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Account Ana Griott that the children of small african villages were raised by their grandmothers have a greater life expectancy than those that grow alongside their mothers. Their grandmothers did not get to eat because they don't have milk, but feed them with the trust and hope that give the stories whispered with affection. Ana said, as you will engaging, little by little, with that velvety voice in the sweet gloom of a storyteller tanned in a thousand battles in Café La Palma, Madrid. When you neglect it because you have been caught drawing a scene of fantasy that acicala with your imagination and a simple message: “storytelling is cool”. Ana Griott is a sorceress of words, a machine gun of fables and morals. Don't know when you account, when you fed with that milk's magical grandmother, or when, simply, you are informed. That is why it is fascinating.

Ana Griott is the character, the voice of those without voice, the rescuing of the oral traditions of collective forgotten to 5,000 miles in Africa, in the Baltic or galician land. The weaver family tree of monsters, witches, morals and characters of folk tales from here and there. But Ana Griott is also the alter ego of Ana Cristina Herreros (Lion, 1965), the editor, the entrepreneur, the philologist, the seeker of opportunities, stories, and the creator of the Books of Bad company, a small publishing company founded in 2014 that basically publishes what he wants “without regard to markets, without printing in China”, reminds us. Ana has no story and, at the same time, has it all.

there are No books, but have grandparents

Griott is not only the surname of the mother, is the name –in the plural– who are the narrators in the center of Africa, which collected the stories silenced from his people, the notaries oral that give faith of fables and legends, who seasoned the tradition with her labia and experience. Are the shamans of the words. To be a griot is not worth anyone; you have to master the voice and the verb, you have identified the silences of your community, the voices of the children of no one. To be of the Griott is not enough to be Ana, you have to be Cristina Herreros: the study of philology, writing a compendium of monsters, and witches, to recite in the Cervantes Institute or the rescue of the best popular stories dedicated to the Mother's Death.

expand photo Our protagonist, in her character of Ana Griott, telling stories to the children. Ana Cristina Herreros

It is, for example, the voice of the tales lost of Usai, a commune of the lower Casamance in Senegal. There he traveled when he learned that a storm had shattered his library. “I had books in Spanish and they are schooling in French, so I sold the books in Spanish, and bought some books in French”, he explains during the interview. But there realized that was not enough. She was wearing a paper-the literature of the conquerors, of the powerful, of those who esquilmaban their land, not that which is born of your culture, or that is constructed to measure the children. It was there without being heard.

Corrected and began to listen. With a tape recorder was collecting the stories of the grandparents in the corridors night in front of the hearth fire. Collected more than 200 stories, which will then translated the librarian: “The dragon that ate the sun tells the grandmother Oma Yeyu, the girl in The pumpkin so the grandfather Jean Bernard... we Put the list in the library and went to the grandparents and the kids would come. Then the young were provided a grandfather to tell them a story. Because we didn't have books, but we had grandparents and one pays what he has.”

In those older for so long silenced there was also the shadow of his grandmother and the source of all this nice project. A woman that learned to shut up by the circumstances of her gender and her generation, that she would bite your tongue with those stories that the eyes of his granddaughter asked him for it. That girl without your “grandmother's onion,” learned that the culture may not be the expression only of the strongest of the conquerors, of the copyists, or amanuenses... culture is an instrument of democratizing that is growing in diversity, in the mix and those little pinches of salt that they put the most fragile, the invisible, the silenced, many times with better talent. The culture is also that of the small bookseller, the street artist, the of the pirate radio or that of the meme tweeter. Culture is your grandmother manipulating her to your whim, a recipe or an old story.

enlarge photo One of the volumes published in Books of Bad company. We are 5

Thus were born the tales of the Black Series: “is Not a crime novel, are stories of black people”, explains Ana editor. And that, in addition, become clear with time. First were the diolas in the south of Senegal, then the sahrawis of Tindouf up to the albino in Mozambique. Three stories whose benefits author are reinvested in projects that demand the communities themselves: the literacy of women silenced, more books for the library of the sahrawi refugees or take up to 30 sewing machines to Matola, Mozambique.

stories make us equal

also note the philologist that the first stories were born in the Neolithic age, in the area of the Caucasus, when the man begins to cultivate the land and changes the nomadism by the caves. ”Someone sat down one day and took the word. Surely it was a woman, and told a story,” he says now Ana Griott. It was there where they forged the roots of the first dragons, the first man out of the sack or the first princesses. The tales also traveled with the later migrations and mutated according to the climate and folklore. Mariama and the python snake is a story rescued from Senegal by Ana that is identical to another of the culture of an eskimo; it changes only the ferocity of the polar bear by the cunning of the serpent python. The rat brave became conceited with the puritanism european of the beginning of the century and the Olentzero, the basque, the Saturnalia romans took on the mantle of Santa Claus with just a cross the pond.

at The end the ghosts of the eskimo are also of a game or a pygmy, you just change their costumes. The tales are a mirror in which recognize us all the same with the nuances of ephemeral which provides the context. That is why the essence of our species does not understand nationalism, race or borders. These stories are like genes that are transmitted from generation to generation, preserving the nature that defines us and with small mutations that add diversity and color but without subtracting talent. Gethe nes will only go away if you do not find a vital support for self-perpetuating, as the role of forest in sustainable books of Ana Cristina Herreros, the voice that rescues the stories lost.

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Content adapted from the video of Ana Cristina

00:00

The oral traditions of many communities in the world are being lost. Ana created the editorial Books of Bad company, with whom he has already picked up the voice of communities in Senegal, Mozambique, Colombia, and the Sahara. He has published more than 15 books whose funds are reinvested in the same communities.

MORE INFORMATION

Of investment banking to regain childhoods lost The miracle of a museum is unfinished, and a people who returned to be reunited

00:27

(Ana Cristina) there Was once a girl that did not tell stories and he had to learn to read, to listen to the stories that he told. He read so much that he ended up at the university and there he met with a lot of books that resounded with the echoes of those voices that she heard no girl, and soon she found herself with the oral tradition and with the voice of the people, and in those voices he recognized the voices of his mother, his grandmother, of all those people silenced that inhabited his childhood. And from there he decided that he wanted to devote himself to giving a voice to the people who have no voice.

01:08

(Ana Cristina) That need led her to Africa, and there listen to people, write the stories of the people and then tells these stories to make them visible and to show that they also have literature, also have culture, they are also people, people who deserve to have a voice.

01:30

(Ana Cristina) The Research Center for Peace asked me to do a job of research of sources of folk to use the stories as an argument in international mediation. No one cares what you have; then when you sit down to listen to them, tell them, and have a lot of things.

01:47

(Ana Cristina) In African culture, in African literature, in Africa the people sing, dance, tap, makes sculptures, live, work in solidarity with each other and tell the same stories that tells a person of Albacete or Murcia or Lion.

02:02

(Girl) And well... she ended the story, and now the mouse and the cat always... that's why they were such enemies.

02:13

(Ana Cristina) in Addition to listening to their voices with the sale of the books that we do, with their stories, we donate a percentage of the author is a cultural project with them, which can be a library, but also a vocational centre. Culture is the engine of change that is going to be able to transform this world and make this world more human, so that we do not forget who we are, that we forget where we are going and to let us not forget where we come from.

02:44

(Ana Cristina), Because a people that does not remember is a people who repeats his story

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Date Of Update: 20 January 2020, 19:00