PETE MEETS SALLY POMME CLAYTON
along with Solomon, Sheba, Lilith, Mother Goose and various other characters.

(From F&F#61 May 2007)

I met Sally Pomme Clayton after seeing her performance of stories about Solomon and Sheba at Flying Donkeys in Derby. She started by clearing up the confusion about her name.

Pomme is a nick name and I started off as a storyteller as Pomme Clayton, in 1983 or something, and then I wrote some books as Pomme Clayton and then I wrote some plays as Sally Clayton, which is my real Christian name, and nobody knew it was the same person and so I thought I’d better join them all together so I became Sally Pomme Clayton and my latest book has come out under that name. And I thought this was going to be very simple but, actually, it’s caused even more confusion because now people put hyphens in it so I’m Sally-Pomme Clayton or I’m Sally Pomme-Clayton, that’s the worst one! In catalogues for festivals I’ve been under ‘P’… I wish I’d never started the whole thing.

What do you do apart from storytelling?—you’ve mentioned writing.

I write, yes, I write quite a lot. I write a lot of different things. I’ve been writing, this last couple of years, three books. They’re all lined up like planes waiting to land. They’re going to take ages to come out. One is based on Persephone, one is a collection of stories about warrior women. It’s, kind of, like a handbook for girls about how to be a warrior. It’s called Amazons. And the third one is my version of Rama and Sita which is going to be a bit like a novel with chapters. And… I’ve written a chapter for a book which is coming out this year, about narrative. It’s called The Heart of Stories, an academic collection of essays.

So are you a storyteller who writes or a writer who tells stories?

A storyteller who writes, I think. When I started writing the first thing I wrote was for a collection that Mary Medlicott edited, called… mmm.. I can’t remember the title of it, but I wrote a story for that called The King With Dirty Feet and, honestly, I wrote it by hand on lined paper and sent it to them. And I really did think, you know, this is really bad, they’re not going to like this, and I honestly thought that I would never write anything again. But I actually, really enjoy writing and I feel it’s another way I can tell stories in a different form.

And The King With Dirty Feet has had this life outside of me, which I could never have imagined. It was made into an animation by the BBC, then a museum in New York did a special exhibition about shoes and they based it on The King With Dirty Feet. And then, recently, somebody from Thailand, a school, said we want to use this story to teach English, please can you give us permission? So, of course, I said yes… And then I teach a course at Middlesex University, or a couple of courses… I teach one course on Writing for Performance and another course on World Oral Traditions.

So they’re all linked together…

They are all linked together, yes, different aspects of the same thing.

Now, I wanted to concentrate on the set you did last night… Solomon & Sheba, it’s a lovely theme. What attracted you to it in the first place?

I think I mentioned last night, this plaque at the British Museum which I saw when I was very young, a 4-thousand year old Mesopotamian plaque of this winged creature. Then the galleries were un-refurbished and it was just stuck in a corner, dusty and forgotten, and I started looking into it and that led me to the character of Lilith and that led me to the character of Sheba and the link between them which, when I discovered it, it just blew my mind! And then the fact that La Reine Pedauque in France (Goosefoot) and Mother Goose in England… so all the, sort of, links of this character backwards and forwards across countries and languages and so on… Since then, in the last five years, the British Museum have realised this is a very important thing and it went on a tour round Britain and they refurbished it and it’s got its proper plinth and, you know… It’s been renamed as well.

But I think, when you’re researching stories you don’t know where they are going to take you. Sometimes they don’t take you anywhere. It’s just a little fragment that you find and something can unfold from that and you feel very lucky to have found the fragment. I think that’s how I feel.

I liked the way you started last night by saying it’s just 13 verses in the Bible but a lifetime’s work. Tell me more about Lilith who was central to the story. Does she occur in the Bible?

No, she doesn’t occur in the Bible. The first mention of Lilith is in this Inanna text and it’s one tiny, tiny story. She seems to have been superseded as a goddess by Iananna. She was cast out of her tree—she was living in a tree, and Inanna’s brother—Inanna said I want that tree for my bed and my throne cut it down and they went and found Lilith in it. And it’s just… just… just fantastic actually because it makes links all over. So that’s the oldest and then she is in Jewish traditions, in the Talmud and in commentaries on the Old Testament. And in the Middle East, throughout the Middle East, and they have amulets to her which they put on the cot to protect the baby from her arrival, so there’s a lot more to say.

You can definitely see how the old societies were scared of that aspect of woman—the woman on top sort of thing!

Definitely! And this woman who went off into the desert and no-one knows her name or what happened to her…

[For those who don’t know the story: Lilith was the first woman god made but Adam banished her because she wanted to make love on top! Then god created another woman but Adam witnessed her creation/birth and it was too much for his delicate nature so she just disappeared into the wilderness as in many good fairy tales, and then comes the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, which we all know.]

Did you go to any of these countries to do your research?

For this particular story, no. I would need to go to Ethiopia, and I would need to go to Yemen which is one of the places where Sheba is supposed to have come from. In fact I nearly did go to Yemen because I work with this band, an Arabic band called Joglaresa and they went to the Yemen with the British Council, but the British Council didn’t have enough money for me to go too! But I have done a lot of travelling and collecting stories. When I was working on the Ramayana I went to Sri Lanka and spent quite a lot of time there, and Central Asia—one of my books is about that… and Alaska… all over...

When I was on the train yesterday I was thinking about why I was telling this story and where do stories come from and why are we telling them, and who do they belong to… And then I started thinking about: have I got the right to tell this story? And that is always a very difficult question to answer and I’ve had many different conversations with many different storytellers about this and I felt extremely clear about it, suddenly. I knew the answer, yesterday anyway! And I thought what if there’s an Ethiopian person there, and I’m telling their story? But the thing is, certainly with this story—Solomon and Sheba, and with many others, every country thinks they own it and so I thought very clearly that I have as much right as anyone else to own it for a moment.

I think what is difficult is that if an Ethiopian person had been there and had really expected me to tell the Kebra Nagast story [the Glory of Kings, the Ethiopian national saga. ed] in their version, they might have been offended; but I wasn’t, I was telling my version which is a mixture of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, European, Jewish, Christian, Yemeni etc. with the Ethiopian version. But I also think my experience of telling things like the Persian Shahname or the Ramayana is that the audience… Once I’d been doing this big project with Shahname and I was telling it in Rotherham where there is a small Persian community and I actually, so wanted them to come to the performance and it was so difficult to get to that community and we’d done some work with them. Some families did come and it was such a privilege to have them there… and a lovely look came on their faces, a lovely dreamy look. At the end they said, well, we never thought we’d hear Shahname again, certainly not in Rotherham! So I felt like I was giving something back which belonged to them. And I think that, ideally… we had a conversation in the performance so I could say was it like that? and then they could tell their bit of the story that they know, which is going to be different to my version, for sure. So it’s a kind of a pooling of ideas about a story and a sharing.

So nobody owns these stories in the end. Nobody owns them so we all have the right to tell them. But there is something else then, which is to do justice to them and that’s the work that we have to focus on, how to do justice to the material... Yeah, that’s each person’s journey.

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