The two great arts of the 20th
century are I think, film and jazz. While jazz, unfortunately, seems to be
declining into a minority interest, film shows no sign of flagging. It still
has the capacity to stimulate, to touch us deep in our hearts, to excite and to
reflect our world back to us. I was moved to think about this by a couple of
films I saw recently, both of which managed to say more in a few minutes about
the nature of community and identity than Blair and his cohorts have done in 10
years.
‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is I know a romantic comedy and the
reviews on IMDB seem to treat it as no more than that, so probably one
shouldn’t read too much into it. Nevertheless in one important scene Josh Lucas
and Patrick Dempsey as the husband and fiancé (don’t ask!) of Reese Witherspoon talk about life in the small town in which Lucas and Witherspoon grew
up. The details of the story don’t matter here, and would be a nasty spoiler if
you haven’t seen the film. Essentially however it illustrates how an important
part of real communities is not necessarily shared beliefs, but shared stories.
Think about any family gathering and almost certainly it
will involve the sharing of stories, not just about the people there but also
about people long gone. These may not be told chronologically or even
completely, they may not even be true, but sharing them allows everyone inside
the group to pick up and draw meaning and strength from them – reinforcing the
sense of identification. I suppose wakes and weddings are the prime examples.
Translating this to the geographical communities of
villages and neighbourhoods in which we all live, makes the importance of
continuity in keeping those stories alive apparent. Villages drowning in seas
of commuter housing, neighbourhoods facing a massive influx of people of other
cultures and religions both face the same problem. Maintenance of shared
stories becomes impossible and perhaps more importantly the old stories are
lost.
We need to recognise that these strains apply as much to the
‘incomers’ as to the ‘locals’. I lived in Wolverhampton in the late 1960s at
which time one could see at the weekend, large groups of men sitting in circles
in the local park. I was told, and I believe it to be true, that these
gatherings were based on links back to the local village in Pakistan or
Bangladesh. For at least some of these immigrants therefore continuity was
maintained but only it seems by discussion of the ‘old days’.
For children born in this country, the old days of course
are irrelevant and unknown – perhaps even literally meaningless. A combination
of religion, language and myth generate separation and isolation on both sides
of the divide. Stories though have intrinsic value and sharing them in the new
context could be a source of a new understanding. Stories from an isolated
village in Bangladesh could be as illuminating to English neighbours as they
were to those to whom they were originally directed.
Another insight may come from the phenomenon of so-called ‘world’
music where musicians from wildly different musical heritages often combine to
generate new and exciting ‘stories’ in the studio. If we can get that openness
out of the studio and into the locality who knows where we might end up.