Hi friends,
Every night when we were children, my mom read to us. Upstairs in our little pink house, my brother and I had bedrooms next to each other, and she would sit in the doorway between our rooms and read classics like The Little Prince and One Thousand and One Nights—mythic stories that helped us understand the different cultures we came from.
As a humorous side note: We refused to let our dad read to us. He has this wonderful, languorous, incantatory way of speaking, often trailing off at the end of a sentence and getting lost in his own contemplation. We thought he was too slow, and we told him he was out.
So my mother read these stories to us, always in French, and we’d fall asleep thinking about Scheherazade, or the prince and the baobab trees, and in the morning we would wake up wondering about what happened next. On our walk to school, we’d pester my mother with questions, begging her to tell us more. She’d indulge us, recounting the stories. Then when that thread spun out, she made things up. We loved it, and we’d chime in with our own twists and turns. It was my favorite way to start and end the day, and it shaped me profoundly—in that it made me a storyteller.
A few days ago, I finished our September Book Club pick, How Beautiful We Were, by Imbolo Mbue. It’s a stunning book, so beautifully written, the story so timely and poignant. I can’t stop thinking about how Mbue plays with myth, how she uses creation stories and fables to add power and resonance. These stories tap into something deep, and I keep thinking about how such archetypal narratives animate us, telling us both where we came from and giving us a roadmap on where to go.
With that in mind, today we’re sharing one of those stories from How Beautiful We Were, and a prompt inspired by it.
Sending love,
Suleika
P.S. I’ll be in conversation with Imbolo Mbue today at noon ET! I’m going to be asking her about curiosity and imagination and finding the answers in the questions. It’s not too late to come—to join us become a paid subscriber. It’s what sustains this little operation and allows us to keep sending out these weekly prompts.
Prompt 161. Origin Stories
From How Beautiful We Were
Papa would look in the distance and ask me if I wanted to tell him a story. I would say yes and tell him the only story I knew, the one every child in Kosawa knows, about how three brothers once went to check on their traps in the forest and found a leopard caught in one of them.
Please, free me, the leopard cried to the brothers; I need to return home to my children, I’ve been in this trap for days and they have no one to protect them.
The brothers debated at length what to do—leopards were rare, and taking one back to their village would have brought them great fortune, but the leopard’s pain was evident in her tears. Ultimately, the brothers decided to let her go home to her children. In gratitude, the leopard made a cut on her paw and asked the brothers to use their spears and make cuts on their fingers too. On this day, the leopard said as she forged a blood pact with each brother, I give you my blood: it will flow in your veins and the veins of your descendants until the sun ceases to rise. All who seek to destroy you will fail, for my power in you will cause you to prevail. Go forth now, and live as indomitable men.
When the brothers returned to their village, they packed their belongings and left to create a new village, one in which every child would grow up to be as fearsome and dignified as a leopard. They founded Kosawa and anointed the eldest of the brothers to be their woja, for the blood of the leopard was most apparent in the strength that allowed him to tread upon snakes and scorpions. Through these brothers, we came to the world.
After finishing the story, I’d sit in silence, waiting for Papa’s praise, which always came in the form of a semi-smile.
Sometimes he asked me to sing the song our ancestors sang as they laid the foundation for Kosawa, the song that would later become our village anthem. My singing voice is as pretty as a rooster’s crow, and I took no pride in using it, but I knew Papa’s heart needed a balm, so I would sing for him: Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced.
Your prompt for the week:
Write your origin story—maybe the story of your nation, or your city, or your family, or yourself. Write it as myth: distilled and symbolic. Capture the essence of where you’ve come from, and let it tell you where to go.
If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments below, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.
We’re excited to host the great Imbolo Mbue for our next Studio Visit. Please note that the conversation will take place an hour earlier than normal, from 12-1pm ET.
Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her new novel, How Beautiful We Were—about what happened when a fictional African village decided to fight against an American oil company that had been polluting its land for many years—is our September Book Club pick.
Paid subscribers also get access to our video archive of past Studio Visits with amazing humans like Elizabeth Gilbert, Jon Batiste, & Nadia Bolz-Weber. We hope you’ll join us!