Communal Storytelling Theme Analysis

The narrator of the “The Shawl” begins his story by sharing another story told “among the Anishinaabeg” about a woman named Aanakwad. This tale, in addition to being well known within the area where the narrator lives, is important for the narrator’s grandfather (Aanakwad’s husband), his father, and the narrator himself, making it clear that, for Erdrich, storytelling is a powerful force. As different stories are told throughout “The Shawl,” it becomes evident that part of storytelling’s power is the way it can enable the sharing of emotional trauma, a curative process inherent to the very act of telling. However, this curative power is not only born of the act of passing a burden onto someone else, but also in the revelations that can be found in sharing the role of narration itself with another person. For Erdrich, storytelling must be communal in order to be meaningful.

Throughout “The Shawl,” Erdrich shows how the simple act of telling a story can be curative or therapeutic.  Aanakwad’s story is widely known among the Anishinaabeg people, as the first line of “The Shawl” indicates. The narrator suggests that this may be because, after finding his daughter’s remains and realizing what must have happened to her, Aanakwad’s husband “had to tell what he saw, again and again, in order to get rid of it.” Telling the story of something disturbing is a way to “destroy its power.”

This vision of storytelling as a way to lighten the burden of a terrible experience or memory is reinforced later in “The Shawl,” when the narrator and his father get into a physical fight. Before the fight began, the father was drunk and violent. By the end of the fight, after the narrator has stopped striking his father and offered him the shawl to clean up his blood, the father becomes not just subdued but sober. In this moment, he tells his son, for the first time, the story of his sister, Aanakwad’s daughter who was eaten by wolves: “Did you know I had a sister once?” After this revelation, the father remains sober and his relationship with the narrator improves, the implication being that the act of telling the story was enough to address the rage the father was carrying that made him drunk and violent. 

Erdrich also emphasizes the way that storytelling can be communal, an exchange of perspectives rather than the mere transmission of a story from one person to a listener or reader. The narrator describes how, once he and his two siblings Raymond and Doris have grown up, they continue to live near each other and get together often. He notes that, while their story of paternal drunkenness and abuse isn’t a rare story, it’s still useful for them to discuss their childhoods with each other because “it helps to compare our points of view.” In fact, for Erdrich, the therapeutic properties of storytelling do not simply come out of the act of unburdening oneself, but are actually a result of the communal nature of storytelling. When the narrator describes the sharing of perspectives with his siblings, he explains why it is helpful by providing the example of the fact that, without this kind of comparison, he wouldn’t have known that his brother saw him the first time he hid their father’s belt so that their father couldn’t beat them with it. In other words, the narrator thought he’d experienced something profoundly difficult in solitude—taking complete responsibility at a very young age for protecting himself and his siblings from their father—and that he was the only possible narrator of that story. But through the process of sharing stories with his siblings, he is able to realize he was not alone in the story and so he does not bear its weight alone now.

The most significant instance of communal storytelling in “The Shawl” is the evolution of the story of Aanakwad, the story that opens Erdrich’s piece. For the father, who heard the story from his father, it is a story of his mother’s betrayal by throwing the daughter to the wolves to save herself. But for the narrator, it has the potential to be something else—the story of the daughter’s brave sacrifice of herself to save those whom she loves. It is through sharing stories with others that they can change, influenced by the perspectives and experiences of these other people. In Erdrich’s formulation, a story is not a private, singular thing, but a co-created, living thing, The implications of this perspective on storytelling are potentially enormous: history, as the ultimate “story,” is, in the mainstream, traditionally told from one perspective—that of the powerful. In the case of the history of Native peoples in the United States, history as it concerns them is traditionally told from the perspective of the settlers and, eventually, the U.S. government. Erdrich is pointing to the necessity of a more communally composed history—one that allows the Native peoples to reclaim the interpretation of their past for themselves—and is in fact offering a sort of alternative history herself through her writing.