Sharing Stories

For the last year, as part of my work with Magic Torch Comics CIC, I've been working with Inverclyde Community Development Trust on their Sharing Stories project – which is funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund. Our part in the process, was to create a book of illustrated folk tales with stories from Scotland, Syria and Sudan.

The project developed directly from a comic we worked on a few years back, which had young people from recently arrived Syrian families, learning about the myths and legends of their new home town and creating a story and a learning resource related to Children’s Rights.

At the time that project felt like the first part of a conversation; we’d told our stories, and now, it was time for us to listen and hear stories back. We all know that stories, folklore, heritage – culture, can be lost during displacement, and we all felt this was one way of keeping elements of culture alive, and finding out more about one another in the process.

One of the things that worked well about the Sharing Stories project was it being housed within an organisation which was already running some services with Inverclyde’s New Scots community, in particular, a befriending programme – so we were able to tap into that. For example, Roijin invited us along to her house a few times for amazing coffee, to tell us all about Newroz and Kurdish culture. Eventually she chose the story of Shengay and Pengay, two sheep who are left alone in the house when their mother goes out. It’s a “wolf at the door” style story, where a character, is trying to trick their way into a house. We heard a few different variations.

And what we had set out to do, was hear as many stories as possible, find some with some common themes or symbols and then find a few Scottish tales that would also echo those themes. Because there’s a universality to stories, symbols and archetypes obviously repeat across cultures and we wanted to produce a book that reflected that.

Obviously, the language differences were a challenge in the project – that was almost the whole point. We spent a fair bit of time with an ESOL group supported by Inverclyde Community Learning and Development - and the first few weeks were just polite chaos, but gradually we established a rhythm. Members of the group would come in with written down texts of stories, which they would read and then another member of the group would translate into English and I would scribble it down, or we’d use google translate to try and figure it out, and all the while, Mhairi would be sitting sketching the characters we were talking about and checking if this is how they should look in our story book.

Eventually we whittled the group of stories down to 8 – which was tricky, because towards the end we were suddenly getting more and more suggestions. And the stories we chose all feature water or rivers in some way, which seemed fitting given that we’re down in Greenock, right on the banks of the Clyde.

I think genuinely my favourite day in the project, was when we finally convinced Tamadour and Amal to record their stories. You can hear their versions of The Old Man and The Apple Seller and Fatima on soundcloud.

The book was due to launch in April at our local library at an event with families of everyone involved – of course, that’s been put on hold for just now. Hopefully we’ll get that happening later in the year. 

Meantime, The Trust’s project worker Ilona proposed getting them online in a few alternative formats, so for the next two weeks, we will be sharing a story each day in two different versions – one read by me in English and the other read in Arabic or Kurmanji. Here’s the first one below, from Sudan, the story of Lion and Rabbit.

Ito the rabbit is a trickster, often associated with Anansi and Brer Rabbit, and there was certainly a lot of chat and laughter about how Assad the Lion was the typical arrogant leader who values strength and fear above leadership. I think you can maybe guess who comes out best...