By: Staff Writer
April 12, 2022
This Jamaican storyteller is a natural born performer and runs workshops on storytelling for people that want to hone their craft.
Dr Amina Blackwood-Meeks, professor at the Edna Manley College in Jamaica and professional storyteller, told Caribbean Magazine Plus in preparation for her presentations at the Caribbean Literary Conference (CARICON) this coming June 3-5 that she came out of the womb storytelling. “When the doctors slapped other babies, they said Wahh! But when they slapped me, I said Wahnce upon a time.”
She also said: “I’m a storyteller. I write stories, contemporary stories. I tell traditional Ananse stories, I teach storytelling, and I’ve performed as a founder at every single Storytelling Festival in the Caribbean since 1998. “
She has also travelled outside of the region studying storytelling, “I don’t always talk about my academic background, but my PhD thesis is in storytelling. Its origin and values and the way in which our stories compare to the stories from the continent. So that’s what I was born to do.”
Dr Blackwood-Meeks also has a storytelling festival she has been running every year since 1998 called the “Ananse Soundsplah” that has attracted the attention of storytellers from around the world from Australia and Japan to the U.S and Canada.
She also said: “The Ananse Soundsplash is an eight leg festival with each leg according to one of Ananse’s legs. It runs in November every year and the only the primary criteria of the festival is that it must cross November 20. Why must it cross November 20? Because November 20 is the first time that Jamaica got its universal adult suffrage and that was on November 20, 1940. November 20, is also a Universal Children’s Day. And in 2014, I successfully got the Governor General to proclaim on November 28 as national storytelling day, so we use that as a way to affirm our children’s right, to heritage and culture.”
The first leg of the festival is “always” dedicated to the children and on the second day is international men’s day, where the entire theme is geared around men in storytelling and their experiences.
Dr Blackwood-Meeks added: “We’ve partnered with the University of the West Indies, just to mount an exhibition of works created by men. And we told stories and we did many things.
“Our main partner is the Jamaica Library Service. So on the weekend of that eight days, we have something called Ananse goes to the library. There are 131 libraries in Jamaica run by the Jamaica library service. That includes the 14 Parish libraries, the school libraries, and something they call the mobile libraries, where they drive libraries up into deep rural districts. So on that day when Ananse goes to the library, there are two hours of simultaneous storytelling in all of the libraries.”