1.2 EN BUSCA DE LOS ORÍGENES

The queue is snaking down the pavement and spilling into the narrow, cobbled road of Hill Street, deep in the heart of artsy, bohemian Belfast. Yes, I did say ‘bohemian’… look around you at the regenerated Cathedral Quarter with its trendy coffee shops and restaurants and full-to-burstin’ bars, home to the busy Ulster University campus and the Metropolitan Arts Centre, known affectionately as ‘The Mac’ and built just a few years ago, with a reputation for staging edgy, contemporary theatre. Look! There’s the Amavi café with a rainbow flag above the door, that’s a recent arrival in Donegall Street, just down the road from the Kremlin nightclub, a stalwart of the gay scene for the last fifteen years or so. The photographers’ gallery, Belfast Exposed, has been in this street for years too. We’re outside St Anne’s Cathedral now, with its classical Romanesque architecture and that modern, and controversial, ‘Spire of Hope’ looking like a giant silver toothpick stabbing the skyline. On Culture Night (when Belfast’s artsy side is celebrated) there were four drag queens posing for photos on the Cathedral steps – and the world did not cave in. Over there is Writer’s Square, where lines of poetry are inscribed in the paving slabs. ‘Bohemian’ means socially unconventional, so in comparison to the rest of the city….

On Hill Street, the queue’s getting longer. There’s still a good fifteen minutes to go before the doors of the Black Box open – word has gotten around about Ten By Nine you see (or Tenx9 as it’s known): words like ‘Brilliant stories!’, ‘Great craic!’, and ‘Free night out!’ It moved out of the small cosy bar into the larger theatre space a few months ago, but you still have to get there early to get a good seat. Most of the people in the queue seem to be with friends, laughing and joshing, creating an effervescence of anticipation. A blonde woman in front of me is reading from a sheet of paper… I wonder if she’s a storyteller?

At last! The doors open and we file in. It’s quite dark inside until you get used to the half-light penumbra from the bar revealing small round tables, plain chairs and a screen reminding the audience of the theme for the night… Bodies.

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Figure 11 Promotional image for 'Bodies' at Tenx9

People bustle about, greeting friends, buying drinks and settling into seats, and then Paul and Pádraig come to the microphone and welcome us all. Paul explains:

Tenx9 is a storytelling evening where nine people have up to ten minutes to tell a true story from their life. And when the ten minutes are up [Honk! Honk!] we have a lovely comedy sound effect.

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There’s a gentle reminder of the few rules – the stories must be true and personal – and the audience is asked to be respectful. Pádraig’s pleased: several of tonight’s storytellers are first-timers, but first up, we’ve listened to her before, please welcome… Roisin. Applause greets her as she moves to the front and turns to face the audience. She stands quietly for a few seconds (there’s a calming stillness about her) then she begins to tell her story…

When I was seventeen I desperately wanted to do Fine Art at the Art College in Belfast, go to the Big City from my small country town, but I needed a crash course in drawing so I signed up for a life class at the local college. As I walked into the room all the other students were busy setting up their easels, talking animatedly to each other. Would I ever fit in with these people? I so wanted to. Fionnuala, a middle-aged life model draped in a kaftan, sat on a plinth waiting patiently and, in doing so, somehow put me at ease. After a few words of introduction from the life-drawing master, she slipped off her robe to reveal a body beautifully lined with life, stretch marks on her breasts and belly, neither elegant nor poised but an older woman completely comfortable in her skin. I admired her confidence and began to draw.

Roisin went on to tell how, when she came to Belfast Art College in the 1970s, the life drawing classroom became hugely important to her – she was there early in the morning and late at night, learning about drawing, learning about life. Her horizons expanded, ‘life at art college was pure freedom,’ as the bright lights of the big city brought independence and anonymity, qualities of the city that she loves to this day, because she never went back to live in County Tyrone where she grew up, where everyone knew her: ‘I embraced Belfast with all my teenage desire to be known for myself and not my family history.’

At Tenx9 there is no deconstruction of the stories once told, no questions asked, just applause followed by the next storyteller. The stories that followed that night were about getting a tattoo, living with ovarian cancer, and drunkenly skinny- dipping in a lake under an African night sky; of the difficulty in peeing in public, of a sister who nearly died, and of a doctor who had no bedside manner; a story of an anorexic obsession with food, and a story of transgressions that turned a nude life

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model into a naked man with an enormous penis. Some of the stories were funny, others were poignant; some storytellers were self-deprecating, others displayed self- confidence, and many shared their vulnerability. The audience was receptive and respectful, sometimes laughing heartily, sometimes listening in silence, always applauding warmly. There was a feeling of togetherness in the room, of belonging, of sharing the joys and pains of everyday life. And, interestingly for me, although there were tales of troubles told, there were no Troubles Tales told.

But what inspires people to tell stories, particularly those that expose their vulnerabilities? This chapter explores some of the stories told at Tenx9 and I argue that, through personal storytelling and the communitas that this engenders, Tenx9 opens up a privileged space that allows people to share the joys and woes of their everyday lives. In the process people narrate a picture of life in Belfast that challenges and transcends the Troubled grand narratives that prevail in the city. Moreover, the juxtaposition of stories – funny and sad, profound and quotidian – reflects the existential disorderliness of our lives that we manage through our narratives.

I showcase a range of personal stories: these are a small but representative sample of the many told at Tenx9. The room in the Black Box where the evening is hosted holds two hundred people at full capacity and it is at full capacity every month. Although many who attend are regulars, there are always new people in the audience and new storytellers at the front and even those who are regular storytellers will not know everyone in the room. Thus, every month, stories are being told to strangers. But this is a different kind of stranger from those we encountered in Chapter Two, where the connections between my interlocutors and me were mostly chance meetings, and most of the stories told were short and superficial (although, as I have argued, this does not mean they are trivial). Diken (1998) asserts that there are degrees of strangerness and at Tenx9 the figure of the stranger is both known and unknown. On an individual level, one person may not have met another one before, but as I explore later in the chapter, the communitas that is experienced at Tenx9 means that the unknown stranger is one of us, a Ten-By-Niner one might say, a stranger with whom it is much easier to share confidences (Schuetz 1944; Simmel 1950). This affords us a different glimpse ‘on the private lives of individuals’ (Davis 1959:160) to those we encounter on the street corner, where people meet by

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chance. At Tenx9, audience member seek out these strangers, and give up their personal time to listen to the life of another urban individual.

Although the stories at Tenx9 are performed in front of an audience, I do not explore performance in this chapter because that is addressed in Chapter Five. As indicated in the Introduction, there are many theoretical overlaps to the data presented in this dissertation. Here I am interested in the content of the stories.

A Note On Method And On Representation Of The Stories

My primary research methods with regard to Tenx9 were of participant observation and interviewing. Participant observation is widely understood to be the defining method of anthropological fieldwork (Bernard 2006; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007; DeWalt and DeWalt 2011). However, Wolcott (2005) notes that it is a somewhat all-encompassing term, more of a strategy than a method. To clarify what participant observation means to me, I attended the monthly Tenx9 storytelling night during my fieldwork in Belfast to listen to the stories and observe the proceedings, and I participated both as an audience member and as a storyteller. Tenx9 also has a website that includes a short promotional video, a Facebook page, and an active Twitter account, and I have sometimes drawn on these sources too (Tenx9 n.d. a., Tenx9 n.d. b). Although Tenx9 is held in a public venue, and entry is free and open to all, video or audio recording the stories by audience members on the night is not allowed. Therefore, the stories recreated and the insights developed in this chapter are taken from fieldnotes of several Tenx9 evenings and from the subsequent recorded interviews I had with many of the storytellers.

Interviewing covers a wide range of practices. For example, an interview can be very structured with preset questions or it can be a semi- or unstructured dialogue between interviewer and interviewee. It may be audio- or video- recorded or the interviewer may take notes, during or afterwards; and the relationship between interviewer and interviewee can be formal or informal (Burgess 2000). Jonathan Skinner (2012) cites a long history of anthropologists using interviews as a method and he argues that it should be seen as a part of, not apart from, participant observation. This certainly resonates with me, since the interviews I conducted were on a continuum of interactions with people. For example, observations, conversations and my initial thoughts about what was happening would be recorded

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in my fieldnotes, email exchanges with people were archived and the interviews I carried out were fairly unstructured. I wanted to explore what storytelling and Tenx9 meant to people but I rarely had prepared questions, preferring instead to use our shared participant experiences – as storytellers and audience members – to prompt and guide the interview. There was a to-and-fro of questions, comments, ideas, and reminiscences between the interviewees and me that recalls Rapport’s ‘talking partnerships’ (Rapport 2012b; 1987). These ‘conversations with a purpose’ (Burgess 2000:102), were recorded using a small lapel microphone and an unobtrusive digital voice recorder that could be slipped into an interviewee’s pocket. Several people remarked at the end of the interview that they had forgotten that the equipment was there. Nevertheless, all gave permission to use the data, and any quotations taken from interviews are verbatim, other than removing space-filler utterances, since I am interested in the general content of the interviews not a linguistic conversational analysis.

The founders of Tenx9, Paul Doran and Pádraig Ó Tuama, were aware of my research from the beginning and generously assisted me not only by being interviewed themselves but also by acting as brokers for me to gain access to other storytellers and, in some instances, to gain permissions to use their stories. As each story told on the night lasts for ten minutes, those represented in the chapter are short extracts. Almost all of the storytellers read from a prepared text, so the written-language style of the recreated stories is authentic and I have presented their stories in the first person singular to capture something of their individual voices. However, as my aesthetic reproduction of ethnographic data differs throughout this dissertation, I examine writing style in the Conclusion, rather than in this chapter.

Some storytellers gave permission for me to use their own names while others preferred me to use a pseudonym. I have not differentiated them in the text: the importance of names here is most relevant for those who claim them, not for those who read about them. This is true of the other chapters too.

Anyone can tell a story at Tenx9, indeed new storytellers are positively encouraged, so I too told a story. Although my story is not the subject of this chapter, my participation as a storyteller as well as an audience member gave me a particular insight into public, personal storytelling and it gave me a means to connect with the people I interviewed, some of whom had heard me speak.

93 Storytelling As A Local-Cultural Symbolic Form

When I met Roisin at the Art College to talk to her about storytelling she told me she had always been a creative person – painting, drawing, making jewellery, writing fiction (mainly short stories) – so she felt naturally drawn to the concept of Tenx9. Once there, she experienced something quite powerful, as she explains here:

When you’re writing something about yourself that’s real, you go back to that time and place. You do. You go straight back. You feel as you felt at that age. You can nearly smell what you smelt at that time. You relive it. But the telling of something, there’s something very different about that. It has a really powerful impact on a person. It’s the declaration of something. (…) I’m an introvert: standing up in front of an audience is terrifying for me. My leg shakes and I have to move ever so slightly from one foot to the other to stop it. But [telling stories] is something I really want to do. I’m so eager to tell them, and they’re… they’re just coming out of me. I think I would have been satisfied just writing the story, even if it had never been read, until I went to Tenx9 and I thought, Wow! There is something really powerful going on here. I’ve been going [for nine months] and I’m still not at the bottom of it, but there is something incredibly powerful about standing up and telling something of yourself.

Roisin began our interview by telling me about the culture and history of the storyteller in Ireland, where the seanchaí (pronounced shan-a-kee) would come round to people’s homes: ‘You’d hear that the storyteller was coming in the area and you would wait with baited breath and families would gather’. Many other people I spoke to at Tenx9 placed their storytelling in this historical and social context. The seanchaí was usually a man, although not exclusively so (Ó Duilearga 1942; Harvey 1989), who either wandered from place to place telling folktales and bringing news from towns and villages or, more often, was a local person known as ‘the bard of the house’ (Zimmerman 2001:82), who would gather people around them at the fireside

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to tell stories. The seanchaí was in great demand for wakes and for céilithe22 _[plural,

pronounced kay-li-huh], evenings of music, dance and storytelling (Ó Súilleabháin 1973). The storytelling tradition continues to this day, as Cashman (2011) identifies in a small village on the Northern Irish border. Telling stories at wakes and céilithe is an important means of establishing both community and personal identity: by ‘taking stock of themselves through storytelling – and particularly through anecdotes – [people] define who they have been, who they are, and who they can be’ (Cashman 2011:255).

Roisin also told me about the therapeutic effect, for her, of telling and listening to true stories. Storytelling as a form of healing is widely acknowledged (cf. Frank 1995; Rosenthal 2003; Mullet et al. 2013; Aho 2014) and has been employed in Northern Ireland in post-conflict reconciliation (Healing Through Remembering 2005; Senehi 2009; Weiglhofer 2014). The meta-narrative here is of storytelling as a force for good, but Hackett and Rolston question that storytelling is unproblematic in peace and reconciliation initiatives, noting that although many victims regard storytelling as essential, often people ‘do not get to hear stories from other groups or reject out of hand the validity of those stories’ (2009:370). As mentioned, the stories I heard told at Tenx9 were not Troubles stories but there were some painful tales, and all of the people I spoke to felt that storytelling was beneficial to both teller and hearer; I explore this in more detail later. The stories told at Tenx9 were stories of everyday lives and in the context of the historical and social role of storytelling in Northern Ireland, Tenx9 becomes a modern version of the storytelling céilí, updating and yet at the same time continuing this local cultural-symbolic form of communication.

Narrative Identity

Richard Kearney says that stories ‘are what make our life worth living. They are what make our condition human’ (Kearney 2002:3, original emphasis). Nor is he the only

22 _{There are several spellings of both seanchaí and céilí (singular) depending on}

whether it is Scottish or Irish Gaelic, and old or reformed spelling. I have chosen the modern Irish Gaelic spelling.

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commentator to see narrative as an inherently human activity (cf. Hardy 1968; Kerby 1991; Ochs and Capps 2001; Jackson 2006). For Barthes, narrative is so ubiquitous that ‘it is simply there, like life itself’ (1993:252). According to Michael Jackson, storytelling enables us to share our private world with others, it is a way to transmit the meaning we ascribe to events, and how we sustain ‘a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances’ (2006:15), qualities that are so essential to being human that Jackson refers to it as the narrative imperative. Or, as Roisin articulates it, stories are just coming out of her.

To tell a story about oneself – even if only to oneself – is to link events in a coherent fashion that life rarely orders for us. Life experiences happen in a disorderly manner, with many unconnected things happening simultaneously, and the meaning of something is not always immediately apparent. Even birth and death are not a natural beginning and ending to a life story, since at birth we are thrust ‘into the