Week 6 Reading Diary: West African Folktales

("Dew on a Spider's Web in the Morning, by Luc Viatour, via Wikipedia)

I picked this section this week because I'll be using the Jamaican Anansi folktales for my Storybook and I wanted to start feeling out what I want to actually do for the Storybook (because I'm still very much undecided on that front!). There were lots of interesting stories, and I think what I'll try to do is tell my story this week from the point of view of an anthropologist (see: me). I've actually read several ethnographies on various regions within West Africa, so we'll see how this goes...

As for the parts that really caught my eye this week:

How We Got the Name Spider Tales: origin stories are some of my favorites, and there are so many in this unit that I'll have a whole spectrum to choose from, but this one is really interesting because it's like the origin story or origin stories, and that kind of nested form would be really interesting to play with in a story. I was actually thinking about combining this story with How Wisdom Became the Property of the Human Race, because I felt that the Wisdom story would act as a nice coda/tie-in piece to the Spider Tales story. I don't really know how I would do this--I haven't had enough time to ponder it--but there's definitely a connection there in my head, so I'll roll with it...

Anansi and Nothing: I feel like this story would be really interesting to tell more from Anansi's wives' point of view (I actually thought that it would be really interesting to have a woman tell this story to an anthropologist in response to a question about either her marriage or the folk tales of the area, as a way to both say that her husband was either wonderful or a real jerk). It might be interesting to juxtapose the way that real life often echoes folklore, and I think that would be a really cool way to do it. There would also be a lot of opportunity to talk about other real-life details, which is also a cool way to mirror the events in the folk tale and tie everything together, I think!

Source: West African Folktales by William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair, with drawings by Cecilia Sinclair (1917).