Liberian Storytelling and Oral Tradition w/ Mayonn Paasewe-Valchev
Spirits
Multitude
4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2022
⏱️ 44 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
We’re joined by author Mayonn Paasewe-Valchev, an incredible storyteller and educator. We talk about how myths are purposeful, cautionary storytelling, and the differences between oral storytelling and literary traditions.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of parental death, grief, animal attacks, drowning, and kidnapping.
Guest
Mayonn Paasewe-Valchev was born in Liberia, where she was exposed to a culture of oral storytelling at a young age. She lived in the Netherlands for several years, where she learned to stuff her klompen (wooden shoes) with carrots and developed a love for reading stories—especially tales written by Roald Dahl and Astrid Lindgren. She lives in Georgia with her family. Pre-order her book, The Leopard Behind the Moon, today!
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About Us
Spirits was created by Julia Schifini, Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Schneider. We are founding members of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio. Our music is "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends, and folklore. |
| 0:10.8 | Every week we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. |
| 0:14.2 | I'm Amanda. |
| 0:14.9 | And I'm Julia. |
| 0:15.9 | And this week we are joined by the absolutely fantastic Mayan Pisauehw-V. |
| 0:20.3 | Mayan, welcome. |
| 0:21.4 | Hi, Amanda. Hi, Julia. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:24.5 | It's our pleasure. And I am so excited to talk to you today because I have been reading your book, |
| 0:30.9 | The Leopard Behind the Moon. I have been listening to other interviews that you did. I'm just |
| 0:34.9 | really excited to chat and learn more about you and about |
| 0:38.2 | oral storytelling and all your writing experience. Thank you. I'm excited too. So why don't we |
| 0:44.5 | start really quickly with kind of like a quick pitch or a quick summary of the book to kind |
| 0:48.9 | of entice our listeners to go pick it up because that's the goal is to get them to read your |
| 0:52.9 | wonderful work. Oh, good. Okay, so |
| 0:54.8 | the book is about a 10-year-old boy named Isomo, who is considered the most useless boy in his |
| 1:03.0 | village. And Isomo is considered useless because he doesn't attend school as frequently as the other |
| 1:10.2 | children. He doesn't contribute to village life. He doesn't help his mother with chores. And Isoma doesn't do all of these things because he's grieving the loss of his father who was killed by a leopard. So he spends most of his time sitting in the forest, daydreaming, grieving. And one day while he is doing that, he sees the leopard, |
| 1:31.3 | believed to have killed his father. And so he calls the hunters and asks them to come help and catch |
| 1:37.3 | this leopard. And they make fun of him. They tell him, hey, you're useless, find something better to do. |
| 1:42.6 | And so isomo, Elista, is able to get |
| 1:46.6 | his friends, who are, by the way, are also outcast in the village, Mujah and Chimama. And he gets |
| 1:53.8 | them to come with him to capture this leopard. But in order to do so, they break three important |
... |
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