Eileen M. DeMaio
In Africa the folktale was, and still is, a primary means people have of communicating to one another. Folktales can reflect and explain the hopes and fears of a culture as well as its spiritual and religious beliefs. They are devices we all use to explain our relationship with the natural world and why things are the way they are. The characters in folktales can be gods, spirits, animals, or even insects that take on human qualities, or humans that acquire godlike or animalistic qualities. As I gathered stories to read for the writing of this unit, I found that folktales can make you laugh and they can make you cry, they can make you think, and they can teach you about the world we live in, lending explanations that are sure to delight our imaginations.
It is only in this century that the folktales, or the oral literature of Africa, have begun to be collected and written down. They say that by writing these stories down we are ending a very long tradition that is rich and varied and has for the most part remained unique in that it is solely an oral tradition. “ Each person who tells a story molds the story to his mouth, and each listener molds the story to his ear. Thus, the same story, told over and over, is never quite the same. But when stories are written in books, people think that is the only way the story should be and that it cannot be changed. And that is the way a story as a living, growing, changing thing dies. Stories can be changed and should be, as the storyteller feels. The stories don’t live otherwise.
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I personally feel that by writing these folktales down we are at least recording them and preserving them in this form. In this way they are sure to delight and entertain people from all over the world. Storytellers of any culture can surely retell the tales they read adapting them to their own tongue.
In this unit we will study two types of tales. First, we will hear two stories, one a myth and the other a folktale. We will study the cultures and see some sculpture that has a direct connection to these stories. While telling these two I will show the students slides from the Yale Art Gallery. Next, we will read and listen to many tales that belong to a category called explanatory tales, including some that feature Anansi, the wellknown spider character. Anansi is a clever trickster found in the folktales of the Ashanti culture of Ghana. This time the students will not be shown slides; they will be asked instead to create their own masks and images to illustrate some of the stories.
Stories with tricksters as the central character fall into a category all their own. Tricksters are common in the folktales of many African countries as well as Caribbean and American Folktales. A trickster is usually of inferior size and strength but superior in cleverness. Although sometimes treated as a culture hero, the trickster is usually represented as the underdog, who lacks scruples when planning his ruthless antics on others. Many trickster tales give explanation to certain ways of nature like the common Anansi tales “ Why spider hides in dark corners” and “Why Anansi’ head so small while his hind quarters so big.”
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