Mainly it was a contest between Gbodi and Ikpoom, who were the two great storytellers of the country. Gbodi, a short stocky little man with a huge voice, excelled as a dancer and a tumbler. In the tale of the cricket and the praying mantis he danced holding a heavy mahogany mortar in his hands. First, as the praying mantis, he held it over his head; then, placing the mortar on the ground, he continued to dance on it upside down, his hands grasping the edge of the mortar, his feet in the air—and singing all the while.
Ikpoom excelled in mime. His ugly face was extraordinarily expressive, and he was at his best when he could himself act out all parts of the story at once. Now he was telling the tale of a chief’s daughter who refused to marry any man, for she knew she was far too good for any suitor who came to court her. Ikpoom’s voice was shrilly angry when, as the girl, he warned lovers off the farm and threatened to shoot them with bow and arrow. His voice was eerie and his song uncanny as he portrayed the chief of the underworld sprites, Agundu, who is a head with wild, red eyes and with gouts of blood on the raw cut neck that terminates the creature. He showed us how Agundu borrowed the radiance of the sun and moon and with them dazzled the girl, how she followed this bright illusion away from her own people whom she had scorned, and how at the very gates of the underworld Agundu gave back to the sun his glory and to the moon her beauty. Only then, when it was too late, did the girl see what a monster she had chosen, and then too late and in vain, she longed for a human mate.
I had no need to hear the shouted proverb that marks the end of each story. I knew the moral of this tale. Especially now, in this situation in which our common humanity and pleasure in amusement was so evident, the dangers of parting from one’s own to follow beckoning strangeness loomed perilous and sad.
Ikpoom sang the lament of the girl whom blind pride had shut in a strange, dark world away from the sun and familiar light.…
Ikpoom sang for Agundu, for the grinning skeleton of the world that underlines all illusion. One can ignore Agundu. But those who follow him can never return, for they have seen and can never forget … they knew. All these people laughing around me. They knew how to come back. I had still to learn.
Gbodi was telling a tale now, of the hare’s attempt to pass himself off as one of the bush sprites in their own country. Great a trickster as the hare is, infinite as is his ingenuity, he was unable to act and feel as did the bush sprites. At first this enabled him to deceive them the better and to steal the toga that bears one along like the wind, but ultimately this lack of understanding and this difference was his undoing. “This time,” sang Gbodi, “the sprites killed the hare and ate him. The fable has killed the hare.”
The hare would soon be resurrected in another fable. The trickster is immortal as a type no matter how often any one trickster tricks himself into disaster. But even the greatest trickster cannot transform himself. His personal habits always betray him, as they betray all of us for what we are; we ourselves are the only ones to see ourselves as what we think we ought to be or what we would like to be thought.
Many of my mortal dilemmas had sprung from the very nature of my work which had made me a trickster: one who seems to be what he is not and who professes faith in what he does not believe. But this realization is of little help. It is not enough to be true to oneself. The self may be bad and need to be changed, or it may change unawares into something strange and new. I had changed. Whatever the merits of anthropology to the world or of my work to anthropology, this experience had wrought many changes in me as a human being—and I had thought that what wasn’t grist for my notebooks would be adventure.…
I had lost track of the fable being told. It was a long one, and I couldn’t keep the characters straight. Neither, it seemed, could Accident—energetic as ever and quite unchanged save for a few pockmarks on his nose. Perhaps, though, it was just his sense of mischief that made him bound up from his seat beside his brother and take the stage with the storyteller. “I don’t understand. Would you repeat more slowly?”
There was a startled gasp. Then a roar of laughter, even from the interrupted storyteller. “What was his great-great-grandfather’s name? And where did he learn to perform that ceremony?” continued Accident, so broadly that I too began to laugh, for it was my own accent and my own questions that Accident was imitating. Aware that he had lost his audience, the fable teller began to play informant to Accident’s anthropologist. Accident in turn looked eager to baffled, scribbled in the air as though in a notebook, wiped imaginary glasses, adjusted imaginary skirts, and took off my accent, gestures, errors of grammar, and habits of phrase with such unmerciful accuracy that even as I laughed myself sore I resolved on improvement. Accident finally sat down under a shower of pennies and approving applause.…9
III
Bohannon’s description of an actual performance underscores the fact that the vitality of the storytelling lies in two characteristic elements: first, the seizure of the role of narrator and the maintaining of it in the face of ongoing critical commentary; second, the constant interaction between storyteller and audience, maintained both through audience commentary and the periodic introduction of call-and-response songs. Thus, the occasion of storytelling calls for the same seizing of the center, and the same kind of voice overlap and interlock, as do the many other forms of audience behavior taking place in front of the performer, who, through a sense of personal control, provides a focus for all the noise and random bustle arising on occasions of performance.
Entering into a story often involves a little tension, and getting out of it is often not as definitive a matter as it is in Western storytelling traditions. For, as the Mandingo say at the beginning of a story: “A really unique story has no end.” Nearly everyone who gives us an up-close report on African storytelling, emphasizes the importance of beginning dramatically with such a “formulaic opening”—a fixed phrase like the Mandingo’s that prepares everyone for what is to come. More than just an opening sentence, the fixed phrase bids for a standard response from the audience that indicates that they are ready and listening.
We see such opening formulas in many of the tales taken from recent reportings (earlier collections exclude them, mainly because of their repetitive character). For instance, “Monkey Steals a Drum” begins with the kind of elaborately playful formula that characterizes the other Yoruba stories included in this volume. “Here is a story,” the aspiring narrator shouts out, to which the audience replies, “A story it is,” in essence accepting his bid for a hearing. He then responds:
My story breaks sharply, pá,
Don’t let it break its arms;
It breaks, whirs, and thuds, wàrà gbì
Don’t let it break its neck;
It didn’t fall on my head!
It didn’t fall on my neck!
Nor did it fall on the bit of Rat
That I’ll eat before I sleep tonight!
Instead, it fell on the heads of the one hundred and fifty-six animals
The narrator ingeniously and somewhat whimsically reminds his audience that he is about to launch into an elaborate invention. Just as often, the audience will, in turn, remind the narrator of the ridiculous character of his narrative, especially when the formal part of the story is coming to an end. This is often done, as in the opening, by introducing a first person singular reference, and treating the narrators speaking persona in a humorous way.
The high energy of the dialogue, then, cannot be neglected in an understanding of how these stories come into being. Just as many of these stories themselves discuss the coming apart of family, friendships, community, the way the stories emerge in contests underscores the enduring nature of the oppositions. Achieving a sense of closure, of strong and definitive conclusion, is a condition regarded as neither possible nor desirable. There are certain parts and relationships which are so central to life itself that their playing out is necessary and never ending: between father and child, man and woman, husband and wife, wife and cowife, humans
and witches, life and death. The idea of having a strong sense of resolution then, to which Westerners are so accustomed, seems strange to an African, an anathema.
As we see in most of the stories in Part Three of this book, having storytellers or some other kind of aggressive trickster as a central figure illustrates the motive of competition that informs many of the other tales, too. Sometimes, a kind of mirror effect is added simply by having some kind of performance-in-dialogue as an integral feature of the story. This is most clear in those cases where there is a competitive performance within the story, as in the marvelous Abron “The Contest of Riddles.”
Judging from the frequency with which they appear, such open-ended stories, including the dilemma tales of which I’ll speak more later, are among the most popular with African audiences. Open-endedness often occurs where a Westerner would least expect it, as in brief tales that make explicit moral commentaries. These can then be explored in conversation, especially among adults and children. Contrary to the closed form of the conventional Western fable, which seems to provide, Aesop-fashion, the “last word” on a subject, these African versions throw the floor open for debate, demonstrating yet again that in the African context the function of storytelling is to initiate as much as to instruct. Even when such a moral “last word” does arise, it commonly is at once so divisive and open-ended in its implications that it calls for further discussion.
Consider, for instance, a story that because it concerns the consequences of talk itself, may be viewed as a companion piece to “The Talking Skull.” The Ewe tell of an old man who, by circumstance, was without family and had to board with an old woman in his village. As bad luck would have it, she ran out of food and was forced to suggest to the old man that they eat dog meat. He refused, saying that if word got around that he ate such stuff no one would have anything to do with him. She promised not to tell, so the old man agreed. But when the pet was cooked, he told her to set it aside for the moment and to call her best friend—“the one to whom you can tell anything.” When that person came, he gave them the same instruction, and thus a third person joined them. He made the same suggestion to that third person, and so it went until a hundred people had gathered around. Then the old man told the assembled guests what had happened—that the old lady had run out of food and had been forced to serve him dog, promising that she wouldn’t tell anyone if he ate it. The moral of the story is obvious enough since each of the guests was one to whom someone else could tell anything.10
The picture of life here, as in so many of the tales in this anthology, is deeply informed by the paradoxes of life, especially as they arise among people who live together and discuss things. Such tales argue that wholeness and integrity are but dreams: social division and dissolving of bonds are the expected. This accounts for the great numbers of stories about the betrayal of friendship, usually comic in their style, but deadly serious in their message. In this anthology, we first see such a betrayal in “Cursing the Birds,” the story of the dignified blackbird whose view of the appropriate determined how the various other birds, all of whom wanted to change their appearance, should look. We think we understand, until we reach the apparent point of the story: “For the rest of the birds, they are in trouble, they are killed, they are ensnared, they are persecuted … all because they were cursed by the blackbird.”
The occasion for the curse is unexplained in the story, but details of it are certainly understood by its audience: first, it is vain to wish to change one’s coloration simply because of envy; second, the blackbird (like the old man confronting the problem of eating dog), is disgusted by those who do not eat correctly, for it is only through proper eating that culture can be manifested. By discussing how physical differences come into being, and are maintained in dramatic opposition, this is, in the deepest sense, an entertainment about the way life is. The vibrant performances of tales impart the message that “things” come apart, but never quietly and passively: The dissolution is to be discussed, argued about, entered into knowingly.
This process of engagement, of using moral tales to open rather than close off discussion, is precisely the modus operandi of the group of stories included here in the section called “Stories to Discuss and Even Argue About.” Characteristic of Black Africa and seldom encountered elsewhere, they are tales that develop the plot in such a way that the listener is given a choice of endings. Most commonly, the choice is posed as a question, for example, which of the characters has been most valiant or virtuous and thus deserves a reward. The form of the tale, therefore, is designed to lead to discussion or more formal debate. Or, as William Bascom notes in his definitive study of the genre: “Even when they have standard answers, dilemma tales generally evoke spirited discussions, and they train those who participate in the skills of debate and argumentation.”11
Consider now this principle that stories may be told that have no “proper” conclusion, and are specifically calculated to bring about dispute. “Stories,” as we define them, should have a strong feeling of completion about them, a wholeness that will seldom call for discussion of motives, much less argument. Consider also a related characteristic: dilemma tales, as well as many of the other types of tales included here, use a tremendous amount of repetition. The narrative may be strung out endlessly through the repetition of the song, begun by the narrator, but taken up by everyone. (A full taste of this technique is given here in “A Competition of Lies” and “The Mwindo Epic.”) That such interruptive repetitions are encouraged underlines another aspect of this open-endedness: attention is not on the narrator per se, but on the place of the storyteller as first among many, as in the other forms of performance. Open-endedness and repetition are resolutely connected in the minds of the community with involvement and, indeed, cooperative activity.
Songs set in stories do maintain audience involvement, and as already mentioned, there are often competitive uses of songs (as well as riddles and tests of wit), woven into the fabric of a story. But there are also numerous ways in which the storyteller can use songs simply to move the narrative along. In “The Disobedient Sisters,” for instance, the sad account of the separated siblings is revealed in a song-story, a lullaby. In “Tiger Slights the Tortoise,” the slow-but-steady turtle gets back at Tiger for refusing to employ him by carrying his harp to Tiger’s farm, where he sings a song so compelling that everyone stops working and starts dancing. In “Take Me Carefully, Carefully,” the song of the bird not only moves the story along, but becomes the narrator’s way of revealing the bird’s magical character.
In “Profitable Amends,” Yo, the Dahomean trickster figure, is portrayed as a magical singer, one who is capable of employing song as a means of tricking others. Each time he sings, in this amazing myth, he is able to negotiate an unequal exchange of goods, until finally in exchange for just one cowry shell he gets a wife for the king. Unfortunately, the wife turns out to be a voracious sorceress, who is able to sing the king into sending one feast after another into her camp—and this in the midst of a famine!
Another technique for integrating the song into the story is to use it as a recognition device, or signature, which is how it appears in “Demane and Demazana,” the very first tale in the book. Here the runaway brother uses a special song to identify himself whenever he wants his sister to unlock her door for him. The story turns on her ability to tell his voice from that of the cannibal intruder.
The most common device for introducing song into the story, however, is to use song as a kind of spotlighting device, a way of amplifying the most important speeches of the antagonists in the drama. We see this technique, for instance, in “The Smart Man and the Fool,” where the “foolish” brother uses song as a means of revealing why he let his selfish father choke to death. Similarly, in “He Starved His Own,” when the son is old enough to kill game but refuses to give any to his starving father (who has neglected the boy and his mother), he gives his justification for not doing so through song. The importance of the audi
ence involvement that these songs and other techniques create, along with open-ended story structure and communal playing-out of oppositions, cannot be overstressed. For in many African cultures, this is a theological as well as an aesthetic matter. Life is regarded as a pulsating spirit or force, separate from any individual or group, a vital element of the gods that bearing their timeless messages, descends on the group when they engage in a performance. The oppositions given voice and movement at that time are simply temporal representations of the eternal struggles; oppositions are presented, therefore, as complementarities, opposing forces that could not exist without each other.
James Fernandez, who has studied the expressive life of the Fang of Gabon, is describing this central concept when he notes that “what is artistically pleasing to the Fang has a … vitality that arises out of a certain relationship of contradictory elements. The Fang will only live easily with such contradictions; they cannot live without them.” He goes on to demonstrate that, indeed, aesthetic pleasure (as well as everyday fun), occurs in the dramatizing of some of these basic oppositions, that is, by putting them into a play. This is so because “vitality, arises out of complementary oppositions,… what is aesthetically satisfying is the same as what is culturally alive.”12
African Folktales Page 4