Marrakech Storytelling Festival: A Global Meeting of Ideas, Minds, Stories

Rabat – The Marrakech International Storytelling festival has kicked off with the goal of perpetuating and preserving the value of the age-old tradition of storytelling.

The festival which is taking place from February 12 to 19 in Marrakech seeks to promote understanding and create a bridge between people from different cultures as well as self-healing through stories.

The event which is a partnership between the storytelling Cafe and the Union of Storytellers in Marrakech is open to the public: “There is always space for people to tell stories themselves whether they are trained storytellers or not,” the festival’s co-founder Lucie Andersen-Wood told Morocco World News (MWN).

This year, with more than 80 tellers from around the world, the festival is meeting its objective as it unites various nationalities, ethnic groups, and cultures.

Master Storyteller John Row

“The festival has reignited our dialogue, our sense of community, and our openness; the stories are told in English, French, Arabic, and Darija,” Baba-C, a griot and master storyteller, explained.

Echoing Baba-C’s statement, English Storyteller Sef Townsend noted the importance of the festival as it “brings people with different cultures and religions from all over the world.”

Townsend added: “It’s very important at this time that people listen to each other, that they come together and hear each other’s stories.”

English Storyteller Sef Townsend

How it all started

On the sidelines of the festival’s first day, Lucie Andersen-Wood, who is the co-founder of both the World Storytelling Cafe and the Marrakech International Storytelling Festival, explained the motivations behind the cafe’s launch as well as how the encounter with eminent storyteller John Row gave rise to the festival.

Lucie and her husband Mike Wood have been visiting Marrakech for 16 years, and her dream has always been to open a storytelling venue.

Wood’s initial idea was to establish a storytelling museum, but that would require a sizable building and a lot of money. It was her husband’s suggestion to create a storytelling cafe where storytellers would tell tales, and customers would purchase food and beverages to help defray the cost of the storytelling.

Lucie, a psychotherapist, and hypnotherapist explained: “Storytelling is such an ancient art and craft, it’s so important for Marrakech and for Morocco.”

Noticing the talent and the enthusiasm of the storytellers in the cafe, Wood decided to bring them to the festival “to meet and exchange stories with Moroccan storytellers, ” she enthused.

As the person behind the fusion of the projects she described the gathering of the tellers as “a truly international exchange of ideas as well as a connection of minds and stories. ”

The festival’s director and co-founder Zouhair Khaznaoui

The founder emphasized that the transmission of traditional stories about our morals, including how we ought to treat the outside world, our neighbors, and our friends, is extremely important.

What Stories Are You Telling Yourself?

The psychotherapist made the case that stories are crucial for our survival by pointing out that we understand the world through them starting in our early years.

“Inside our head, we have stories about our past, stories about how our parents treated us badly or well, how our siblings treated us, how competent we were, and if we did well at school, we have these stories that continue to replay in our head,” she detailed.

Lucie Andersen-Wood, the co-founder of both the World Storytelling Cafe and the Marrakech International Storytelling

Through stories, you learn about yourself, your culture, and how to walk in other people’s shoes, “When you understand the motivations behind other people’s actions, you gain a deeper understanding and empathy for them,” Wood explained.

Wood’s career background and awareness of the power of storytelling leads her to understand that some of the stories we hold in our head are not serving our “highest purpose.” She stressed that as a result these stories can become “ruminations that can eat away our soul.”

In addition, she emphasized the importance of changing these stories, saying: “First, we need to recognize that they exist, because we never learned in school that there are stories that are good for you, but there are also stories that are very bad for you.”

Internal Family Systems

According to the journal Psychology Today, Internal Family Systems (IFS) is an approach to psychotherapy that identifies and addresses multiple sub-personalities or families within each person’s mentality.

Through IFS, which was developed by academic Richard Schwartz, Wood explained, we can learn about ourselves and see the stories that are going on in our heads in a much clearer way.

“We all have multiple stories, and in this system [ISF], we learn that we have parts that want to help us and others that want to criticize us,” the psychotherapist said.

On a concluding note Wood remarked: “The most important thing is to identify those parts and befriend them because when people find their internal family, they can heal.”