Global and Connected Bards

I want to create a network of people and a system of thought, that will allow the stories of the peoples of the world to be exchanged and introduced to each other again.


Humans are a story telling species.

News are stories.

We tell each other stories of harmful events that happened in the past, so that we can alter our societies accordingly.

Societies are altered in ways, that will adapt them to reacting to similar dangers in the future.

This is the method our species has chosen for its survival. (Watch The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis.) In Evolving, we as humans traded away precise short term memory, to gain vast long term memory. Now, we have access to stories from the ancient past. We can warn of climate calamities that happened long before any of our contemporary socio-linguistic communities were born. The Story of Noah’s Flood is still alive, and it exists in many different story-bodies, not only in the Bible. (Read Atra-Hasis, and the flood myth hypothesis.) It is a story that is part of our collective conciousness: everybody alive right now inherits it, and it belongs to all of us.

Stories are powerful.

We can tell stories of our immediate ancestors; of how a marriage of grandparents dissolved, or how an uncle’s business collapsed. And even stories of how climate change instigated floods wiped out whole countries. Next generations who listen to them may alter the ways their society functions. And change can be initiated—starting from families, growing to villages, to towns, to cities, encompassing areas, countries, regions, whole continents; and finally, the world.

Ancestral power is recalled through stories.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa on
why humans developed language.

One of our greatest libraries of stories—is language. Languages can hold within them, countless stories we have forgotten. In “Ancestral Recall”, I wrote about my Grandmother, who once told me a story about her own Grandmoter—absolutely amazed by it herself—about how she used to call someone ‘Genoese-minded’ if they were smart… The Genoese was a seafaring kingdom that existed in the years 1200s—the 13th century—and collapsed 500 years before she was born.

Stories are power. We tell stories to convey vital information, that ensures our survival in the world. The information we pass down was crafted by our ancestors. We draw our strength from them, and we bring the same strength to the future, so that we can pass it down to our next of kin.


G&C Bards will seek stories and retell them

It’s like bringing back Dede Korkut…The ancestral Turkic bard—the Ozan

Korkut Ata, Қорқыт Ата,
Qoʻrqit ota, Dədə Qorqud, дәдә Коркыт, Gorkut-ata, Ҡорҡот ата

It’s like delving deep into Africa, and meeting the ancient Griot.

ߖߋ߬ߟߌ jèli in Bambara language spoken in Mali,
and unfortunately the rest can’t be fact checked,
guewel in Wolof,
gawlo 𞤺𞤢𞤱𞤤𞤮 in Fulani,
diari or gesere in Soninke, also spoken in Mali,
and arokin in Yoruba spoken in Nigeria.

A griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet, and/or musician.

Praise. Bards sing praises. Praises of the ancient past, of our ancestors.

When writing “Start of Something Big“, I discovered that the origin of the English word “bard” lies in the Proto-Indo-Europian root word gʷerH, meaning “to praise“.

Skalds. Bards. Ozans. And Griots: the bard exists in every one of our civilizations.

We were story-tellers.

The griot is a repository of oral tradition and is often seen as a leader due to their position as an advisor to royal personages.

Zora Neale Hurston,
she collected African diaspora folklore

Repository. The library.

The Griot as the soul of their People.

Delve deep into the land, Seek out the Griots of Harlem.

What are they doing now? What strange suns do they hail? That ancient, wise heart. That young, fiery heart…

A repository, a library.

Griots, ozans, bards, dengbejs, skalds.

The soul of the people lives on in the Griot.


GLOBAL AND CONNECTED BARDS

Let’s create the Global and Connected Bards, so that we may bring each other, the stories of our people. So that a new age can begin, where the stories of our ancestors will be shared, swapped, exchanged.

Let’s connect the Griot and the Ozan.

Stories will witness the creation and the collapse of nations. And they will live to tell the tale.

Right now, so many nations are burning with the fires of war. To collect and share the stories will not be an easy task…It was never easy. It was always serious.

We have to jump through the fires—dive into Central Africa. Yes, that sounds stupid—yet it can be done.

Travel to Crimea—yes that sounds stupid—yes it can be done—and tell the stories of the Tatars.

They are not dead yet. They will in fact never die! Their stories have been being passed down—from mother to child, ancestor to descendant, bard to people—through word of mouth…Now is the time to connect them.

Published by giiray

Writing for G&C Bards, a project that collects and connects stories and those who tell them.

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