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    Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative
    Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative
    Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative
    Ebook360 pages5 hours

    Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative

    By Frank de Caro

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    About this ebook

    In Stories of Our Lives Frank de Caro demonstrates the value of personal narratives in enlightening our lives and our world. We all live with legends, family sagas, and anecdotes that shape our selves and give meaning to our recollections. Featuring an array of colorful stories from de Caro’s personal life and years of field research as a folklorist, the book is part memoir and part exploration of how the stories we tell, listen to, and learn play an integral role in shaping our sense of self. 
     
    De Caro’s narrative includes stories within the story: among them a near-mythic capture of his golden-haired grandmother by Plains Indians, a quintessential Italian rags-to-riches grandfather, and his own experiences growing up in culturally rich 1950s New York City, living in India amid the fading glories of a former princely state, conducting field research on Day of the Dead altars in Mexico, and coming home to a battered New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
     
    Stories of Our Lives shows that our lives are interesting, and that the stories we tell—however particular to our own circumstances or trivial they may seem to others—reveal something about ourselves, our societies, our cultures, and our larger human existence.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUtah State University Press
    Release dateJul 15, 2013
    ISBN9780874218947
    Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative
    Author

    Frank de Caro

    Frank de Caro (1943–2020) was professor emeritus at Louisiana State University. He is the award-winning author of numerous books on folklore, including Folklore Recycled: Old Traditions in New Contexts and coauthor (with Leslie A. Wade and Robin Roberts) of Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans, both published by University Press of Mississippi.

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      Book preview

      Stories of Our Lives - Frank de Caro

      One

      The Golden-Haired Maiden

      IT IS 1979 AND I AM SITTING IN a pub in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, with six other people, five of whom have personal connections to an imperial past. Our informal conversation quickly turns to the subject about which I have come to interview one of them, though I will wind up taping four out of the five later and will hear their stories.¹

      At the bus station in Waterford yesterday evening the stage was set for oral performance. We tell the station agent where we’re going, and he looks completely puzzled, as though we have asked for a bus that goes to Moscow or San Francisco. Then he realizes that we have merely been mispronouncing the name of our destination. We are not going to U-gall, as we have been saying, but rather to someplace more like Yawl. This linguistic confusion and its resolution sets him off on a lengthy paean to the joys of being a bus conductor, of announcing destinations, of pointing out to his riders—especially any tourists aboard—the sights being passed. Oh, ’tis grand, he says repeatedly, ’tis grand. His lilting tones stoke our stereotypes of the Irish love of elaborate, musical speech and remind us of the Irish fame for verbal art, though the conductor on our journey the next day turns out to be more taciturn.

      The stage should be set, too, for the post-colonial. Ireland has, after all, been called Britain’s original colony. And it gained independence early—in 1921, well before the spate of post–World War II British colonial departures that began with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.

      But we have not come to Ireland to encounter grand oral performances, but rather the prosaic, everyday speech of interviews. And though we are very much interested in the colonial, there is nothing post about the colonial we seek. Nor, for that matter, is the Irish context directly involved. We stopped in Ireland on the route of a larger project that will also take us through England and Scotland that requires talking to British men and women who lived and worked in imperial India before independence—as colonial administrators, soldiers, businesspeople, and in other capacities. My interest is in part personal and comes out of my Fulbright grant in India in the 1960s, an experience that made me curious about earlier generations of Western sojourners on the subcontinent, who certainly left their mark upon the cultural landscape in various ways.

      But my fellow interviewer and I are both folklorists, and our current project is also part of an interest in the expanding conception of the parameters of folklore, of seeing folklore as something possessed and communicated by virtually all human groups—not just peasants or the common people or country folk, not just wizened mountaineers and star-crossed Delta bluesmen. Although our purpose here has a connection to oral history, we see our endeavor as folkloristic and ethnographic, as an exercise in what Margaret Mead and Rhoda Métraux once called the study of culture at a distance.² The distance is temporal as well as spatial, for the subculture of our focus no longer exists either in situ or the present time because the colonialists of India mostly came Home to the British Isles when their world in Asia ceased to exist.³ We want to know what sort of folklore existed in that world and, in passing, see something about the lore of a politically and socially elite group. To mention the various purposes of this project, however, merely provides a sort of prologue and—though the stories of the sahibs will play an important role here—this project on Anglo-India is but one focus of this book. Rather, the book is intended as a meditation on the importance and value of narratives, oral narratives especially and personal narratives in particular—by which I mean the structured and repeated stories that virtually all of us tell about our lives and the events and forces (personal, historical, and cultural) that have shaped our lives. In doing so, I mean to draw upon both research and stories of significance to me personally or other people I’ve known. Such stories form us and communicate who we are and constitute parts of larger narratives such as life histories and social epics. In the past I think folklorists have performed a singular service to the study of history and culture by repeatedly calling attention to such humbler narratives, though I also hope to suggest more about the meanings these stories possess in our repertoires of narratives while placing some into contexts as part of my personal and family repertoire, necessarily against the backdrop of memory and memoir.

      We sit in the pub—a rather upscale one—and eat tasty fish sandwiches made on excellent rolls with Ian, the informant we have come to see; his wife, Davida; her brother-in-law, Howard; and Howard’s brother, Arthur; as well as Davida’s sister (and Howard’s wife), Marian (Arthur has never married).⁴ All three men belonged to the small, elite Indian Civil Service, or ICS, the corps which provided imperial India with its key administrators. I am particularly struck by a story Arthur tells, about what happened to him after he left India following Partition (we have learned that our informants seldom speak of the independence of India and Pakistan, but rather reference the partition of one entity into two nations as the culminating event of the British Raj). Arthur’s story went something like this (we had no tape recorder at our pub lunch, so I am re-creating it here⁵):

      "Well, I had gone on to Egypt when I left India [Arthur said]. I was making my way south. I thought that perhaps I would reach Kenya, you see, and might try coffee farming there. But when I reached the cataracts of the Nile, I ran into an English chap and he said to me, ‘I say, aren’t you wearing a Marlborough tie?’ And I said I was. Marlborough was my old public school.

      "And he asked, ‘Were you at Marlborough?’

      "‘Yes, of course,’ I said, or something of the sort.

      "‘Why, so was I,’ he said, and we chatted a bit about Marlborough and the people we might have known in common, though we had been there at rather different times.

      "‘Well, what are you doing now?’ he finally asked.

      "I told him I had left India and was heading for Kenya and might try coffee farming, but he had another idea, you see.

      "‘I’m in the Uganda Judicial Service,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come to Uganda and join the Judicial Service?’

      And so that’s just what I did.

      It is the quintessential old school tie story. In the middle of Africa—still very much a colonial place, though India has become something else—he is literally wearing a tie. This itself is a rather extraordinary fact, and by it his identity is recognized as an alumnus of an elite public school, and hence, not only as someone with an important link to the man he has run into but as someone suitably qualified—even without further inquiry—to assume an important position as a judge in African colonial courts.

      It is a story about an encounter full of assumptions about the character and abilities of someone who attended a certain kind of school and who thus is a member of a certain class, and about the rightness of his taking a position in which he will judge the affairs of inferior, colonized people. It is also a story that reveals what a small world we deal with in our interviews—this world of the British upper classes whose members assumed a certain right to govern others. Its inhabitants have all gone to the same schools, wear the same ties, encounter each other in far-flung if unlikely places, trust each other, make assumptions about each other, and take care of each other’s

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