How to Tell a Story

I can't get Scott Carrier's voice out of my mind. Yes, the physical voice that resonates from the radio; and this morning the insistent voice that calls from the lines and paragraphs of "Prisoner of Zion."


How does he do it? How does Scott do his verbal magic?


There are answers in "Najibullah in America, Orem, Utah 2011."

Najibullah Niazi, candidate for UVU President

The story begins with this sentence: "I first met Najibullah Niazi in Afghanistan in the late fall of 2001, at the beginning of the longest war in American history." 


Najib's name in its full form is the antithesis of the spare, even gaunt "I." It is unfamiliar, almost opaque to a speaker of English. Welcome to a foreign world; and by the way, this war is the longest American war in history.


Lesson #1: wed the unfamiliar with a matter-of-fact surprise (it was a surprise to me) and the story is launched.


"For the next three weeks, until I left the country, he was my guide and translator, the best I ever had. He could go anywhere and talk to anybody with charm and cunning. He could shape shift, and he could lie -- never to hurt anybody but only to get by and survive."


Lesson #2: a good storyteller lies, never to hurt anybody but for the good of the story, and does so with charm and cunning.


The story shifts from Afghanistan to Utah Valley University, to Najib's graduation. Both Najib and Scott are waring caps and gowns, for Scott is now at professor of communications at the university. This will be a double story, of Najib's accommodation to the U.S. system of education and of Scott's accommodation to the life of a teacher.


Lesson #3: good texts, like textiles, are woven of several threads. Not any threads, but of well-suited threads.


Scott quotes the tearful Mormon graduation speaker and concludes "This is where we ended up. UVU and the Mormons took us both in from the cold, but now Najib is getting out and I may be here to stay, at least for the time being."


[My own angry post about this graduation speaker and his assault on Najib and all non-Mormon participants in the graduation is here: http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/04/white-and-delightsome.html]


The story shifts back from the graduation to what Scott did to bring Najib to Utah when he was threatened for having been a translator for an American writer. The key to acceptance, Scott tells Najib, will be your story. It will show your fluency in English and your ability to do college work. 


"Three weeks later I got the first draft by email. It was barely readable -- full of misspellings, grammatical and syntactical errors, problems with punctuation and capitalization, and so on. Still, once you figured out what he was saying, it was an amazing story."


Lesson #4: good stories come from experience.


Najib then sent his story to me, at UVU, at Scott's suggestion, without changing a thing. Scott then writes that I "wrote back in less than an hour, saying 'We want him. Tell him he's accepted.'"


I did want him, but the "we" involved a counselor responsible for international students who acted quickly and knowledgeably on my recommendation and after Najib sent a fat package of materials related to his sketchy but impressive formal education, including lots of certificates from training he had done at the U.N. office where he had worked.


This kind of streamlining, stripping down, and conflating continues in the next paragraph in which Scott lays out the story of my move from BYU to UVSC and the development of the vibrant state university in a couple of sentences that get some of the facts wrong but that convey the creative energy of the place (I had nothing to do with the innovative "ethics and values" course, for instance).


Lesson #5: while a good story may be a lie, it should also be a mostly truthful lie and the lie should be in the service of the story.


The story continues, contrasting Najib's story at UVU with Scott's own. It is full of observations like this one: "Imagine a young Johnny Depp playing an exuberant Afghan refugee and you pretty much have Najibullah in America."


There's much more to the story, like the independent-study class Scott sets up for Najib so he can read and write about classic American writers in the service of learning how to write himself (Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men, and Catcher in the Rye) but I'll end with the part where Scott is helping Najib conceptualize an essay about DADA for a class Alex Caldiero is teaching:


'Take out a pen and some paper and tell me, Who were the Dadaists?' I said.


Najib put his notebook in his lap and sucked his pen and said, 'The Dadaists were artists in Europe who thought art had too many rules and was boring, so they moved to Zurich in Switzerland where there were no rules about art.'


'Excellent,' I said. 'Write that down, just what you said.'


It took him about five minutes and when he read it back he'd completely changed the wording and it made no sense at all. . . .


'Look down at the river,' I said. 'Do you see any places where you could jump from rock to rock and make it across to the other side?'


'No,' he said, 'there is too much water.'


'Well, imagine there is a place like that. I want you to think about writing as like jumping from rock to rock. Can you swim?'


'Not very well.'


'Good. If you fall, you'll drown. In order to jump to a rock you must answer my question honestly in your own voice, not the voice of someone else. If you try to answer in someone else's voice, you'll fall into the river and drown. Do you understand?'


'Yes.'


'You've jumped to the first rock by telling me who the Dadaists were, now jump again and tell me, 'What did the Dadaists do?'




. . .


'The one called Duchamp took a toilet and turned it upside down to make people see it for its shape, not what it does.'


'And what do you think about that?'


'But what I think doesn't matter,' he said.


'So now you're in the middle of the stream and you're just going to stay there?' I asked. 'Will I have to call your father and tell him you were last seen in the middle of a river contemplating Dada? In order to keep going you have to say what you think, now, jump!'


Lesson # 6: If you want to be a good writer, find a mentor like Scott Carrier.

White and Delightsome

Graduation yesterday at Utah Valley University. Although I skipped my own graduation ceremonies, figuring that what I had learned was enough for me, I have enjoyed attending the graduations of my own students, pleased to get to shake their hands and congratulate them and celebrate their hard work and accomplishment.

This graduation was one I'd been anticipating for over four years. When Najib Niazi arrived at what was then UVSC from Afghanistan, sponsored by Scott Carrier, for whom he had translated during the war, he brought me a chapan that looks a lot like the three chapans worn by the men at the left (photo from a Swedish blog). I told Najib that I would wear it when he graduated. Yesterday I wore the chapan as I lined up with my faculty colleagues in their colorful academic robes, proud of Najib and happy to see him wave and smile as he passed by the faculty with his fellow students.

The morning was spoiled by the graduation speech given by teary-eyed Dr. Robert C. Gay, CEO of Huntsman Gay Global Capital (and former colleague of Mitt Romney in Bain Capital).

We (and by we I mean the Atheists and Methodists and Muslims and Mormons and Buddhists and Catholics and so many others at our state University) were assaulted by a simpering millionaire who intimated that Africans do not treat children charitably and that they know nothing about service unless they are taught by the millionaire Mormon's Eagle Scout son. He said that the deviations of a secular world will lead us astray, that pitiful liberals at Harvard censored the printed version of Mother Teresa's commencement address about abortion as murder, that Jesus is the way.

I squirmed and cursed and wrote pointed obscenities in my notebook as I thought about Najib and his Muslim friends and family-to-be who were sitting in the audience.

While Mr. Gay pretended to be Mother Teresa, they sat there dumbfounded.

As did I.

Najib, please accept my heartfelt apology. Najib, this celebrated man, this captain of capitalism, this philanthropic Mormon, this man of power and wealth -- this man is simply uneducated.

Take your honors B.S. in Business, take your MBA, if that's what you choose, take the fine education that you already have, and make more of it than this man has. Huck Finn, whom you met and wrote about in the class with me and Alex and Scott, is a much finer model for a good life.

While you do that, charitable man that you are, I'll look into the world through the less charitable face of the man to the right of the photo and think angrily about the man who brought his shameful disrespect into our celebration.

SUCCUSSFUL UNIVERSITIE SPELING

A university education ought to do many things, one of which is to foster a heightened awareness for language.

There are two universities in Utah Valley, and both of them seem to have some problem with words.

Take, for instance, the sign on the south entrance of the newly remodelled Losee Center for Student Succuss (photo taken on Monday, the 5th of April).

Hope the remodeling went better than the re-branding.

And if one might snicker and think that this is just what happens at a new university still thinking its way to success, consider the following.

At BYU, just a few miles to the east of the unsuccussessful sign, the very department whose task is to pay attention to the English language, the English Department, lists multiple faculty members on their home page with this proof that the Latin original of the English has passed into forgetfulness:

"Link to Vitae"

If you mix up nominative singular with genitive or plural you're apt to be made fun of, especially if you're professing English or Student Success.