how stories create a sense of belonging
Stories can give us insight into a group of people and into the way in which those people think. One of my favourite folksongs is Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy. It begins: "There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run." The railroad built Canada in the nineteenth century and was hugely important to the life of the country. Even now most of the population of the Canada is concentrated in a band that roughly follows that original railroad track. But Lightfoot's song points out the tension between technology and the majestic pure environment that is the Canadian wilderness. That tension is a great concern to many of us, and shows up again and again in our stories.
I doubt that the Canadian Railroad Trilogy could have the same resonance with anyone who is not Canadian. Stories can be instructive to an outsider, but true understanding is only possible for members inside the group. Stories have meaning because they represent behaviour that we admire. An outsider with different values and different priorities will naturally admire different behaviours, so the stories might be quite meaningless.
Gilles Vigneault's classic song begins: "Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver." To English-speaking Canadians this is an interesting folksong about how desolate and uncompromising the winter can be. But winter here is a metaphor, and Mon Pays has become a political anthem for dissatisfied and disenfranchised Francophone Canadians, evoking powerful feelings of frustration and a deeply felt isolation. The dreams of many Québecois are united in this folksong. It is less emotional in English Canada.
We must be able to recognize the characters in our stories. Because there are so many of us from varying backgrounds, it is extremely important that we be able to hear different stories told in different voices. Canada's ethnic and cultural diversity is evident in the variety of stories that have recently been produced. The Girl Who Swam Forever by playwright Marie Clements and Green Grass, Running Water by novelist Thomas King are stories belonging to aboriginal people. The Hero's Walk by Anita Rau Badami and Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry are stories by novelists who have come to Canada from from India. Double Happiness by filmmaker Mina Shum, and Obasan by novelist Joy Kogawa are stories from our Asian communities. Better Than Chocolate is a film by Anne Wheeler about gay women, Michel-Marc Bouchard's Lilies is a story about gay men. Joan Macleod's play The Shape of a Girl , Dennis Foon's War are are stories about teenagers, and Western Gold Theatre is a professional acting company for senior citizens. It is through stories that we see ourselves - all of ourselves.
For the first time in 2002, CBC Radio ran a program called Canada Reads. The idea was to select a novel that could be read by as many people as possible, and then discussed on the air, a sort of book club on the radio. There were hundreds of suggestions from thousands of people from across the country. The novel chosen was Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. The program was tremendously successful, with hundreds of thousands of readers. The book was 15 years old, but for a few weeks in the spring of 2002 it was back on the best seller lists. This remarkable program gave all of Canada a chance to participate in the same activity.
Digital technology can easily create activities that engage people individually. The danger is that it also creates increased isolation when individuals find it preferrable to relate to a computer or a television screen. As we get more and more dependent on digital technology it is more and more important to emphasize those activities that people can do together. It is our shared stories and our collective storytelling that will fulfil this need.
