Recognizing an Imagination Need

During Stalin’s purges in Russia, millions of people were sent to work in Siberian labour camps, and many died from lack of food, brutal punishments, overwork or the bitter cold. There were, however, some remarkable instances of survival. In the introduction to his novel The Forbidden Forest, the philosopher Mircea Eliade tells how some prisoners in one camp survived their ordeal. While those in other dormitories died at the rate of up to twelve a week, the prisoners of one dormitory stayed alive because they listened every night to an old woman telling fairy tales. Each prisoner gave up a precious portion of his daily bread ration in order to help feed the old woman so she could save her strength for the nightly storytelling sessions.

This is just one of many accounts I have come across of how stories can make the literal difference between life and death, and it goes some way towards explaining why I love being a school librarian. I know that every story I read aloud to my students is adding strength to an invisible ring of protection around their souls and their bodies. When I began my library career in the 1980s I thought I was entering an enchanted realm – a place where reading to children and matching books with readers would be my daily task. For a year the enchantment endured. The children came to the library, listened to stories, talked about books and found good books to take home and read. Then came computers. First one, then another, then a whole lab full. Word processing. Email and 14K modems. Dot matrix printers that churned out long horizontal banners which decorated the hallways with important messages such as ‘Happy Holidays!’ and ‘Welcome to Charlesmont Elementary School!’ It was fun. Within a few years, however, the whimsical pointlessness of dot matrix banners had given way to the humourless drudgery of ‘information skills’. Librarians were told to teach their students how to ‘develop a concept of peer evaluation by giving and receiving feedback’, to ‘evaluate understanding and implementation of the set task criteria using modelled examples’, and to ‘recognize an information need’ (doesn’t that sound nasty?).* Suddenly, tacitly and certainly, librarians knew that reading aloud to students was no longer cool. It looked so lazy. The librarian just sat there, and the children just sat there enjoying themselves. They were only learning how to empathize, how to be imaginative people – and perhaps one day how to survive severe adversity. Henri Charrière’s Papillon (1970) portrays the stupendous survival value of storytelling that the ‘information skills’ revolution has been pushing out of school libraries. Charrière recounts how he was unjustly convicted of murder and imprisoned on an island in French Guiana. Shut up in solitary confinement with no light, no exercise and no human contact for two years, Charrière hung on to his sanity by reliving in his imagination films he had seen in his youth. By retelling to himself the comedies, thrillers and romances of French cinema, he preserved not only his physical body, but also enough spirit to succeed eventually in escaping. A more recent example of the life-saving power of storytelling is described in Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (2001) by Malika Oufkir. The author and her family were shut up in a desert jail by the Moroccan king in punishment for her father’s attempt to lead a coup d’état. Their plight went from terrible to unspeakably desperate when they were separated into individual solitary cells (the youngest child was only 6 when the family was imprisoned). Malika, the oldest daughter, kept up her family’s spirits by telling a story, which she was able to communicate by speaking through water pipes that connected the cells.

I went on telling it night after night, for ten years, just like Scheherazade . . . Thanks to the Story, thanks to the characters, we didn’t succumb to madness. When I described the ball gowns in intricate detail, the beaded dresses, the lace, taffeta and jewelry, the carriages, the dashing officers and the beautiful countesses waltzing to the strains of the Tsar’s orchestras, we forgot the fleas . . . the cold, hunger, filth . . . typhoid and dysentery . . . I truly, humbly believe that this Story saved us all.

Librarians still know that stories are important. What we don’t seem to know any longer and certainly don’t dare to say is that stories are more important than something else. Stories are more important than information literacy. They are more important than knowing how to analyse a URL, select a search engine, create subject tags, build a website, search a database, or manipulate a spreadsheet. All these skills are useful, perhaps even essential, but they won’t heal a bitter conflict, inspire heroism, or give comfort to grief. The Siberian prison camps no longer exist. The solitary confinement cells in French Guiana are now a tourist site. But there are still prisons just as bad as these all over the world. Some have visible walls. Others have invisible walls of poverty, injustice and ignorance. Most of our students will encounter one of these prisons at some point in their lives, and when they do I doubt very much whether database search skills will be of much help to them. But stories might. In the frozen fields of Siberia, the prisoners who survived were not recognizing an information need or implementing task criteria. They were listening to fairy tales. *Jenny Ryan and Stephen Capra, Information Literacy Toolkit (American Library Association, 2001)

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 19 © Constance Vidor 2008