. Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not meant to be temporally frozen: they are alive, always responding to contemporary realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world. Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in that way the past regularly shapes our experience of the present. And the present can also influence the past. The storyteller deals with ancient images and mythic images and places 106 S The Nguni Artist these always into a contemporary, recognizable environment. And those ancient images are not themselves beyond reshaping by our experiences of the present. It is always a mutual and enriching relationship. Storytellers reveal connections between humans, within the world, within a society, within a family, emphasizing our...

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