Today I continue the blog series titled Following folktales around the world! If you would like to know what the series is all about, you can find the introduction post here. You can find all posts under the Following Folktales label, or you can follow the series on Facebook!
There could not be a more fitting volume to say goodbye to the Caribbean than a collection full of Anansi stories.
Anancy and Miss Lou
Louise Bennett
Sangster's Book Stores, 1979.
I cam across this book by accident, in a used book store in Knoxville, TN, a week before I flew home from the USA. Even though most of my books were already packed, I could not resist buying it (especially for $2!). It was a very lucky find.
The volume contains thirty-one Anancy stories, re-told by famous Jamaican singer, storyteller, and folklore artist Louise Bennett. The stories are written down phonetically from her telling; while the Jamaican dialect is hard for an outsider to decipher in writing, once you get the hang of it, both Miss Lou's and Anancy's personalities jump off the page is bright colors. I have not heard Louise Bennett before, so I spent a lot of time looking up
YouTube videos and voice recordings online. I wish I could have heard her live...
The book contains a short introduction about Miss Lou and Anancy, and musical notes for the songs that appear in the stories. Every story closes with the same formula: "Is Anancy meck it" ("Anancy made it so" - all stories are pourquoi tales), and "Jack Mandora, me noh choose none" (According to the Introduction, this translates into "I take no responsibility for the story I have told").
Highlights
The opening story in the book is, naturally,
about Anancy stories - or rather, how Anancy decided he wanted to star in bedtime tales, and how he got Cat and Rat to fight in order to achieve his legendary trickster status. I was also happy to find Miss Lou's lovely version of
Anancy and Fire, a story I have heard from
Eshu Bumpus, and never found again since. In it, Anancy tries to seduce Miss Flame, but she soon turns out to be more than he signed up for.
By far my favorite tale in the book was that of
Anancy and Sorrel, in which the trickster, while stealing fruit on Market Day, just happened to invent this very popular, spiced Jamaican drink. I also laughed a lot at the tale of
Anancy and Fee Fee, in which Anancy dressed up as a little girl (called Fee Fee) just to get free food at a Christmas party for children.
Connections
I found a tale that I read earlier from
Trinidad, in which
Crab helps a poor servant girl find out an evil witch's secret name - except in this case the poor girl was Anancy in disguise, going for the rich rewards of guessing the name.
Guessing names was a common theme in the collection; I also found a couple of versions for the African tale type where Anancy had to guess a princess' name in order to marry her. I was reminded of the Haitian story of Owl's wedding by the story of
Po Pattoo, the Jamaican owl, who tried to marry a pretty girl by hiding his feathers, but Anancy gave him away. On a slightly more serious note, there was once again a tale of
A girl marrying a Yellow Snake - she was rescued by Anancy and his clever tricks (I have encountered this tale type on almost all Caribbean islands).
And, of course, there were the
all-time trickster classics, such as Riding Tiger, the Deadly Rock, and the Tar Baby. And it almost goes without saying that this book was not without an animal race either: This time,
Donkey ran a race with Toad, and the latter won by the help of Anancy's cunning advice.
Where to next?
Next week we start our trek north across Central America. Panama first!
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