… And they lived happily ever after.
Fairytale stories – a literary genre that has always been relegated to the Western world of princes and fair maidens, the forbidden apple, the formidable pea, Hans Christian Anderson, Mother Goose, and Alice falling down a rabbit hole. These imageries have shaped a many childhood imagination, opening up mindscapes to other-ly worlds beyond their own.
These stories encapsulate the whimsical, the bizarre, and the magical, allowing for the existence of realities that intrude, merge, and often mimic the real everyday.
Using the narrative form of the fairytale, we venture from two vastly different worlds – from the resplendent diverse site of Asia, to the sacred navel of all human beginnings, Africa – each a storyteller shaped and wildly colored by the unique imageries, symbols, and stories of her own culture.
This fusion yields forth the possibility of creating a canon of stories that can contribute towards the telling of fairytales beyond that of the Western world.
We aim to seek out the different stories that have been told as oral narratives in the form of myths, old wives’ tales, legends, and folklores in our respective cultures, and retell them as fairytales – etched in a form that is written, illustrated, documented, and can thus hopefully be introduced onto imaginations as other realities to consider. Transcending age groups and cultural divisions, we hope that through the retelling of these stories, we will achieve not only the introduction of new imageries, symbols, and lessons to be learnt, but also illuminate the true value of stories, and that is: every community possesses the magical ability to tell stories, and these stories when shared possess the power to affect the individual not merely as a cultural individual – an Asian or an African – but as a universal audience – a human being.
/via Nurul H. and Greer Valley
