What are your favorite children’s stories? Are they still relevant to you?
Baba interviewed by Willi Paul at PlanetShifter Magazine
Among my favorite children’s stories, what stands out to me, is Salman Rushdie’s novel, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” which, I admit, is a postmodern allegory disguised as a children’s book.
Because the Water Genie, Iff, has cancelled his famous Storyteller father’s subscription to the supply of imagination, the Journey of this Hero, Haroun, is to the hidden Story Moon where the Sea of the Streams of Stories is being polluted by the Prince of Silence. Haroun leads the way in a brave attempt to save the Ocean, and then returns to his city, bringing back the gift of storytelling to his father, and thus brings back happiness to his city, because now the citizens can remember its name.
It takes a theme we all relate to, pollution and polluters, that has enormous relevance today in the wake of the BP oil spill disaster, and yet moves past the facts and information, which are the manipulated resources for political narrative, and into allegory and analogy by means of masterful use of Speech to create compelling entertainment. We can come to our own conclusion that there is something greater than the event of the BP disaster itself, which is the cause, itself. There is an even greater pollution taking place which is the cause of the individual events of pollution that we witness.
The book was published in 1990, while Rushdie was in hiding from the Fatwah to kill him because of his book, “Satanic Verses.” Yet, we can see that good storytelling, such as this, easily applies to events occurring many years later.
