Storytelling and Learning an Alphabet

Early this past sum­mer, I promised myself that before I left for Ethiopia, I’d learn the Ge’ez alpha­bet, or fidel (ፊደል), used to write many of Ethiopia’s lan­guages includ­ing the offi­cial lan­guage of Amharic.  My flight is at the end of this month, and I have made no progress. The fidel has some 268 char­ac­ters, which my audio lan­guage lessons breeze through in the first half hour ses­sion.  Given the like­li­hood that I would teach myself atro­cious pro­nun­ci­a­tion with­out proper instruc­tion, I decided to wait until I arrive in Ethiopia where I’ll have a proper tutor.

In his book Notes From the Hyena’s Belly, Nega Mezlekia recounts his gru­el­ing first two years of school­ing as a child in Ethiopia where the only sub­ject was the writ­ten Amharic lan­guage.  To make sure he stayed in school despite the drab sub­ject mat­ter and the cur­mud­geonly, abu­sive old teacher, Mezlekia’s mother told him a story about the King of Shewa who loved sto­ries.  The tale made me think of the piss­ing match that nar­ra­tol­o­gists and ludol­o­gists waged in estab­lish­ing the field of game stud­ies, a debate I learned about over the sum­mer through read­ing the First Per­son thread on the Elec­tronic Book Review.  Those of you famil­iar with this debate might see why.

The King of Shewa loved sto­ries.  Many sto­ry­tellers came to the palace to enter­tain the king, and it didn’t take long before he had heard all the sto­ries in the land and all neigh­bor­ing regions.

Finally, in des­per­a­tion, he decided that what he needed was a sto­ry­teller who could make him cry out, “Enough! No more! I am done with sto­ries.” If such a per­son existed, the King swore to make him a prince and give him a great piece of land.

Many sto­ry­tellers came, and the king lis­tened to all their sto­ries intently.  One day a farmer offered to tell a story.  The king was skep­ti­cal about the farmer’s abil­ity to outdo the pro­fes­sional sto­ry­tellers, but he let him try anyway.

The farmer’s story started:

“Once there was a peas­ant in Axum who sowed wheat.  When the crop ripened, he mowed it, threshed it and stored it in a gra­nary.  It was the best har­vest he’d ever had.  But there was a small hole in his gra­nary, barely large enough to pass a straw through — and that is the irony in this tale.  When all the grain was stored and the farmer went home, delighted, an ant came and entered through the hole.  He picked up a sin­gle grain, which he car­ried away to his anthill to eat.”

The king was engrossed with the story at this point and expected things to pick up pace.  The farmer con­tin­ued on, telling of each ant com­ing each day into the gra­nary and tak­ing a sin­gle grain of wheat.  The king grew inpa­tient, beg­ging the farmer to pro­ceed with the story, to get to the plot, to get beyond these details.  The farmer always said that there was still so many ants in the story, and that the gra­nary was still full, and the story needed to go in the right order.¹ Despite the king’s inter­rup­tions, he always proceeded:

“And the next day, another ant came, and took another grain.  And the day after that….”

Finally the king lost his temper.

“Enough, enough, you may have the land and the title of prince!”

Mezlekia’s mother told him this story to con­vince him that it was worth his effort to learn the fidel because work­ing per­sis­tently lit­tle by lit­tle brings good for­tune.  There’s a curi­ous slip­page here between the per­sis­tence of the farmer-storyteller and the per­sis­tence of the ants in his story, not to men­tion the per­sis­tent search for sto­ries by a king and the per­sis­tent reas­sur­ance from a mother.  With all the sto­ries nested in one another, of the ants and their grain, of the storyteller-farmer and his king, and of the boy and his mother, it is not easy to tell what story ele­ments are work­ing for whose story.

Mezlekia wanted to be a prince, just like the farmer-storyteller, so he per­sisted in school, study­ing the fidel.  Maybe if I wanted to be a prince, I would have learned the fidel by now.  But no; I spent my sum­mer learn­ing about games and stories.