Diane Ferlatte’s charismatic personality sets the stage on fire. Her storytelling is so powerful that the stories she tells become a part of you. For Daine the best storyteller, she has known, is her father. “Everyone in my family knew stories, but it was my father who told them the best.”
And then she tells a story about her father. “One day, there were heavy rains. The streets were flooded. But my daddy came home early, in the rains, to be with me,” she says, breaking into song in her melodious voice. “I asked him you came early for me? And he said yes….and I sang: I love my daddy. I love my daddy. I love my daddy. A little bit more.”
Diane, an award winning storyteller, was in town to enthral audiences at the international storytelling festival, Under the Aaladamaraa, organised by Bangalore Storytelling Society, in association with Kathai Kalatta.
Among the many mesmerising tales she narrated was one of a young boy who makes friends with people in an old age home. ‘What’s a memory?’ he asks when he finds out that his favourite friend Miss Nancy is losing her memory. The answers are varying: “A memory is something you remember”. “A memory is something warm.” “A memory is something long ago”. “A memory is something that makes you cry.” “A memory is something that makes you laugh.”
There is pin-drop silence when Diane continues to tell this heart-warming story Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Australian writer, Mem Fox. “A memory is as precious as gold.” By the end of the story, some of us tear up.
Diane grew up in a family steeped in the oral tradition, spending much of her childhood in Louisiana. She later moved to California as a teenager.
Her love for stories endured whenever she went back to visit her relatives in Louisiana. “Most people had no TV, no cell phones, no computers. People had to talk more. Stories were all around me! I got them by osmosis, at home and in church, where I learnt the rhythm of songs.”
Diane says she likes to tell African-American stories. “Because most people don’t get hear to them.”
When asked which her favourite story is, she quickly replies: “I have no favourites! I like all of them! I choose a story if it makes me laugh, makes me feel something, or if it moves me.”
Recalling how she told stories to her four-year-old son, Diane says:
“I wondered how do I get a TV brain to listen! I kept books aside and took him to a library every week. The librarian would read some and tell some.
By the time he was in school, he would not just read individual words, but the whole story.”
She says storytelling helps the imagination.
“They help you to sympathise, to predict and to connect things to what you have learned. It’s about pulling out a child’s curiosity.”
Diane has enthralled audiences across the world. “People tell stories differently and people listen differently.” And what is the perfect storytelling style?
“The best way is your way. Tell stories from the heart and not from the head. The more you tell, the more you will discover your style. When you tell a story, you can tell how the listeners react and that’s how you get better and better.”
Among her other experiences of storytelling, Diane recalls how: “I told an all-white audience about my white mother-in-law who didn’t want to come for my wedding. But when she finally got to know me, things began to change.”
