Who will keep the success stories?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/11/2024 (351 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Of all the books Salman Rushdie has written, I confess a fondness for Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Obviously, the subject matter is less troublesome, but I especially liked his motif of “the sea of stories.”

We swim in a sea of stories of many colours, hues and textures. We can’t escape the constant ebb and flow of narrative in all dimensions of our lives, woven into our relationships with the Earth and with other people.

Yet we can also lose touch with those stories, and what they mean. The dynamic balance within the sea reflects both resilience and fragility. Such a balance is fundamentally about harmony, not dissonance — the music of the spheres, not the clanging discord of a Shakespearean plot gone awry.

Unfortunately, we live these days in a world marked more by dissonance than by harmony. The sea of stories is full of toxic currents, piles of rubbish, the narrative waste of a disposable culture that pollutes our understanding as surely as plastic litters the oceans far beyond.

Stories are important — and yet we wonder not only who will write them or tell them, but also who will keep them, from generation to generation.

Of all the many tragedies inflicted by residential schools, perhaps the worst one was the way generations of Indigenous people were stripped, not only of their language, identity and culture, but also of their stories.

Stories provide us with a context of meaning, an understanding of our place in the universe — a place to pause, amid all those swirling currents, to discern both our direction and our reasons for travelling.

I thought of this, as we recently mourned the death of Murray Sinclair. He not only found words to tell something of his own story by its end, but his gift for listening, sharing and keeping the stories of others is continued in the words and work of his son, Niigaan. The story of the sacred fire that was lit and tended so carefully, and what it meant, has been kept and passed on to the next generation. We are blessed by the currents such stories create in our lives together, as part of what truth and reconciliation mean for us all.

“Who keeps the story?” was also on my mind as again I watched Remembrance Day unfold. That story used to be kept by the veterans and their families, telling stories from personal experience. In Remembrance Day services, led voluntarily by local clergy, there was a religious framing of their sacrifice, couched in Christian terms and buttressed by O God, Our Help in Ages Past or a few similar hymns.

Over the years, however, I was often distressed by shallow messages in these community services, further marred by typos in the bulletin, or miscues and mistakes in the timing. Sadly, the situation has rapidly declined. As rural communities shrink or disappear, along with their churches, there are few local clergy now to lead such services. The veterans are either gone or soon will be, along the immediate families who supported them. The traditional framing of their sacrifice in Christian terms is opaque to younger generations that do not share that same understanding, and their stories teeter on the edge of oblivion.

“We must remember not to forget” has become the theme of Remembrance Day. Yet younger people are increasingly uncertain, given the absurd notion they should remember something significant about experiences they never had, about people they never knew.

What does any of this mean, today, in the midst of 21st-century conflicts? We can teach Let There be Peace on Earth to new generations that have never heard the tune, but what does it mean, when there is neither peace, nor justice, in the stories they hear today?

We represent world wars of the last century as battles for freedom, but most in the audience have never learned anything about those wars. My students also reported little or no mention of Afghanistan or Afghan veterans at the services they attended this year. If wars are only about “winning,” we have already lost that story of Canada’s longest war and its sacrifices, to our collective shame.

Where do peace, freedom and heroic self-sacrifice fit into a narrative about the unnecessary deaths of civilians in Gaza? In Ukraine? In Sudan? Who are we fighting, where, how, and — most importantly — why? Does anyone really know?

I fear we are losing the story of the horrors of war that my grandparents learned the hard way — the reasons they collectively learned about the importance of finding a better way — how, in any war, especially today, there will be no victors, nor victory, in the end.

But who will keep that particular story? Who will keep other stories of struggles for justice, of all kinds, from civil rights to human rights to environmental protection, as the sea of stories becomes more polluted with lies and misconceptions?

Will you?

Peter Denton works at being a story-keeper in rural Manitoba.