With an astute sense of humor and a great ability to interact with the public Palestinian storyteller Khaled El Naanaa charmed visitors of the Sharjah International Book Fair with his storytelling sessions titled “When the Book Narrates”.The session starts with a child who, in an electrical black out, finds that he can’t play on his iPad, or telephone or even watch television. The child decides to open a box that his grandmother gave him to discover what’s inside it and there he found a book that came to life telling him stories. “I believe that technology has taken people away from books so I thought that being here in the book fair would be a good opportunity for me to tackle this. I wanted to show that books are not boring and can be a lot of fun,” said AL Naanaa, who is in the Gulf for the first time. He added that in the Arab world, books are given an academic role and that after a long day at school, children don’t want to open up any other book even for fun. “When a Book Narrates, shows that the book is in fact the storyteller. If you open the book it won’t bite you and if you don’t open it you’ll never get to hear its stories,” he said.
El Naanaa, an educator who was born and raised in Lebanon, started telling stories in 2007 and was trained by Lebanese storyteller, Jihad Darweesh.
But his relationship with stories goes back even earlier, back to his childhood days as he lived during the Lebanese civil war. “We had no TV or internet so my uncle used to gather us around him and tell us stories. The thing about stories is that you hear them and you think you forgot them but the truth is that I retrieved them all when I became a storyteller,” he said.He tells stories in Arabic and French and has performed in festivals as well as in schools and cultural centers.“In Lebanon, there used to be more demand for storytelling in French. This however started to change because even French schools are requesting Arabic storytellers. They understand that the child needs to be proficient in their own mother tongue in order to be proficient in another languages. To attract them to learn Arabic they use stories to show them that Arabic can be fun to learn!” he said.
El Naanaa says that some of his stories are traditional, others that he heard and some that he wrote. “Sometimes, I might hear a story that I would modify to make it suitable for children,” he said.In fact, flexibility, according to El Naanaa, is key when it comes to being a storyteller. “The person telling the story has the ability to change and modify the session depending on the public. You prepare the story then you think it’s going to go a certain way but you find that the public is not responsive or that they need something different. You have to be able to modify,” he said.When he tells his stories El Naanaa says that he stays away from preaching or giving direct advice. “I never reach out for the teacher in me. Children are inundated with advice. They are always told how to think and how to behave. I believe they need to have some fun too and I’m here to entertain them,” he said saying that it’s not his job to make sure that they learnt something from the story.
“Children are very smart and t hey will understand the moral of he story but that’ s not my job. If you ask children what they learnt from a story they will come up with things that I haven’t even intended. It’s great to leave the space to children to process what they think the morals are,” he said.In addition to being able to read the audience and have flexibility, a good storyteller must be charismatic, make eye contact with everyone in the audience and he must know his story and the background of every character very well. “When you know all the details you can change them because you are prepared. You will also be able to change the duration of the story, removing events that you think are unnecessary,” El Naanaa [email protected]