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Volume 5, Number 1 - Fall 2006
Stories Carry News and
Tradition at Covenant House
by Nava
EtShalom
In my first People & Stories series, I read six stories with a group of young women at Covenant House, a shelter for youth in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. We read about survival, creativity, family, loss and community; but the story I remember most made us discuss what we were doing there together: what stories are for, why we tell them, why we listen to them.
That week in April, we read, “This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” by Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian from Washington. It’s about two men on a Spokane reservation: Thomas, who tells stories to himself all the time about history that no one listens to, and Victor, who asks Thomas to help him get to Arizona to pick up his father’s body.
“Nobody talked to Thomas any more because he told the same damn stories over and over again. Victor was embarrassed, but he thought that Thomas might be able to help him. Victor felt a sudden need for tradition.”
In our discussion, everybody thought of people who reminded them of Thomas: a resident at Covenant House who talked to himself but connected really well with people who took the time to be with him; a woman Sasha used to live with who prayed to the saints, believing in the power of their old stories. “You have to pay attention,” said one participant, something we all agreed on.
The women talked about their own experiences of losing and finding faith the way Thomas and Victor lose and find their own history. They compared Thomas’s losses to their own. They asked: How can all this pain be happening to one people? To one person? The story seemed to be about People & Stories itself: What stories do we tell in painful times? What stories help us change? What stories remind us of the importance of where we come from, or the new places we want to go?
Each week, we also read a poem that related to the story’s themes. The week after “This Is What it Means…” we read “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100,” by Martín Espada, a Puerto Rican poet from Brooklyn:
…When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul/two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,/mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:/Teach me to dance. We have no music here./And the other said with a Spanish tongue:/I will teach you. Music is all we have.
When we’d finished, Kertrina said, “This should be on the news!” We all agreed: This is how we want to hear about world events.
So there it was: Stories can be tradition, and they can be news. These stories matter not only in the particular lives of individual People & Stories participants, but in the larger world we share. In our intimate lives, stories we read and hear remind us of who we are and where we come from; as news they remind us of constant change, of collective pain and imagination, of what’s possible.
This spring, we listened to each other and connected the small stories of daily lives to the large stories they make up, to the past and the future. Together, we paid attention.