A long while ago, I sent out a story and it got published on Arts and Africa.
It was a good story, I thought so and I enjoyed writing it.
Someone read it, and said it was a hard story to understand, and that it was told like a parable. It made me uneasy for a long time, and then I decided, but there’s nothing wrong with parables.
Parables have a unique use in story-telling. They engage us in an abstract way, a way that leaves room for the imagination to fill out intentional holes left within the story’s shape.
They aren’t told to let you know, but to make you think, or further, to make you see something very common in a very new way.
And I was advised to use a different approach to writing this story, I suppose one where the ideas are laid out more flatly, plainer and easier to grasp. There should be no hidden meanings, the message should be right there in one’s face.
But I didn’t. And I’m glad. I chose to go ahead with the story how it already was. And this blog, as I have promised in this earlier post, is one where I take readers behind the scenes. This is where I should break open the meaning of the story, let everyone in on what I really meant.
But I won’t be doing that here either.
Explaining parables defeats their purpose. It ruins the fun really.
If you really want to help, you will explain how to interpret a parable, that’s the real victory. So, I won’t explain this story to you, or what it is about. What I will do here is explain all of the reasons I chose to write the story in the form that I did, and from there, make it easier for you to decide, or think through what it means. And perhaps when you meet another story like mine, you will have an easier time interpreting just what it might be trying to say.
Well alright, here it is.
Allegory and using metaphors in prose
Big revelation; this whole story is an allegory to a larger, better known one.
What’s an allegory?
An allegory is a story that is essentially a metaphor of another story. Like two stories that run parallel to one another, two stories where one is a subtler retelling of the other.
In this case, I piggybacked the story idea I was developing onto the familiar tale about the creation of the world (in the Christian context). There is a short passage in Romans 8 that echoes the significance of the creation story. I love it and have likely had it memorised.
It was this passage that struck me, and formed the focal point, or inspiration for the concept of the story.
This part of it specifically,
“All of creation groans with labour pangs awaiting the revelation of the sons of God”
The interesting thing is that Romans 8 in itself is a sort of allegory for creation itself. The first time I found it, it felt like I had fallen, head first, into a portal of sorts.
The image that came to my mind when I read it then, was one of trees. Because I thought, who else would have been here long enough to witness that, to be around at the beginning of creation itself, the heralds of creation’s song?
We know about trees that have lived for a thousand years, and more. They’ve likely already seen so much.
Using this helped to form the gears of the story for me, and I fleshed out the idea by using it to explore a question; what would happen if the trees got tired of waiting?
Which naturally lead to another question; what were the trees in my own story waiting for?
2. And why trees?
Because I like them.
Really, it is that, and the image that ignited the story too.
Trees are quiet, in a way that makes me wonder about them. They are always just there and I wanted to know what they would say if they could talk.
These creatures who witness everything and never speak of it. They were perfect to be the representatives of a sub-idea I wanted to explore. The character was already there, with how they loomed, spoke and thought in unison, and were graceful yet so fallible and so easily cut down and trampled upon, trivialized by the very beings they nourished, and in some ways sustain.
If they were to protest their mistreatment and if they had a voice, what would they say?
And then, about my earlier question; what were the trees waiting for?
I think they were waiting for a break really. Waiting to exhale, and to speak up for once. In this story, just like in the Romans 8 passage that partly inspired it, someone is waiting- wearily- for a saviour.
And in my story, the supposed saviour shows up. The trees get the beginning of their happy ending. But this is where my story begins to move off into its own territory. The saviour decides that No, I don’t even want to be a saviour.
What do the trees do about it? They act in a way that I hope shows something quite human about them. They behave a little selfishly. Gone is all of that celestial wisdom, they want that child to do the job she was born to do, regardless of what the child’s desires are. Of course, this could just be some very bad parenting, and maybe they were justifiably tired due to all of the waiting they had to do before they got what they wanted the most.
Still, the thing I wanted to nudge the reader to notice is something that marginalized groups have in common with the people that oppress them- once they get the chance, they can become oppressors themselves. Usurping the order, and in their own terms, justifiably so.
It is an easy blind-spot to miss or ignore. It happened to the trees here in this story. And I wanted the story’s progression to illustrate the descent of all creation, in the way the Christian story of creation explains.
Sort of like the trees got the fruit of their waiting, the hope to have a spokesperson for them, and ended up saying all of the wrong things.
3. The Language used to express this story
Is very poetic and that is on purpose.
But it isn’t done to alienate or to confuse, or to make the idea vague. It is written this way partly because the story started out as a poem.
I used a poem I had written as the lyrical backbone for this story. I wove the paragraphs and sentences and images around it. There is no fun talking about something as magnificent as the creation of the world, with a bland affect. The story of creation, if this isn’t me getting ahead of myself, behaves and aches like a good poem. When you really pay attention to it.
But there had to be room for the story to veer off into simpler, more ordinary form without compromising on the themes I wanted to use, or for the transition to be jarring. Because the story at some point begins to move off into more ordinary, less celestial territory. It needed to be flexible, enough to be ordinary, and full of wonder, and both. [But really, what is ordinary anyway?]
There are two layers that run in tandem in my story. One is a more metaphysical and poetic one and the other is more factual and perhaps mundane. In the story’s world, the characters are woven into one another, being like sort of like shape-shifters within the time-line of the story.
It is possible that the girl in the beginning of the story is the same as the woman in the garden who was speaking to a child. It is also possible that she is the narrator of the story, but all of that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how both of these layers create a texture that alone, neither of them would be able to have. It isn’t so much about allowing the divine to co-exist with the ‘ordinary’ but that they aren’t as separate as they’ve been made to seem. They are simply different angles to a single, unified story.
So...
There are some things that are better said indirectly, they are more powerful that way. In this story, I wanted to meet the reader first in their imagination, to engage it and then, get them to begin to ask questions not just about what the story was about, but about what I could be saying through the story, and why it was told in the way it was told.
It was hardly for the sake of passing across a moral lesson, parables rarely are about that if you are really watching. I wanted to make ideas that seemed completely unrelated when you think of them at first, to become two sides of the same coin, or even better, different layers of the same fabric.
Everything from the trees being both part of the divinity of creation and ending up as fiends of the material world, to creating a connection between a child that was essentially abandoned at birth just to be reclaimed for use, then juxtaposing that with another child who was running away from home, and yet another that would never have to experience anything but growing up being doted upon.
It did this to point out that things don’t have to intimately correlate, or even be vaguely similar to be interconnected. All of these things are not as irreconcilable as they seem.
That is what the story is doing. (But still, you get to decide what you take out of it).