Storytelling, History, and Community

In West African tradition, a unique fixture of local communities was known as a djali, a specialized societal role that served a unique set of varied purposes. 

Functionally, djalis held a multitude of positions - ranging from acting as direct aides to kings to accompanying villages and sometimes even particular families. The latter was more common by far, as the role they performed was that of a narrative historian, using oral and musical conventions to record and reference the course of past events. Djalis, as literally translated from their name, were “blood,” as integral as a vital bodily component, that employed knowledge and communicative skills to represent communities as an authoritative speaker and referenced stories to resolve conflicts both social and political. To such an extent were they dedicated to narratives, that, according to Cameroonian musicologist Francis Bebey, djalis were “living archives of the people’s traditions,” representations of generational lifetimes that advocated directly for those they sang about. 

At a greater scale, they are one example of the particular role of localized storytelling in communities, an age-old and repeating occurrence in history and culture. From the well-known Celtic bard, a similar type of verse-based narrative historian, to classical Greek Rhapsodes such as Homer himself, there has always been a distinct need for narratives engrained in the identity of the community, conveyed by storytellers that also serve as social pillars.Storytelling has always been a necessary component of basic living interaction. Open-ended narratives are literally timeless, with individual stories elaborated upon and transformed to become ever-relevant, becoming cohesive over the course of thousands of campfire tellings. Folk tales have significant appeal because of the infinite degree of possibilities offered, serving a reflective purpose for communities in which they are told as well as being simply narrative windows. The value of told experiences shared in social spaces, constructed by ordinary individuals, has far from disappeared in some aspects even now - genres such as slam poetry carry on many of the same aspects, being a fundamentally ground-up, community-based form of narrative. 

But at the same time, more than ever, alienation regarding stories has also become common. Not only due to growing disdain for the humanities but also a belief in inaccessibility of it, the value of storytelling has become sidelined in the view of many, treated as a practice only for those with means or time. This is a dire problem - but also a baseless one. Writing is perhaps one of the most fundamentally accessible means of art, requiring no other medium but self-invention - and it has been known to have an uplifting effect. What WritetoRight does is not necessarily provide those we serve with the means to write, but rather allow those already-present means to be utilized, a process centered on the value of writing in of itself. 

Djalis were, through their mastery of rhetoric and narrative, often elevated to the point of being able to freely criticize rulers as representatives of the populace. Writing served as the highest form of elevation - not by means of material wealth, or political power, but the sole value in of itself of representing a community through storytelling - a vox populi afforded through the capacity for narrative vision. Nothing makes a storyteller more unique than the story itself, and though it may seem sometimes that the capacity for becoming one has diminished, it is entirely within your hands to prove that wrong.