![]() ![]() ![]() His trickery provoked Mawu into distancing herself from the newly formed earth, and his unpredictable mediation reminds both gods and humans that autonomy requires the perils of relationship. All who approach her, even the other gods, must first address him. The youngest of the seven children of the female-male high god, Mawu-Lisa, Legba is her linguist. Legba, the trickster god of the Fon, personifies such logic clearly. It is a bold piece of spiritual logic to make this insistence a joke -or even more, a joking relationship. It is perhaps a commonplace to insist that in every system the order of the center and the wildness of the periphery are linked. Indeed, the trickster in Africa shows by his witty juggling with meaning and absurdity that he is more accurately understood as a spectrum of commentaries on mythic commentary than as a "category." This epistemological playfulness seems to represent a sophisticated African form of religious thought. Thus the differences among these figures are as significant as their similarities. Ananse of the Ashanti, Mantis of the San, Ogo-Yurugu of the Dogon, and others contend with animals and gods, spirits and humans they exploit every liminal space to claim all speech for human language. In displaying his power to dismember everything, a people celebrates its capacity for remembering its own way of being.Īfrican trickster figures are images of an ironic imagination that yokes together bodiliness and transcendence, society and individuality. Telling the trickster's stories, then, is an anamnesis. Ananse is "wonderful" because he makes all multiplicity a symbol of the Ashanti oneness that exists here and now. They insist that the core of human existence, a meeting place of every sort of force, is displayed by -not prior to, withdrawn from, or obliterated by -the twists of disease, the denial of hospitality, the crazed lens of sexual rivalry. ![]() Too bawdy to be taken as cautionary fables, too confident of the unity between specific and ultimate aims to be reduced to sets of binary opposition, too attuned to animals' lives to use them univocally, these stories provide an education in wit. The Kaguru, like the Ashanti in their anansesem ("spider stories") and the Azande in their tales of Tore, the spider, understand that the intricate lies and outrages of their tricksters reveal the social order as sacred in its supple particularity. He has analyzed the complex ways that the Kaguru use Hare, Hyena, and other animals as metaphors, partly for the surface rules and patterns of their life, but much more for the deeper intuitions and meanings that make them, the Kaguru, who they are. In the first place, Africans have delighted in using animal tricksters to shape their children's "moral imagination," as T. Nevertheless, these barest beginnings have already demonstrated that the transforming power of the trickster -what the Yoruba refer to when they say that "E ṣu turns feces into treasure" -works in the present as well as in the primordial past. Rarely do we have the tales in their original languages, or in more than a single version, together with the indigenous commentary that would make deep translation and comparison more reliable. Tricksterlike myths and stories have emerged from many of their reports, but only a few collections of trickster tales have been gathered and examined within the context of their social and religious settings. Travelers, ethnographers, and, more recently, Africans themselves have studied hundreds of African societies. Such study is only now passing into its second phase. This observation may tell more about the history of Western colonialism and ethnography than it does about the tricksters of non-Westerners, but it does suggest that anyone who wants to know the trickster in Africa must study the particular ways and speech of many different African peoples. Unlike many tricksters elsewhere, however, these multiform world-shatterers and pathfinders in Africa are woven not only into the fabric of myth but also into the stuff of everyday life, playing a part in economics, rites of passage, and ordinary conversation. Like their counterparts in Amerindian myth and folklore, African tricksters inject bawdiness, rebellion, and wild lying (one might aptly call it polymorphous perversity) into the mythic history and the common experience of divine-human relations wherever they appear. Through it they strike up absurd conversations between laundresses and goddesses, sex and death, flatulence and spiritual power, breaking the univocal by the anomalous and so opening human life -bodily, daily, defined -to its sacramental immensity. African tricksters speak and embody a vivid, subtle language of sacred transformation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |