A grandmother who’s starting to lose her memory… And a boy who wants to do nothing but play video games… What might blossom from this meeting? And what will we find when we dig way down deep into our old memory closet? That is where the sensitive book “Mesma Nova História” by our dear teacher Mafuane Oliveira takes us.
We at be.Living are very happy with this achievement by Mafu and are very excited to be presenting her book to our children and to our entire community over the next few weeks. There will be a special reading for the Kindergarten and Elementary classes, excerpts from the book on our Instagram, and the “Mesma Nova História” booth at our Art Fair.
But how did the idea for this plot come about? For what purpose? What is the process of creating a book like? Let’s have a chat with Professor Mafu and find out!
bL: Mafu, let’s start at the beginning. Why is the book called “Mesma Nova História”? What do you want to say with this title?
Mafu: The book is called “Mesma Nova História” because the same story, even if told several times, can always be a new story, depending on how we listen to it and how we receive it.
bL: How did you come up with the idea of bringing a grandmother losing her memory and a grandson who only wants to play video games?
Mafu: This story, in its final publication, in this written form that was laid down in a book, is the result of the experimentation of 3 languages and has 3 authors. The plot itself was introduced by my friend Emerson Bertucci who, while participating in a writing workshop that included the challenge of using the word “die” in the text, wrote this beautiful story of the grandmother and the boy. I, as a storyteller, fell in love with his tale and asked him to let me tell it. The narrative changed in my retellings. People say that “He who tells a tale adds to it a bit”, but for us who are storytellers and work professionally in this craft, it is not that we simply add a bit, we use elements to tell the story, which can be external resources – such as music, costumes, puppets, finger puppets, or internal resources – which I particularly consider to be much more important. These internal resources are the modulation of my voice, my emotions, and especially my memories that help bring this story to life in another way, introducing other subjective elements. And then came Juão Vaz with the illustration, adding another narrative, this time a visual one. The purple floor of the grandmother’s house, for example, he represented as being the sunflower itself, as if she lived inside the sunflower, generating another textuality.
bL: By bringing your biographical memories into this story, you went back to your grandmother from Bahia who had 20 children. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Mafu: In the original story, the number of children was not that many. It was a smaller number, but it already portrayed a family model where families were larger than the models we have today. And my grandmother is, in fact, a woman who was raised in a rural environment and had many children, my mother being the second to last of 20. It so happens that at the end of her life, my grandmother, already over 90 years old, had only 5 living children out of 20. And she always had so many stories to tell about this very large family and I’m referring not only to her, but to an archetype, actually, of old age, of this better age, of growing old and the importance of listening to these people. So there are a lot of things that are biographical elements, but there are also a lot of things that are fictional. And the retellings are vivid. Many of the retellings of this story I performed at be.Living. The children also contributed so that I could create my written retelling. This was a story that had many pedagogical purposes: origin, ancestry, besides having already been told a few times on Family Day. I always worked on the outline of the book with the children. Before I had an editor, I used to do storytelling exercises for the children, telling them to draw and then I would show them some of Juão’s drawings and ask them to compare the written version with the version I had told them. Thus, we have been building the retellings and understanding these nuances of when we tell a story orally and when we lay it down in a printed textuality. The first time I narrated this story artistically was at a be.Living pedagogical meeting in 2013. So this story that makes up part of our school’s literary culture.
bL: Why is it important to address the relationship between a grandmother with early memory loss and a boy who only wants to play video games? What does the book teach us with this relationship?
Mafu: This book’s approach, that is, the plot that has this grandmother and this boy as its thread, calls attention to the meeting of generations. Especially at this moment in which we are living, with a lot of technology, making us believe that we are heading towards modernity, but often what these electronic games, the internet, the convenience bring is a breakdown of relationships and a lack of understanding of these two generations. The intention of approaching a plot like this, these two generations, is to appreciate and look more carefully at two categories of society that are rarely heard: children, who often have their rights violated, who often cannot exercise their protagonism in their family environment or in society itself, and the elderly, with whom, often, the family does not have the patience to listen or does not understand that what the elders are telling us is, in fact, part of our own history and collective memory. Moreover, in a society where there is a very high devotion to productivity, these two age groups that – in general – are not at a point of high productivity, end up being excluded. We don’t listen to or have patience for them. I think that this book can help, in some way, to strengthen bonds and to value our ancestry.
b.L: Is the book a sort of tribute to our ancestors and the art of storytelling?
Mafu: Sure. The book is a tribute to our ancestors and a true declaration of love for the art of storytelling. Above all, to the art of listening to stories. Nowadays, we have many courses in oratory, we are constantly posting on social media, we want to talk a lot, but we never bother to take a listening course, for example. Sensitive listening, active listening. I think that these are values that we can transmit to children: affective listening, in relation to themselves, but also in relation to our elders, how we can connect with our ancestors, reaching a sincere feeling of gratitude, because if it weren’t for our grandparents, our great-grandparents, we wouldn’t be here. We are the continuity, always, of a legacy and we always represent this dream of our ancestors. That’s what this book is all about. It is not about a narrative, an individual tribute to my family line, but a tribute to all our ancestral lineages and that each one may awaken this awareness and curiosity on learning a little more about their history and genealogy, especially with regard to the values received, beyond the issue of genetics.
