Ted Chamberlin, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at U of T, has travelled far and wide working on issues of land and language. In his new book If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, he shares tales from his days with the San Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Aboriginals of Australia, the Rastafaris of Jamaica, and the cowboys and Indians of his childhood Wild West. In all these places he is concerned with language, with riddles, charms and elegies, nursery rhymes and creation tales, with how through stories we divide the world into Us and Them, then fight across the divide.
This is a wide-ranging book full of surprising contradictions and long-held wisdoms tossed aside as so much “nonsense”: reading animal tracks is much the same as reading books-there are no such things as ‘oral’ and ‘written’ cultures, argues Chamberlin; mathematics and science are among the great imaginative traditions of our times; European “settler” culture is really a culture of wanderers, those we term “nomads” are in fact settled.
Chamberlin delights in his children’s love of well-worn rhymes, and extols the fine art of the bedtime story, which unfolds in the land of “Once upon a time”: a place that is but is not, where things happen that don’t, that delicious border land between imagination and reality where all good stories take place. Children know this, says Chamberlin, but adults often forget, turning imaginary land into earthly terrain, then fighting over contesting claims.
The world is built from stories, which are made of language, a meaningless sound built on a meaningless symbol from which we make meaning. The world is therefore made of sand but is as hard as rock, as long as we believe. The choice between reality and imagination is a false choice between “being marooned on an island and thrown into the sea.”
This is the same false dichotomy as the one between Us and Them. Stories are lies that tell the truth; they are full of paradox and contradiction; from this they harvest their power. The trick is to recognize paradox so that we can hold “lies” and “truth” up side by side, and see that they are not mutually exclusive. Then we can “believe it and not”-the way children do, the way we do with Hollywood films and good novels, but often not with our own deepest tales.
If This Is Your Land, lit from within by a love of language, intended to be read by everyman, is at its root deeply political: how are we to live together on this shrinking earth, where the ghost stories of so many unburied dead still roam free?
