Traditional tales with a personal flair
Mixing traditional African folk stories with her own experiences and unique personal flair, storyteller Queen Nur will take to the stage tonight to entertain a Libby audience.
Queen Nur, also known as Karen Abdul-Malik, is a world-renowned storyteller who aims to educate her audience as well as entertain them.
“I try to connect with people through story,” she said. “I try to show our connectivity and our similarities, and to understand and celebrate our differences and diversity.”
Queen Nur, born and raised in Philadelphia, Penn., and currently residing in New Jersey, is participating in the Kootenai Heritage Council’s Artists in Residence program. This is the second year the council has brought a resident artist to Lincoln County to share a week with the community before wrapping up with a performance at the Memorial Center. She started her Montana experience with a night-time flight into the airport in Missoula and a dark drive to Seeley Lake. Her first daylight Montana experience was waking up to a sunrise view of Seeley Lake from the Lodges, where she stayed. From there she traveled to Dillon before finding herself in Lincoln County this week. She spent the first part of the week in Eureka, then traveled to Libby Wednesday. She worked with students at Libby’s Central School Thursdsay before moving to the Plummer Center to visit the Head Start and pre-school classes before wrapping up at Libby Elementary School.
“It’s just been such a beautiful experience,” she said.
During her whirlwind tour of Libby, she found time to sit down with The Western News to chat about her life and her stories.
Queen Nur started writing at the age of nine, with her father as her first producer. He had her recite her stories, overlaid on jazz music. She’s stuck with the format ever since, making it her unique, personal signature.
For her performance in Libby, she will be setting her stories to the soulful beats of an African drum. For that, she brought with her Sangue Mboup, a member of a clan of African Grios, or musicians, from Senegal in West Africa. Mboup will be playing a djembe and what is known as a talking drum during the performance tonight, along with a number of other “accompanying instruments,” as he called them. Mboup doesn’t just play the drums for Queen Nur, in keeping with his family’s traditions, he makes all the drums he plays, stretching and tightening various leathers onto the heads to create the desired sounds.
Queen Nur is an energetic performer, as evidenced by the jubilant way in which she told stories sitting in Diane’s Cafe in Libby Wednesday afternoon. Relating her desire to ride a horse while in Montana, she told a story from one of her fellow storytellers from a “tall tales” contest years ago.
She told the story of the woman riding and riding on the horse, going up and down and around and around, she said, mimicking the movement of a newcomer on horseback. “I rode and rode,” she said. “I moved and moved. And then the quarter ran out.”
Queen Nur, despite her unique style and contagious humor, has a serious side to her work.
“We keep people alive with our stories,” she said. “We keep values and morals alive and teach people without chastising them, through story. We talk about changes and transformations we want to see in our communities and tell about our victories over struggles.”
In the end, she said her goal is to preserve history through storytelling.
“What can we learn from the stories and what can we apply to today to help us gain victory over our struggles?”
Queen Nur’s all-ages show begins tonight at 7 p.m. at the Memorial Center in Libby.