Compass Rose

Hello, High Plains! I’m Marjory Hall from Goodwell, Oklahoma with a BookByte for the Radio Reader’s Series. Years ago, I was fortunate enough to attend an event in which Maya Angelou spoke to a full-house audience at my university. She explained her belief that people write as a means of recording their thoughts and experiences and that we read other people’s writing in search of a survival map for times of difficulty. Her words came back to me as I read Daniel Nayeri’s book Everything Sad Is Untrue. A map can only provide direction when it is read from the intended perspective. Maybe one reason people have such difficulty embracing other’s stories is that we have not oriented our compass to a reliable true North.

The great epic adventure stories begin in a serious tone that lets the reader know that they are about to experience something important, more than merely a story. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey portentously begin with “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles” and “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.” 8-year-old Daniel also knows the significance of narrative. He informs the reader that, in his book, they “have [his] whole life in [their] hands.” Having spent his earliest years in a culture that values the telling and hearing of stories, Daniel cannot understand why his classmates fail to recognize the prince in the boy they categorize only as a refugee. He comes to realize how diametrically opposite is the orientation of his Western listeners who are viewing his map upside down.

Not only are the members of Mrs. Miller’s class functioning at a predictable level of youthful self-centeredness, they are not culturally equipped to appreciate Daniel’s elaborate Persian-style tales. Although there was a time when Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo’s 800 and 900-page novels satisfied western tastes, contemporary western bestsellers reflect a preference for concision in their very brief chapters and pared-down plot development. Because his stories are Daniel’s only currency with which to enter his new world, he tries hard to translate that currency to US dollars. He is willing even to relinquish his real name in the cause of economy, but its true importance to Daniel is clear as he cannot resist telling the story of the king for whom he is named. When a classmate impatiently urges Daniel to get to the point of a story, he finds that approach “tightfisted,” miserly.

In Daniel’s experience, sharing one’s story is an act of generosity much like the Persian traditions of hospitality in which “[t]here are very important rules about treating guests with honor.” In Oklahoma, the response to his stories frequently demonstrates that his audience is not really paying any attention. Daniel perceives those listeners as “immune to the sadness of others.” Receiving another person’s story with impatience or apathy is the same, in Daniel’s eyes, as the violation of hospitality of a person’s thoughtlessly tracking dirt from outside into another person’s home. Just as Daniel fully recognizes the mean spirit that is behind so many of the acts of charity his family is obliged to accept, he quickly realizes that sharing his story opens himself to a callously indifferent response. The youthful narrator decides that the safer strategy is to “keep [his] stories to [himself], so that they can’t be used against [him],” but what is the adult Daniel Nayeri suggesting here?

What would it hurt to reorient our collective cultural compass in the direction of kindness and respect instead of grudging inhospitality? A person entering a new culture will have more adjustments to make than in counting money or finding their way in a new town. People coming from a background that values compassion and mutual respect might find a less explicitly sympathetic social norm unfriendly, intimidating, even when the host has no intention of appearing so. How would society look if gracious empathy became the true north on which we orient our cultural compass? What if our underlying approach to other people was that we must never make people feel “like the lowest thing in the world” as Daniel describes, like a hungry child with no lunch money?

I’m Marjory Hall for the Radio Readers Series.