The storyteller is the living memory of her time: at once an oracle, weaver, healer, warrior, witch, protectress, teacher and great mother. Her powers are to do with passing on, not only the stories but transmission itself: ‘what grandma began, granddaughter completes and passes on to be further completed.’ In contrast to the idea that a story is ‘just a story’, pioneering postcolonial feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha recodes ideas about truth and fantasy to tell a different story about power, civilisation, history, medicine and magic. Grandma’s Story shows how creative speech is connected to women’s powers of enchantment, drawing upon and speaking with storytellers including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Clarice Lispector, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Zora Neale Hurston – all who may be known as ‘she who breaks open the spell’.

The story as a cure and a protection is at once musical, historical, poetical, ethical, educational, magical, and religious.