Saturday, April 23, 2011

Explanation of Stories

Stories are more than words painted across the pages of a book or the words flowing out of someone's mouth. Stories represent something, explain something, and have morals. In the case of the Umuofia tribe, stories were used to explain the science of nature. The story about the tortoise and the birds taught the children that the tortoise has an uneven shell because he disappointed the birds, lost his wings, fell from the sky, and shattered his shell on the ground (pg. 96-97). Concrete sciences were foreign to an un-Englished educated society, yet the clan discovered a way to explain things beyond sciences through folklore and the gods. It is amazing that the clan could come up with such elaborate stories to explain things that needed much more explanation.

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