Why Do We Tell Stories?

After my daughter was born in September of 2021, my mother-in-law, or my aunt as I call her, stayed with us for two weeks. During that time, we often sat in the living room, while my daughter smiled at life around her or cried for milk or love. The first time we sat together was the day after we came back from the hospital. The first time we sat together was the day after we came back from the hospital. My wife and I sat on the couch, and my aunt gave our daughter a tour of the apartment. After she was done, she sat across from us, and asked my daughter in a playful voice, “do you want to hear a hizawyah?” My daughter wasn’t even looking at my aunt when she began to tell her a story about a farmer who exchanged a grain of corn with a rooster,

The next day I asked my aunt what other hazawi she knew. She told me about a woman who married a man that attempted to kill her, to avenge his brother’s death which the wife’s family was responsible for. She told me about her wedding day: the dresses they wore, the rituals we no longer practiced, and the forgotten songs old women used to chant. She recited poem after poem, full of moral lessons, jokes, and color. She told me about the kids she lost to illnesses we treat at home today. I sat and listened for two weeks, interrupted only by my daughter’s irresistible cuteness or cries.

Hazawi is the Arabic word for stories. Hizawyah is the singular form, story. “Can you tell me a hizawyah?” We used to ask uncles who visited us in the city from the village while growing up in Yemen. They were our equivalent of bedtime stories, only hazawi were told to groups of kids during family gatherings, or to pass the time when the electricity was out. The stories I remember are full of weird characters, animals, and jinn. Their purpose wasn’t only to entertain but to also convey a lesson. Like children's books, they rhymed, were full of songs, and good and evil. Stories, therefore, teach us how to live, or how to learn from the way others lived.

Are Hazawi fiction or nonfiction? They’re both. I encounter the question of the validity of fiction every time a friend sees me reading a novel or finds out that I write stories. During these conversations, I find myself trying to convince people that fiction provides as much value as any nonfiction book, if not more. I mean, read Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart, read George Orwell's 1948, read Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, read Shel Silverstein’s children’s book The Giving Tree. You will find that what matters the most about stories is the emotions they evoke and how much you, the reader, relate to the characters. Fiction or nonfiction, if it's a good story, people will read, listen, and retell it.

On this website, I will publish short-short stories, book reviews, things I’m learning, and the writing challenges I face. My hope is for this to become a hub for aspiring writers to visit and benefit from. My experience is different. As a Muslim who migrated to the US from Yemen at the age of 14, my learning journey took me to places that someone who grew up eating English-letters cereal for breakfast might not have considered. I’m warning you, dear reader, I misspell a ton, and mispronounce more— sometimes on purpose. If you are interested in receiving an email with the articles I publish and short snippets about the books I’m reading, make sure to sign up for my newsletter, Hazawi Weekly.