M to N: Mystical Narratives

Explore ways of knowing and telling.

Radical acts of storytelling invite us to shift our perspective on time and experience. Listening to stories from the cultures where we live, in Australia and Aotearoa, we can step into past and future moments. Different cultural storytelling traditions offer profound alternatives to linear thinking. Perhaps the most radical act is simply creating space for voices and narrative structures that challenge dominant ways of knowing and telling.

We were affected by Richard Flanagan’s account of the Yolngu people in Arnhem Land, Australia, who sing in a tense that doesn’t exist in English. This was described to Richard by an 18-year-old Yolngu woman, Siena Stubbs.

“When Yolngu sing, we sing in a tense that doesn’t exist in English. To explore this tense, let’s take an activity, say a young boy walking along the beach. Within the songlines, this boy was walking along the beach, is walking along the beach and will walk along the beach, simultaneously. As a non-Yolngu person, it might be hard to understand this but it might make sense when you hear the songlines.

This is how we, as young people learn…sitting on the beach, with our elders, listening, learning…The songmen recall…what is happening now. This has always happened, is happening, and will happen in the future. Yolngu people have always sat/are sitting/will always sit under the shaded resting place named Bunjumbirr at this place and were thinking/think/will think about the fish that they will catch later in the day.

…The past is in the present is in the future. Our ancestors were here, are here and will be here, waiting for the tide to go out so the fish can be caught. Yambirrpa has always provided fish for Yolngu people and it will continue to.

…This structure has helped sustain both Yolngu life and the balance of the natural world for thousands of years. This is how Yolngu live. It is in the songs.”

Flanagan writes: “The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said no man ever steps in the same river twice for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. This beautiful axiom, so important in European thought, is often taken to mean that time itself is that river, that time divides us from ourselves, from our past, and from our future.

The Yolngu fourth tense implies something profoundly different: that we exist in a relationship with the larger world that is outside time yet also the guarantee that time continues; that by building the fish traps today we ensure they continue being built both in the past and in the future. It places us in a position of humility towards the land and sea, and towards those who come before and after us. The act is eternal and so are we for as long as we continue to build the fish traps, for as long as we continue to sing the land and sea in to being, for as long as we honour the material world that gives us our life.”

This different way of knowing reminds us that, beyond our own ways of thinking and knowing, lies alternatives. And who knows where that might lead?

What about...

I Am From poem template.

We have always considered poetry as a different way of knowing. This form of writing uses language differently, allowing us to say things that might not otherwise be possible. The imagery evoked by poetry open our emotions and imaginations in ways other forms of writing may not. There’s a lot to explore.

This poem template, that we discovered during the Covid-19 Pandemic, was inspired by George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” poem. It provides an accessible way for anyone to write a biographical poem. When we have used it people comment that it opened memories and emotions in surprising ways.

I am from (a specific item from your childhood home)

from (two products or objects from your past)

I am from (a phrase describing your childhood home)

and (more description of your childhood home)

I am from (a plant, tree or natural object from your past)

whose (personify that natural object)

I am from (two objects from your past)

from (two family members or ancestors)

and from (two family traits or tendencies)

from (another family trait, habit or tendency)

I am from (a religious memory or family tradition)

from (two foods from your family history)

from (a specific event in the life of an ancestor)

and from (another detail from the life of an ancestor)

I am from these moments…

I am from (continue this thought or repeat a line or idea from earlier in the poem)