When I was about five years old, I wrote my very first book. It was called “All About Aliens” and on the front of it, I proudly wrote: “Written and illustrated by Alefiya Presswala.” I decided then that I wanted a career that had to do with books (my two choices that I knew of at that age were librarian and author and I decided on author because being a librarian seemed boring).
I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but what I really wanted was a career to do with storytelling, not just books. I grew up with stories literally all around me. They were infused into everything I did. My dad told me bedtime stories about faraway lands with palm trees that had diamonds for branches and warrior princes. When my mom cooked dinner, she would recount stories from her childhood in India. When we visited my grandparents, my grandma told me about superstitions surrounding certain fruits, like how you should never share a pomegranate with another person because each pomegranate contained a seed that would secure your path to heaven. I named and created backstories for each and every stuffed animal or toy I owned. When it rained, I would watch the raindrops slide down my window and pretend they were in a race against each other.
As I’ve grown older, journalism is one of the forms of storytelling I’ve grown most fond of. I still love creative writing and it’s still my dream to someday publish a fantasy novel. But finding stories – the epic ones that already exist – and telling them in the right ways has become more and more important to me.
Through tons and tons of interviews with my friends and family, I’ve come to think of journalism as a documentation of my people. Journalism is often called the first draft of history, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. History, as we know it, is the facts that become mainstream and journalism helps those facts get there.
I am a person who obsessively journals, posts pictures and writes down memorable quotes from conversations. I spend hours recounting the timelines of past weekends. I tell stories to remember them. To be forgotten is to be nonexistent. And what I’ve realized recently is that I have an urgent need to be remembered. I want people to remember me and the things that were important to me, which includes my history and my heritage and the stories of where I come from. I want people to remember the true crucial moments that define our culture.
I want to remember the way my dad oils my hair and the yellow light that slithers into my room when my roommate doesn’t put both blinds down to go to bed and spring mornings that make me nostalgic for running to the bus stop in middle school and everything else in between; even the parts that are painful to recall. Telling these stories isn’t always fun. Poetry is actually rarely a pretty process, and sometimes conducting interviews and writing features on people like I like to do is an ugly job. But it’s the job I want.
Storytelling isn’t just something you do. I believe it’s something you can learn, something you can work at and become better at. I believe it’s something you have to work at. And that takes a lot of courage. Obtaining the courage to tell stories takes a lot of work too. I am extremely privileged (and extremely grateful) to be able to go to school for that exact purpose and be taught how to do this work.
All I can hope for is that we all one day become brave enough to share our true authentic stories in the way they deserve to be shared.
Alefiya is a second year journalism major who encourages all to continue telling their stories, no matter how small. They can be reached at [email protected] .