The Al Hakawātī Story Teller Project was conceived and then further explored through a grant I received in 2016.  Its intent is to foster a love of storytelling and myth-making within the diverse ethnic groups living an working in Abu Dhabi. The project involved a series of workshops on making and telling stories at two labor camps, the Filipino Women’s Safe House at the Filipino Embassy and and among the contract workers at NYU Abu Dhabi where I teach academic and creative writing. The stories in the workshops are constructed orally to avoid any stigma around writing and reading  literacy, and are outlined on a chalk board. Later a student assistant types out a summary of the plot lines. This is a short sample of how one of the stories begins. It’s called The Whistler.

Image: Osman Hamdi Bey, A Young Emir Studying, 1878

The Whistler

A story collaboration between Kumar Thapa Magar, Patience Gunde, Gideon Asiimwe and Jim Savio

So far. . . .

Our story begins in a small town in Uganda’s foothills, where the weather in the summer is cool and tolerable in the winter. A river flows through the village and the surrounding hills are green and lush. There is an old belief among the people in this remote part of the country, that girls should never whistle. Those girls who do it is believed, possess mysterious powers and have the ability to communicate with animals and in some cases, the dead. Because of this they are eyed with great suspicion.

A fifteen-year girl named Barbara lives with her grandmother, Joy. They are poor and live on the outskirts of town. Barbara tends to the animals and the gardens, and maintains the old house and barns because her grandmother can no longer walk very well. Because of her responsibilities, Barbara cannot go to school. This makes her sad, but she accepts it. There is a boy in town named John, who is sixteen, and he too works on his family’s farm, but because he has brothers and sisters he is able to attend classes three days a week.

One weekend as John leads his animals out to pasture he meets the girl named Barbara. In the course of the day, he discovers something extraordinary about her. Barbara can whistle. We are not talking about your average, good whistler here, but a whistler of extraordinary talent and skill. She uses her gift to soothe the cows and goats in her herd. But it is not only the cows and goats who respond so favorably to her whistling; the birds in the woods, the panthers and reptiles and all the other creatures who live in the surrounding forest and swim in the river, all of them are calmed by Barbara’s whistling.

John feels something for Barbara but he has not yet identified it as love. He cautions her that she must keep her whistling a secret, or run the risk of angering the council of elders. But there is another girl in town who has her eyes on John. Her name is Charlotte.

Charlotte comes from a more well-to-do family. They own a store and Charlotte works there when she is not in school. One day John comes in for supplies, and she tries to convince him to go with her to hear a well-known singer who is performing in the town square that weekend. Grateful for the invitation, he tells he has to take his animals into the hills to graze and cannot attend. Suspicious, Charlotte decides to follow him.

Charlotte follows John into the countryside, staying back and hiding at the edge of the woods. A few miles outside of town she sees that someone with a small herd of cows and goats has joined him. She keeps back and cannot see who it is. She continues to follow them, when suddenly she is surprised to hear the most marvelous whistling she has ever heard. She’s enthralled and tries to get closer but fails to notice that it’s growing dark…..

NOTE: The idea would be to adapt this tale to a short screenplay format and set it within the Kenyan or Ugandan community in Abu Dhabi. It would be one of the four films in the Mussafah Quartet.