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Mouth open, story jump out was a phrase that I grew up hearing in Anglophone Caribbean cultural and linguistic contexts. It described an experience where the avoided topic of conversation somehow, in spite of our best machinations, managed to insert itself into the narrative, often awkwardly. You might say to yourself in advance that you are not going to discuss a particular topic or idea for any of the following reasons: it is controversial, it might seem rude or uncouth, it might be shameful to oneself or others, it could stir up deep emotions for which one may be unprepared. In other words, having the conversation will undoubtedly upset the status quo. However, as the phrase warns, as you begin to speak with the intention of uttering the carefully prescribed words of avoidance and subterfuge, it is as if the story has a life of its own and the suppressed topic comes tumbling out. Typically, the subject matter which was being carefully avoided is one which needed to be addressed. And despite the discomfort, there is a very real possibility of transformation for oneself and others through honest dialogue and careful inquiry.As I mentioned in another blog, “Story Bones,” my older brother and I spent our early childhood with our maternal grandparents in Antigua. They were born about a century and a quarter ago in Caribbean colonies, of the then British West Indies, when the British Empire arguably was at the height of its power. Household items and technologies for preparing food and washing clothes from the nineteenth and earlier centuries would have been in daily use. We, the current generation living adult lives in the early decades of the twenty-first century, were not there as living witnesses. However, those who lived during those earlier times raised us, fed us, taught us how to cook, and told us their stories using what poet and literary scholar Kamau Brathwaite terms “nation language,” a creole expressive language created by Caribbean people. We learned about descriptions of a variety of qualities of speech and oral expression including how bodies moved in motion or held postural positions. These descriptions told us a lot about the speaker and how to listen to whatever they were saying with discernment. For instance, someone who was dicty was fussy and ostentatious in their personal style. From my Trinbagonian (Trinidad and Tobago) friends, I learned the term mauvais lang to describe those who relished gossip. I also grew up hearing the term speaksy-spokesy used to describe deliberate, careful speech which indicated the user’s self-conscious striving for upward social positioning, often through avoidance of common, everyday language use including creole. From my experience, mouth-open-story-jump-out speech challenged controlled speaksy-spokesy utterances and lived into the postural, audacious style of the dicty. Mouth open, story jump out was outspoken speech which offered an invitation to radical truth telling. It held the promise of a path to engagement with the challenging work of personal and social transformation.Mouth open, story jump out is an observation about the power of stories which can transform our own consciousness and that of others in their utterance. Teaching can involve moments like these which surprise and jolt us out of expected conversational routes, especially those designed to avoid what we might consider topics that are too challenging, or for which there just does not seem to be enough time to adequately address. We teachers might pause believing that students may not be adequately prepared, but the topic intrudes on the planned lesson. Popular cultural texts, world events, and changing cultural landscapes can prompt what might seem like impromptu expressions. My suggestion is to embrace them as they come up. They might be the entry point to creative ventures, new research and curriculum ideas, and collaborations and collaborative problem solving. For instance, when I opened my mouth and dared to listen to some of the half-whispered stories, my work as a short story writer jumped out. They were the hidden stories, fragments of which lurked in archival documents. Speculative fiction was the genre which enabled me to blend historical research with imaginings about what the lives and thoughts of people living in the colonial era in the Caribbean may have been like as they grappled with theological and spiritual themes about the nature of liberation. In other words, these stories explored many of the same themes as my scholarship and course development. Speculative fiction enabled me to reimagine the life worlds of Caribbean people using Caribbean folklore to explore themes such as intergenerational trauma, liberation, memory, and invisible branches of family trees. Incorporating opportunities for students to examine challenging topics through written reflections, creative writing, facilitated conversations, and other creative projects holds great potential rewards for transformative learning. What stories will jump out, if we dare to open our mouths authentically in our teaching practice?Suggested ReadingBennett, Louise. Jamaica Labrish. Sangsters, 1966.Brathwaite, Kamau. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. New Beacon Books, 1984.

In my early Caribbean childhood of the 1960s and 1970s after leaving England, the country of my birth, stories surrounded us. Often, they were whispered and overheard in partial, redacted fragments, or they were spit out into the air with force, the words ricocheting off the walls and buildings of our individual and collective histories and rebounding in fragments to listeners in myriad shapes and patterns. At other times, the stories were gently ladled—soft, soothing, and nourishing in the recollections of elder women and men who chose their words with care, deboning the sharp bits while maintaining the flesh of the experience for young listeners. As children, my brother and I were often reminded never to eat fried fish while simultaneously carrying on a vigorous conversation because the slipperiness and sharpness of the fish bones made them more likely to shift from between our teeth and lodge sharply somewhere between the first bite and the swallowing of piquant deliciousness. Fairytale horror always got our attention. I regard the silence of eating fried fish as one of the crucial lessons of conversation because it taught us how to listen carefully. Now while fish bones were discarded, the bones of chicken and other meat were often ground to a powdery mass—“down to the marrow”—the chewing of which was an enjoyment of the meal. In this way, eating bones were both cautionary as well as savoured metaphors about speech, listening, and enjoyment. We grew up with grandparents, people born at the turn of the last century, descendants of the enslaved, on small islands of the Eastern Caribbean in what was then a far-flung shore of Britain’s imperial project. At one time in the late eighteenth century, Admiral Horatio Nelson and his soldiers were stationed there in Antigua, at the naval dockyard built by enslaved folks on the south coast looking over the waves at Guadaloupe. Sitting on the front stone steps of our grandparents’ home, too young for school, we too were sentinels who drank in salt air. There were a few cars and trucks, but mostly we watched people; they embodied the world beyond garden gates, doors, and louvres (windows). We saw children in their freshly pressed uniforms going to and from school and grown folk walking by and calling out their greetings, selling their wares with snatches of song, including fish, ice wrapped in burlap, and salt peanuts. And if there were praises and curses belonging to dramas that began long before they walked by, we heard those, too. My brother and I traveled through the centuries, daily. We walked by structures, including the Anglican cathedral that we visited each Sunday, built and rebuilt over the last few centuries. Nothing was designated a historical site. I do not recall any plaques or markers. There were gravestones and cannons and cannon balls, material evidence from a colonial past. A woman selling fruit around the corner from our house greeted my grandfather in his mother tongue, Antillean French Creole, every day as he took his constitutional walk after lunch. I imagine her saying “Sa kap fet?” (How’s it going?). The scales on which she and other market women confirmed the price of her goods, accurately pre-weighed by her touch, were heavy dark metal forged before our time. When we returned to the house with longer shadows in tow perhaps my uncle would be there, his car parked outside and the gentle tick tock of his wristwatch marking modern time. We learned to move between these various eras. We were travelers seated on the front steps of the house, books and words and stories for fuel, hurtling through the atmosphere from which we took deep garden-perfumed gulps, sunglasses a barrier protecting our eyes from some alternate sun. After flying to Canada in the early 1970s in a giant version of the red plastic plane from the cereal box, we felt the shift and change, jarringly, in the unaccustomed motion of escalators and elevators and trains and buses and another English language. But the stories, we remembered the stories, and we learned to chew and spit and talk and write them. In my teaching and design of Caribbean and African Diaspora religious and cultural studies courses, these storying practices contribute to imaginative pedagogies. They are especially useful when engaging students in the study of topics which are potentially difficult and traumatic. Storying as a teaching method has the capacity to both disrupt and challenge as well as to protect. Storying invites multiple vantage points and critical assessment. Finding the story bones is a process of meaningful engagement with the past and holds the potential to connect our various worlds of being as teachers, scholars, and learners.   Photo by British Library on Unsplash Enslaved people cutting the sugar cane on the Island of Antigua, 1823. Download this photo by British Library on Unsplash unsplash.com