in a musical sense and a personal sense.
One of my new year's resolutions:
to listen more, to hear the story in a person's interactions
The Art of Listening
By HENNING MANKELL
Published: December 10, 2011
Maputo, Mozambique
I CAME to Africa with one purpose: I wanted to see the world outside the
perspective of European egocentricity. I could have chosen Asia or
South America. I ended up in Africa because the plane ticket there was
cheapest.
I came and I stayed. For nearly 25 years I’ve lived off and on in
Mozambique. Time has passed, and I’m no longer young; in fact, I’m
approaching old age. But my motive for living this straddled existence,
with one foot in African sand and the other in European snow, in the
melancholy region of Norrland in Sweden where I grew up, has to do with
wanting to see clearly, to understand.
The simplest way to explain what I’ve learned from my life in Africa is
through a parable about why human beings have two ears but only one
tongue. Why is this? Probably so that we have to listen twice as much as
we speak.
In Africa listening is a guiding principle. It’s a principle that’s been
lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems
to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else. From my
own experience, I’ve noticed how much faster I have to answer a question
during a TV interview than I did 10, maybe even 5, years ago. It’s as
if we have completely lost the ability to listen. We talk and talk, and
we end up frightened by silence, the refuge of those who are at a loss
for an answer.
I’m old enough to remember when South American literature emerged in
popular consciousness and changed forever our view of the human
condition and what it means to be human. Now, I think it’s Africa’s
turn.
Everywhere, people on the African continent write and tell stories.
Soon, African literature seems likely to burst onto the world scene —
much as South American literature did some years ago when Gabriel García
Márquez and others led a tumultuous and highly emotional revolt against
ingrained truth. Soon an African literary outpouring will offer a new
perspective on the human condition. The Mozambican author Mia Couto has,
for example, created an African magic realism that mixes written
language with the great oral traditions of Africa.
If we are capable of listening, we’re going to discover that many
African narratives have completely different structures than we’re used
to. I over-simplify, of course. Yet everybody knows that there is truth
in what I’m saying: Western literature is normally linear; it proceeds
from beginning to end without major digressions in space or time.
That’s not the case in Africa. Here, instead of linear narrative, there
is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in
time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died
long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two
people who are very much alive. Just as an example.
The nomads who still inhabit the Kalahari Desert are said to tell one
another stories on their daylong wanderings, during which they search
for edible roots and animals to hunt. Often they have more than one
story going at the same time. Sometimes they have three or four stories
running in parallel. But before they return to the spot where they will
spend the night, they manage either to intertwine the stories or split
them apart for good, giving each its own ending.
A number of years ago I sat down on a stone bench outside the Teatro
Avenida in Maputo, Mozambique, where I work as an artistic consultant.
It was a hot day, and we were taking a break from rehearsals so we fled
outside, hoping that a cool breeze would drift past. The theater’s
air-conditioning system had long since stopped functioning. It must have
been over 100 degrees inside while we were working.
Two old African men were sitting on that bench, but there was room for
me, too. In Africa people share more than just water in a brotherly or
sisterly fashion. Even when it comes to shade, people are generous.
I heard the two men talking about a third old man who had recently died.
One of them said, “I was visiting him at his home. He started to tell
me an amazing story about something that had happened to him when he was
young. But it was a long story. Night came, and we decided that I
should come back the next day to hear the rest. But when I arrived, he
was dead.”
The man fell silent. I decided not to leave that bench until I heard how
the other man would respond to what he’d heard. I had an instinctive
feeling that it would prove to be important.
Finally he, too, spoke.
“That’s not a good way to die — before you’ve told the end of your story.”
It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for
our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling
person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can
listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and
defeats — and they in turn can listen to ours.
Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge.
They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of
information. Knowledge involves listening.
So if I am right that we are storytelling creatures, and as long as we
permit ourselves to be quiet for a while now and then, the eternal
narrative will continue.
Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some
obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last
human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of
humanity out into the endless universe.
Who knows? Maybe someone is out there, willing to listen ...
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