Photo by Katy Kaddatz
Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson are, of course, the “Kitchen Sisters”, the Click and Clack of ‘girl culture’, and perhaps best known for their 2005 book Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and for the current year-long series on NPR, The Hidden World of Girls.
Incidentally, the two named themselves after two brothers, Kenneth and Raymond Kitchen, two stonemasons, who lived in Santa Cruz in yesteryear and were, by all accounts, weird and ornery — even to each other.
Here’s a Kenneth Kitchen story. During WWII, he would spray a mattress with a garden hose, get it good and wet, and then lay down on it, put on his headphones, which were hooked up to an oscillator, and listen for German submarines in Monterey Bay.
Silva and Nelson, who met in 1979 and live in Santa Cruz, are about to participate in Hidden World of Girls: Stories for Orchestra at the Cabrillo Festival this coming Saturday and Sunday. It’s a highly collaborative, multimedia presentation that includes stories of coming-of-age rituals and rites of passage, tied together with the theme of women who “crossed a line, blazed a trail, changed the tide.”
We reached Silva the other day to talk about the art of storytelling and ritual and also the irony that, as they’ve become famous, the Kitchen Sisters have now been drawn into the very gears of media culture that they’re trying to adjust.
“We [as a culture] have definitely lost the art of story-telling,” says Silva. “Everything has been reduced. Everyone wants their sound bite, everything has to be condensed. We were on television the other day, where you realize you have no context for anything. It’s all, ‘give us a quick five seconds’ and then you move on to the next thing. But of course a good story need a good telling.”
Bound Up In Ritual
One of the stories included in the Hidden World of Girls is about the coming-of-age rituals of young women on an Indian reservation in South Dakota. As the ritual unfolds, the girls must build their own tepee and are forbidden from touching food for four days. They can only be fed by their mothers, and then, at the end of the four days, the girls in turn feed the whole tribe.
“We [as a culture] have definitely lost the art of story-telling. Everyone wants their sound bite, everything has to be condensed.” — Nikki Silva
“And you realize what this means; how the care that you received from your mother is transformed into caring for the entire community.”
Among the nuances in this story, called “Braveheart” in the radio series, is that one of the girls doesn’t like her mother and yet through the ritual comes to understand something of who her mother is.
“On the final day,” says Silva, “there in the tepee this particular girl is taken by aunties and told stories about how beautiful she was as a baby. Oh you were such a beautiful baby and how I loved combing your hair. And that’s part of it, ritual as reminder, ritual as way of reinforcing the positive.
“For me, it’s really the significance of older women sharing with younger women and helping them, investing in the next generation, because a lot of times girls just don’t have the models.”
Silva has two girls of her own and has helped to raise four others.
“And so I find it interesting that we have so few rituals for girls in our culture. If you’re Jewish there’s a bat mitzvah. True, but generally there’s not this same sense of crossing over.
“We do have such a hunger for ritual, and people are trying to figure out how to make their stories relevant and to find a place to tell them.”
“We do have such a hunger for ritual, and more and more people are starting to think through these things and trying to figure out how to make their stories relevant and to find a place to tell them. It’s something as simple as eating dinner with your family. Which we used to take for granted. But of course now it’s all so difficult because we’ve been removed from each other by technology, even as it binds us together.”
Asked about the particular angle of girls, Silva replied, “This is really an umbrella for everyone, a way to frame the idea that we’re all connected to stories, to women’s stories and men’s stories.”
Silva added that as she and Davia Nelson continue their journey into the art of storytelling, they are looking for ever new ways to collaborate, and ever new multimedia forms.
“Everyone is reconsidering these different media forms and how they relate to each other: What is radio? What is TV? And what is online, and how will you experience this on your iPhone? We’re coming to a time when you can walk down a city street somewhere in the world, call a number, and literally dial in a place and find out what’s going on, what the stories are there. So there are all these crossovers. The bottom line is there’s a new reason and a new hunger for finding identity through stories.”