Aotearoa/Pacific Island author, Cherie Barford writes about Talkstory and the importance of storytelling in Our Stories are Within Us:  “Our stories are within us. You’ll find them encoded in genealogies, embedded in our hearts, imprinted on our minds. They migrate with the tongues that tell them …truly precious stories, those that hold sacred truths within them, can never be lost. They are kept intact by the universe itself. They exist beyond everything we can touch and name. They are in our blood, and like red hibiscus burnt by frost, recover and reveal themselves again. These stories are so powerful that only the pure of heart can carry them between worlds and survive. They change lives and their coming is signalled by the stars.”  Niu Voices, [Pacific Writing], ed. Selina Marsh, Huia Publishers, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2006.

I first met Nora Neumann at the 2004 Post-Colonial Conference at the Free University of Berlin where she was one of the conference co-ordinators. It was a a powerful conference with academics and writers from many countries and a wide range of cultures giving lectures and performances to students from all over the globe. I co-taught a five day writing and publishing workshop with my colleague Dr Karin Meissenburg, director of Global Dialogues and also participated as a performer in her lecture on Chinese American Literature. Nora Neumann had been to Aotearoa New Zealand before and loved it. She returned again in 2005 researching the work of several writers, including Maori authors Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Later that year, she tried emailing me to let me know she’d decided to do her masters thesis on my novels within the context of other Pacific writing and literary criticism. I had by that time changed emails from my overseas address or would have replied sooner. Finally, not long before her thesis was due, she reached me and asked if I would comment on some passages and if I would answer questions she asked. I said I would be happy to do so and that her work would be respected from whatever perspective she came from.

Since I’d already worked with Dr. Karin Meissenburg in answering questions on the German translations of the Cowrie novels and later with Funda Tartar and Taskin Emisoglu during the Turkish translation of the novels, not knowing any of these people before they were commissioned by the respective publishers to translate my novels, I felt it was vital to continue this process of working constructively between author-translator and author-literary analyst so long as they retained total control of the content and I would just reply to their questions. In all cases, I have found this process, although very time-consuming, also very rewarding, as it has encouraged me to review and think about the works from different perspectives. My aim in writing is to be a communicator across all boundary lines and it would seem hypocritical to refuse the opportunity to work cross-culturally. I had participated on panels at the Liepzig and Frankfurt Bookfairs advocating the importance of such dialogues where possible and productive. I had also heard cases of appalling mis-translations or critical misunderstandings through ignorance of the author and/or his or her native language or cultural context.

Many of Nora’s questions provoked further thought and some longer responses to her queries, a sample of which is included in this book. As Nora was under time pressure to get her thesis completed, we both had to work to very tight deadlines. I became fascinated in how another person from a very different culture might interpret the works in such different ways. I discussed some of her findings with Dr. Karin Meissenburg, who’d been through a similar process translating the novels, and she suggested that a book including some of the thesis material and literary critiques would have been useful to her at the time of translating the novels had this been available and would be of use to the students now studying the books in overseas’ university courses in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand and perhaps other countries in the future. She added that Global Dialogues might consider this as a project.

While working on the thesis, I received invitations from two professors teaching from the Cowrie novels in their university courses in Canada to attend two conferences they were planning around the novels and participate in lectures, workshops, panels and performances for the faculty, students and wider communities. The first conference was organised by Dr. Liz Millward at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg “Ao Toa: Earth Warriors – Exploring Personal, Cultural and Global Identities Through Writing”. The second, by Dr. Katherine McKittrick at Queen’s University in Kingston:  “Cathie Dunsford: A Celebration of Indigenous Poetics and Politics” [from which this book owes its subtitle]. They hoped I could travel before the end of the student term time in March-April 2007. I asked Karin Meissenburg to come with me, since we always perform together and she is now musician for our readings and both she and the universities agreed, asking her to participate on a panel as translator of the novels as well. Her paper is included in this book.

Nothing could have prepared us for the dynamic power of these professors, their students and the unique ways they were using the books. In my second novel, Te Haerenga Kainga: The Journey Home, the central character, Cowrie, puts forward ideas for how universities could work to empower the students more fully. One of the key ideas is taking up the indigenous Pacific method of Talkstory and applying this to their own lives and those of their ancestors instead of trying to fit Pacific literature into a post-modernist framework. As Berlin literary critic Carolyn Gammon stated, it was as if the ideals in the novels had come to life in these courses [see my plenary paper for Queen’s University for further details]. In Te Haerenga Kainga, Cowrie complains that the authors are buried in post-modernist courses with the students relying on secondary material as their main basis of information. In Canada, the Cowrie novels had been read closely by the academics and students alike, and this gave rise to some very different ways of interpreting literature, ranging from student oral talkstory papers based around the novels to original presentations to indigenous drumming both in class and at the Four Directions Aboriginal Centre at Queen’s University.

From the moment we hit the ground in minus 27 windchill, snow and sleet in Winnipeg and were interviewed by Cheryl McKenzie for Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network, to the student papers, performances in universities and at bookstores and in the Aboriginal Centre at Queens, we were treated to some of the most original and exciting ways of teaching and communicating literature I have ever experienced within a university context. Finally, these highly intelligent and political younger women academics were extending women’s studies, literary and cultural studies to include every possible perspective and were truly engaging in what Nora Neumann called my “literary activism” in her thesis. By the end of the rigorous, intense and yet deeply moving conferences and book tour, from Manitoba to Kingston and Toronto, we were exhausted but inspired by the cross-cultural sharing, which is detailed in more depth in my Canadian Tour Journals. “If only there was some way of keeping this sharing going and offering these methods to other students” one academic faculty member stated towards the end of the tour. That got us thinking.

By the time we reached Toronto, we were joined by Carolyn Gammon who’d flown over from Berlin to see us before working on her book tour for the Johanna Krause text, Twice Persecuted, and she’d just completed editing and abridging Nora Neumann’s thesis to prepare it for book publication. The final work was brilliant and she told us that Nora had been granted her Master’s Degree by The Free University of Berlin. Carolyn had done a superb job in abridging and translating this thesis into a readable and accessible text. That’s when Karin decided, as Global Dialogues Director, that if we could get the academic papers from Dr. Katherine McKittrick and Dr. Liz Millward and some student contributions [not so easy as by now they were on their vacation break and most of their presentations were oral talkstory] then this would be superb as a radical teaching text for academics and students alike. Carolyn loved the idea and felt Nora would too. Since the book was due to be launched at the upcoming International Post-Colonial Conference at Frankfurt University, September 2007, where we were both lecturing and giving workshops and also launching the sixth novel in the Cowrie series, Return of the Selkies, we felt this was a perfect venue for a furthering of the international approach to the texts including the work of the Canadian academics and students at the Ao Toa conferences based around the Cowrie novels and an abridged version of Nora’s thesis.

What blew me away about the Canadian Book Tour was the fantastic interaction with both the professors who organised the tour, other faculty at the universities who gave of their time and energy to join us for panels and performances and participate in the conferences on the Cowrie novels and especially the students and audiences, from a wide spectrum of cultural backgrounds. From Manitoba to Ontario, this included African-Canadian, Nigerian, Caribbean, Mexican, Sri Lankan, Portugese, many different Canadian Indian tangata whenua, including Cree, Mohawk, Sasketchwan, and Algonquin, Métis, French-Canadian, German, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and many more cultures in the audiences. The university students were at the end of their term and more than ready for their summer vacation but they all turned up and gave of their very best, from their papers and seminars on the Cowrie novels, with a focus on Te Haerenga Kainga: The Journey Home, to their original interviews with us and especially their extraordinary sharing through their conceptions of Talkstory adapted from Te Haerenga Kainga.

Storytelling has been a part of all indigenous cultures and most cultures globally. Talkstory is native to Hawai’i and the Pacific. I have in workshops, lectures and seminars defined it thus:
“Talkstory [or oral storytelling] is a term used by indigenous Hawai’ians and throughout the Pacific for storytelling in all its myriad forms and as a way of handing on traditional knowledge in an accessible form. I have tried to re-coin this term in a radical way within literature and academia by using it, since 1975, in classes, workshops and in my writing to subvert the dominant colonial discourse and get to the heart of the indigenous narrative. In contemporary times, it [potentially] allows all people a way in to discuss issues, express themselves and be heard without resorting to any one voice being authoritative or dominant. It allows the outsiders to be insiders and those who consider themselves insiders to see life outside themselves. The one who holds the tokotoko or talking stick needs to be listened to until he or she has finished. It evokes respect in listening to other voices and a sense of time that exists beyond the temporal and is more concerned with the quality than the quantity or speed of the experience.”

What I loved about the student interpretations of Talkstory from Te Haerenga Kainga is the way they each adapted this notion to fit their own cultural heritage or their own personal needs and desire to communicate [or not] at the time. It drew out a vast range of stories and experiences that they had not shared in their university term time and which some students had never shared in their lifetimes before. It was clear from their papers, seminars and their own talkstory, that many students felt that the academic institutions could benefit from the introduction of Talkstory techniques in all their other papers, no matter what the discipline. Other faculty, hearing of this, agreed and expressed an interest for their own students to participate on our next journey to Canada.

Many of the experiences could be summarised as the following students so movingly wrote:
Queen’s University, Kingston:
Sarah Sahagian: In my class, we were inspired by Cowrie’s students use of Talk-Story.  We performed Talk-Stories in class as a way of making our own knowledge through our own voices.  I was able to connect my Talk-Story of my grandmother’s escape from the Armenian Genocide in Turkey to stories of fathers embarrassing their daughters at school, the tale of an aboriginal daughter mourning her mother and the assassination of an innocent man in North Ireland. Talk-Story made me realize we are all knowers and can all produce knowledge worthy of being analysed and explored. Aboriginal feminists like those presented in Dunsford’s book have inspired me to find new ways of knowing and learning.  I have been inspired to value the personal histories of others as I define and fight for feminism. Activist Knowledge can be as simple as actually listening to the people in one’s classes, understanding their lives and beginning to know where their opinions come from.  I have learned along with Cowrie’s students that feminism is about talking and listening in order to accept other people’s views and gain acceptance for one’s own.  We can change the world around us by listening to other people and giving the opportunity to listen to us in return.

For Ashley Maracle, Talkstory was through her native Mohawk drumming:
With a drum in my hand
And women on either side of my body/mind/spirit/ being
I feel strong
I feel like my people could say of me…
Ye’shátste** 

For Darcel Bullen, a Black Canadian on a journey as ally to indigenous brothers and sisters, talkstory lead to questioning the very nature of academia and academic debate:
Like Cowrie, the main character of Dunsford’s novel, I question everyday whether the separate world of academia is really a site intelligent enough to value non-white knowledge….However, after the class [talkstory] did this painful removal of our shields, I felt like we were learning together, instead of reproducing the kind of load and fire dialogue that made up the classroom warfare before.

For Melissa Bell, talkstory brought the class closer:
The talk story exercise in our class functioned much as it did within the novel and simultaneously brought us closer to the course material and to each other. By sharing our own talk stories, we were brought closer to a significant message from The Journey Home: that book learning must be supported by real interactions with various types of people whose experience has been different from our own, and who are affected in real ways by the issues that we theorize about in the classroom. It is only when we approach each other with the intention of sharing and understanding that real learning can ensue.

Trevan David saw Talkstory through the cultural importance of the food in Te Haerenga Kainga and in his talkstory related this to his own Sri Lankan heritage:
More importantly, by continuing to uphold traditional ways of life and cultural practices, food as culture sets the stage for collective politics and resistance. Through the onset of globalization and the reduction of barriers between cultures, many local cultures risk losing their diversity by getting co-opted or assimilated into other cultures. With the spread of modernity and neo-liberalism, the idea that women can only gain power through formal, salary earning enterprises is reinforced so as to extend the capitalist economy. While this initiative is by no means a negative one (one needs only look at micro-credit schemes such as the Grameen Bank for proof of this) it is important to understand that there are other ways in which women can, and have achieved status and empowerment in their community, and it is in this regard that the celebration of food and its importance culturally is so important. The communal kitchens and group preparations allow for a reaffirming of values and intergenerational transmissions of knowledge as well as creating an area where members of the community interact with each other.

At the University of Manitoba, the students also experienced Talkstory on their own unique terms:
Melissa Santos: Talkstory allows us to break down barriers, it is a useful tool that should be adopted in several institutions within our society; transforming the way we think about culture, and the way we relate to one another is an important starting point for social change.  If we are all aware that there is not one-way of knowing or experiencing the world around us, that knowledge will be reflected in our actions.

Maike Boeff: Talkstory, or the ability to get up in front of people and tell a story, is very liberating. Any story can be told, the closer and more important to us it is, the better a story it is. I believe the talkstory process is one that forms a bond between the people that take part in it. It is a very powerful thing and my impression was that telling a talkstory strikes something very different within people than books do. Just reading a book usually does not get people as emotionally involved as when they hear a talkstory. It is a way for people to express themselves very personally….
Concluding, I have to say that talkstory is one of the most powerful concepts I have ever experienced. It’s like a silent revolution, a peaceful war that teaches people to listen before they build boundaries, to listen to others before they speak against them. Because if people really listen, they will find common ground, they will understand each other. Talkstory, for me, is one of the best and strongest things I have ever experienced. I have never felt this empowered before.

Valerie Bermudez: Talkstory was an absolutely positive experience, one that I eagerly look forward to partaking in once again. The love that carried through the care of each story teller’s voice, and the love that received each story through the ears of each listener is something that I will carry with me through my life. I have grown an even greater confidence in myself because I know that I have shared myself with others and have not been judged for it – it is liberating, and I’m sure that the other women in the group feel the same way.

Tara Lambert: Talkstory is an extremely powerful tool. It is an effective way to pass on knowledge from generation to generation. It attaches emotions and passion to the stories, giving them stronger meaning. It can connect people of totally different backgrounds, regardless of race, class, sexuality, religion, gender, or any other social barriers, as it did in the Womyn’s Centre. Talkstory provides a bond between the people who share their words, giving it the strength to cross the boundaries that may have once separated them.

Melissa Santos: After thinking about my experience throughout this whole process, I felt completely privileged, I think I learnt more out of this experience than I have ever learnt from one single event in my life. Actually meeting Cathie Dunsford was an honour and a pleasure and hopefully our paths will cross again in the future. For now, I feel as though I am walking away from this experience as a better person, one who crossed some bridges and as a result connected with a truly talented group of women. Talkstory enabled us to form a bond that I am sure will continue to develop in the future, as well as providing a tool of communication that has the potential to create significant social change.

Valerie Bermudez performed a fantastic hip-hop poem about two alienated young people who found new ways to discover their cultural heritage together. Talk story for her was in the voice of her hip-hop lyrics, where, in the final stanza, the experiences are summarised thus:

And now they have a culture they can pass on to their kids
And even though they’re different, their music writes them in
Gives them equal say, & equal privilege
As long as they can listen, feel the vibes & keep lovin
As long as they can listen, feel the vibes & keep lovin
As long as they can listen, feel the vibes & let love in

I learned as much from the students’ original and diverse expressions of talkstory as they may have gleaned from Te Haerenga Kainga. And isn’t this the way university and all education should be? An equal exchange of energies, learning, interpretation, sharing, growing, exploring, guided by the professor or facilitator who may have gained a deeper knowledge over many years of such work but who is still, and always, in the process of learning and exploring. Indeed Dr. Katherine McKittrick and Dr. Liz Millward have shown so clearly the way forward in this respect.
Karin Meissenburg’s vision and the suggestions of others opened the book further to include our own papers on the Canadian tour to help set the context and a small selection of literary reviews of the novels as an introduction to new readers who may not know them as well as a bibliography. It is to be hoped that this book will be of use to other teachers and students reading and teaching from the Cowrie novels globally and also will encourage them to read more literature from the Pacific region, so often left out of the traditional literary canon in international literature. There is a very rich sea of wonderful literature available which we trust many of you will study in the future.

I would especially like to thank Dr. Susan Hawthorne and Dr. Renate Klein at Spinifex Press for publishing the Cowrie novels series with global distribution and for selling foreign language rights at the Frankfurt Bookfair. Without their radical literary vision, none of the conferences on the novels would have taken place and nor would this book have been possible. They have worked for decades to get Pacific indigenous and women’s books known globally and the world is a far richer place for their cross-cultural vision and the implementation of this with Spinifex Press. Kia ora.

My German publishers, Dr. Sigrid Markmann at the University of Osnabruck, Antje Landshoff-Ellermann at Rogner and Bernhard, Hamburg and Christel Goettert at Christel Goettert Verlag, Russelsheim as well as my Turkish publisher, Senol Ayla at Okuyanus Yayin, Istanbul, have all contributed vastly to my growth as an author in translation and I have learned much about writing from being involved in the translation process and in touring their countries, reading at the Leipzig, Frankfurt and Istanbul Bookfairs. Being involved in Talkstory with readers and audiences on these tours has been an incredibly exciting and rewarding journey home to the heart of what really matters on this planet. Mahalo. Vielen Dank. Tesekkur.

Kia kaha- arohanui – Cathie Koa Dunsford
Turtle Lighthouse Room, The Ark, Stromness, Orkney, July 2007.