Word of mouth: stories that connect
Norman Perrin carries every book he ever read on his back. His strange mission to preserve the stories that inspired him is symbolic of all new Torontonians who tell the stories of their pasts to connect with their friends to come.
By Ashleigh Gaul
Norman Perrin is moving. A wall of flattened cassava chip and designer cereal boxes lead a path through the living room to the library.
Most of his stuff won’t require much space. His computer will fit into two boxes. His clothes and linen share a shelf in the bathroom; he can probably get those into three or four. Dishes: two; food: one; books: upwards of 300.
In addition to his job at a Yorkville health food shop, Perrin’s spent the past 20 years building and maintaining 5,000 volumes of folktales for Toronto’s first and only storytellers’ library.
The library’s a labour of love and Norman’s made his sacrifices. He operates the Four Winds Library out of his two-bedroom apartment in The Junction, but he has no bed; after the books went in, there was simply no space.
Storytellers can drop in anytime of day, and Norman lends his key to borrowers if he can’t be home to let them in. He issues no library cards or time limits on borrowing, and he doesn’t chase down the books that don’t come back.
When his landlord increased the rent in February, Perrin and the Four Winds looked for a new home in The Junction. Luckily, he says, he found another two-bedroom in the neighbourhood within his price range last month.
“I thought about putting the books in storage and buying a smaller place,” he says, “but just as soon as I thought that, it was no longer an option.” Until he finds a stable home for his collection where, he says, “it has to be accessible, and it has to be free,” Perrin will carry his books with him from home to home.
He loads a stack of books into an empty goji juice box and makes the first of over 300 slow trips from the library to the new Four Winds, four doors down in The Junction.
It’s a strange mission, but it’s symbolic of many of the city’s immigrants, from other countries, provinces, or towns besides Toronto. We all unpack our stories here, but how much should we let the city change them?
Moyo Rainos Mutamba tries not to change the folktales he learned in his first language, Shona. They are not his, he says, though he has “an obligation to tell them.”
Mutamba was born in the midst of the Zimbabwe Revolution. His mother was a griot, or folk historian, who worked as an informant by day, and a storyteller by night for the revolutionaries. Stories and strategic information were barely distinguishable, and both were necessary for daily survival.
Now, every time he tells a folktale he learned from his mother or grandmother thirty years ago, he says he’s talking to her, and all of the listeners are hearing that conversation.
Translation is difficult, and performance is initially awkward. His Shona stories involve a lot of call and response, particularly at the beginning and end of the story, and he stops often to explain an element that cannot be translated.
Despite the language barrier, though, Mutamba says that once a group of storytellers becomes well-acquainted, there is no difference between folktales and confessional. “The stories of our ancestors,” he says, “are the stories of real people. When you tell those stories, you’re telling your own life.”
In the end, though, Mutamba says he tells the stories he grew up with because “it just feels nice on the palate of my soul. Like an ice cream on the hottest day of the Canadian summer.”
Soheil Parsa, on the other hand, feels no artistic obligation to his native country, Iran, or his ancestors, unless they happened to produce something beautiful, and that’s worth preserving.
Like Mutamba, he also lived through a uprising in his birth country: the Islamic Revolution. Unlike Mutamba, though, he’s a Baha’i Muslim and was persecuted by revolutionaries, expelled from his theatre program at a Tehran university in his last year, and forced to escape to Canada through Pakistan in 1977.
Parsa grew up watching American films and theatre in Farsi translation, and his stage company, Modern Times, is named after the Charlie Chaplin film that convinced him to become an actor when he was 17. Watching Shakespeare translated in Tehran inspired him to test out some Iranian classics on Canadian audiences when he started directing his own plays in Toronto.
Parsa’s since won forty Dora awards for his contribution to Toronto’s performing arts scene.
In 2002, 25 years after he left Tehran, the Iranian government invited Parsa back to the country to stage his version of the Persian myth, Aurash. The show was sold out every night, and Parsa says the Iranians were “shocked, first, that Canadians were interested in Aurash, but then, because it very modern.”
“Traditional stories get stuck being told in traditional ways,” he says, referring to the Aurash the Iranians had grown used to. “I think new contexts give them new life,” perhaps referring to the version of Macbeth he first saw in Tehran.
Parsa looks for common themes in the plays he produces, and common, human themes always transcend national ideologies. “Canadian audiences leave my plays,” he says, “and they, ‘it’s about us.’ That makes it universal.”
Norman looks tired. He wants to travel. The library that started as a foundation has become an anchor. The joys of his memories, and memories of his visitors are still there written in his logbook, but his visitors have declined in recent years. He flips through the logbook before packing it into a box and notes that many of the old borrowers are dead.
“I know,” he says, “the opportunity for these stories to be told again has been lost. But they’re here.”
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