creolizing anancy: signifyin(g) processes in new world spider tales

copy A Pepper-Pot of Cultures Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean ed Gordon Collier amp Ulrich Fleischmann (Matatu 27ndash28 Amsterdam amp New York Editions Rodopi 2003)

PASCALE DE SOUZA mdashmdashmdashmdashmdashmdashmdashmdashmdashmdashmdash

Creolizing Anancy Signifyin(g) Processes in New World Spider Tales

A web is a place and space of hybridity that creates by its very presence in the world (which is often invisible unseen a gossamer of the margins) new combinations and juxta-positions1

The Signifying Monkey he who dwells at the margins of dis-course ever punning ever troping ever embodying the ambi-guities of language is our trope for repetition and revision indeed is our trope for chiasmus itself repeating and simul-taneously reversing in one deft discursive act2

R O M NO V A SCO TI A TO B RA Z IL from the Carolinas to the tiniest Caribbean island Anancy the spider the quintesssential hero of traditional creole folklore weaves a Calibanesque web and spins a

1 Houston J Baker ldquoForewordrdquo to Joyce Jonas Anancy in the Great House Ways

of Reading West Indian Fiction (Westport CT Greenwood 1990) vii 2 Henry Louis Gates Jr The Signifying Monkey A Theory of Afro-American

Literary Criticism (New York Oxford UP 1988) 52

F

340 PASC ALE DE SOU ZA

Signifyin(g) discourse Taking his cue from West African origins but also from New World influences Anancy provides ldquoa tolerated margin of messrdquo3 stemming from a liminality which manifests itself both as a tale and in a tale As fluctuant as the spider which occasionally inhabits it the folktale is a form of expression not only shaped but deshaped and reshaped by cultural influ-ences whose every occurrence is a new creation As such this manifestation of creolization processes at play in the New World provides a fitting place for Anancy to spin his web of trickery

Anancy the spider emerges as a masterful trickster whose indeterminacy is revealed in the geographical location and functions he occupies within each tale as well as in the appearance and language he adopts to achieve his ends Dweller at the crossroads inhabitant of nooks and crannies Anancy is never in a specific enclosure yet never out Likewise he never fulfills a given role He is never quite a hero as he often employs the basest means to reach his goals even on the rare occasion when they are lofty His trickery makes him akin to a villain who preys upon the innocence of others to satisfy his cravings This ldquohero-scamprdquo as Roger Abrahams calls him at times pays a high price for his misdeeds when he is duped by a stronger force or a craftier trickster Hero villain dupe Anancy defies categories in order to retain his indeterminacy

Indeterminacy also characterizes Anancyrsquos physical appearance Like the spider Anancy is a creature that defies categorization He is sometimes por-trayed as a human being endowed with a spinning gift sometimes as a spider with human features male or female Lastly Anancy is aware of the protean nature of language and is forever punning to outwit other characters whether through downright lies or through more refined ways of using what Henry Louis Gates Jr has characterized as Signifyin(g) powers4 In his search for an intertextual grid to read African-American literature Gates draws both on the standard definition of signifying ndash carrying meaning to the surface ndash and on the African-American usage of the term Signifyin(g) ndash testing the ability of a word to bear conventional meanings ndash to posit a discourse of trickery Signi-fyin(g) is not a practice limited to African-Americans As the Jamaican writer Dennis Forsythe explains the ldquoAnancy art of lsquoMouthingrsquo of throwing words (or lsquomammy-guy-ingrsquo in Trinidad) and Anancy body-language techniques

3 Barbara Babcock ldquoA Tolerated Margin of Mess The Trickster and his Tales Reconsideredrdquo Journal of the Folklore Institute 2 (1975) 157

4 In The Signifying Monkey Gates chooses to underline the difference between signifying the standard use of the English word and Signifyin(g) the black use He places the lsquoyrsquo between parentheses to respect the Afro-American pronunciation of the word I retain this spelling here for the same reasons

Creolizing Anancy 341

hissing or sucking the teeth and of making lsquomonkey facesrsquordquo5 were all part of his Caribbean childhood

My purpose here will be to unravel the African continuities that can be traced in the New-World Anancy tales to underline the fluctuancy of the folktale as an art form and to demonstrate the indeterminate characteristics which enable Anancy to become a Signifyin(g) spider

African continuities In a study of West Indian folktales entitled Man-of-Words6 Abrahams argues against African retentions but for African continuities He characterizes the efforts made to establish with certainty a putative direct and specific link between black cultural expressions on either side of the Atlantic as a search for retentions which he sees as a fruitless endeavour He argues instead in favour of tracing continuities which bring to the fore a more diffuse African heritage while underlining the creolizing processes at play in the New World The routes followed by Anancy in his passage from Africa to the Americas provide such an example of continuities Anancy tales are found mostly in the countries of West Africa such as Ghana the Ivory Coast Sierra Leone Liberia Togoland and Dahomey Many slaves who either came from West Africa or awaited there a ship for their middle passage were sent to plantation colonies where Anancy strategies for survival would prove an enduring legacy Anancy stories have surfaced in former (or current) British planto-cratic colonies such as the Southern part of the USA and the English-speak-ing Caribbean islands ndash Antigua the Bahamas Dominica Jamaica St Lucia St Vincent Trinidad and Tobago ndash as well as former Dutch or Portuguese possessions such as Suriname and Brazil Anancy tales collected in non-plantation colonies such as Pennsylvania Nova Scotia or Honduras can be traced back to Caribbean informants who had migrated to new locales Anancyrsquos multiple journeys have spurred numerous variations in his tales all of which however bear traces of African continuities

For centuries West Africans lived in rigid hierarchical societies which faced chronic food shortages and had to develop coping strategies to deal with such conditions of life African slaves encountered similar situations in the New World as they were incorporated into a system which imposed a strict ethnosocial structure upon them and prevented them from obtaining the

5 Dennis Forsythe Rastafari for the Healing of the Nation (Kingston Zaika 1983) 225

6 Roger Abrahams The Man of Words in the West Indies Performance and Emer-gence of Creole Culture (Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins UP 1983)


nourishment needed to sustain a healthy life These characteristics serve to explain why so many African and African-American Anancy tales deal with a dearth of food (and occasionally other commodities such as women) which the trickster is trying to alleviate and why the latter is usually portrayed as a glutton who can never eat enough to satisfy his own hunger never seduce enough women to quench his sexual appetite and never be satisfied with his own underdog status

In African Myths and Tales Susan Feldmann argues that the African trick-sterrsquos amorality is not ldquothat of the anomic presocialized individual who has not yet matured to a sense of responsibility Suave urbane and calculating [he] acts with premeditation always in control of the situation though self-seeking his social sense is sufficiently developed to enable him to manipulate others to his advantagerdquo7 Her characterization applies equally to the Afro-American trickster In most tales Anancy compensates for his physical weak-nesses or lower social status with well-crafted premeditated acts of trickery Whether setting up a hoax rigging up a trap adopting various disguises or Signifyin(g) to reach his goal Anancy always displays a keen awareness of his victimsrsquo expectations which enables him to manipulate them at will

If most tales show him as being in control of the situation in occasional cases however he is caught red-handed Alan Dundes shows that African trickster tales usually turn on the breaking of an interdiction for which punish-ment is determined and assessed by the offenderrsquos group8 Such is the case in the New-World tales where Anancy does not escape unscathed Anancy is then cast out by the group flogged or beaten by his former victims in an attempt to preserve property and social cohesion

Anancyrsquos very nature serves to explain why his strategies involve ldquoa maxi-mization of short-term (economic) gain at the expense of long-term social cohesionrdquo9 If he were a figure tending towards social harmony the trickster would lose his status as an indeterminate figure no longer occupy the geo-graphical and social margins no longer be all at once hero villain and dupe no longer Signify in other words would no longer be a trickster Unlike

7 Susan Feldmann African Myths and Tales (New York Dell 1963) 15 8 Alan DundesldquoThe Making and Breaking of Friendship as a Structural Frame in

African Folktalesrdquo in The Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition ed Pierre Maranda amp Elli Koumlngaumlas Maranda (Philadelphia U of Pennsylvania P 1971) 181

9 Jay Edwards ldquoStructural Analysis of the Afro-American Trickster Talerdquo (1981) in Black Literature and Literary Theory ed Henry Louis Gates Jr (New York Methuen 1984) 92


European tales10 African and Afro-American tales thus end in disharmony in a world torn apart by the tricksterrsquos misdeeds a world where crops have been stolen animals slaughtered spouses cheated and where friends have become enemies11 Disharmony and disorder are the trademarks of the African and African-American tricksters

Creoles as Signifyin(g) languages When they came to the New World African slaves were submitted to a pro-cess of acculturation that was aimed at erasing the African languages and cultures to replace them with the language and culture of the plantation As Gates argues it is in the language itself as it is practised by the African dia-spora that one must look for the origins of Signifyin(g) African slaves may have lost their ability to use their native languages but never their skills in Signifyin(g) Indeed Signifyin(g) is an enduring legacy an African continuity which enabled uprooted Africans to survive slavery by creating a new lan-guage that was only partly understandable to the slaveholder and overseer Changes in the meanings of words ndash changes that sometimes amounted to complete transvaluation ndash were encouraged by the slavesrsquo social situation on the limen of a society which denied them humanhood In other words slaves used their deftness at Signifyin(g) to spin a new language out of systematic derision

The creole languages spoken in the regions of the New World that received slaves are all Signifyin(g) discourses aimed at ldquodecomposing and deportingrdquo12 the language of the other through double entendres puns verbal tricks and plurality of meanings It is relevant to note that while creoles derive most of their lexicon from the masterrsquos tongue be it French English Spanish or Dutch lexemes were not only deshaped but reshaped and their meaning often

10 Not only do most European tales end well but those which have a tendency not to

are adapted to fit the norm Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are never eaten or emerge unscathed from the wolfrsquos belly Little Pigs one and two are no longer eaten and the Little Mermaid gets her prince More generally the acceptability of a trickster hero is clearly a problem in Europe Edwards underlines ldquothe consistent nearly paroxysmal care taken by those who have edited the literary version of the trickster cycle of Reynard the Fox to divorce themselves from assigning anything but disapprobation to his apparently amoral and unpredictable performancesrdquo Jay Ed-wards The Afro-American Trickster Tale A Structural Analysis (Bloomington Indi-ana UP 1978) 3

11 Dundes ldquoThe Making and Breaking of Friendshiprdquo 175 12 MariendashDenise Shelton ldquoLiterature Extracted A Poetic of Daily Liferdquo Callaloo

151 (1992) 171


skewed as they were made to fit within an African-based grammatical grid and a creole setting This very approach to language Signifies the logocentric status quo that is often taken for granted To quote Carol Tennessen ldquoFrench like most modern Western discourse is logocentric that is it assumes that the word can yield immediate access to lsquotruersquo meanings Creole on the other hand makes no such claim in fact prefers to take detours instead of the straightforward pathrdquo13

African discontinuities In African tales Anancy is always portrayed as a male character an imperti-nent seducer who will use trickery and treachery to lure young women into his lair When married he repeatedly abuses his wifersquos trust preventing her from claiming her rightful share of food as in ldquoThe Bone Sweetrdquo (Jamaica) or lying to her to hide his laziness as in ldquoThe Master Tricksterrdquo (Nigeria) In the New World however Anancyrsquos sexual identity is more ambiguous In St Martin he is an old lady in the Carolinas a young woman in the Bahamas a young boy Male or female old or young Anancy does not appeal only to men or women only to the old or the young but stands as the epitome of survival for all

In Anancy in the Great House Joyce Jonas notes that

throughout Africa and the African diaspora in the New World folktales are told of the trickster Anancy ndash half-spider half-man ndash who though peren-nially in tight situations is singularly adept at turning the tables on his oppressor and emerging more or less unscathed His ability to extricate him-self lies in his gift with words his talent for spinning yarns14

Dundes Roberts and Colardelle however disagree with such a position and show that the African trickster is often punished for his deeds whereas in the Afro-American tales he rarely is Colardelle even concludes that Anancy tales in Africa are mostly used to convey a moral message Titles such as ldquoAnancy is put in his placerdquo (Ghana) ldquoSpider meets his matchrdquo (Ghana) ldquoSpider learns to listenrdquo (Ghana) and ldquoMonster flogs Spiderrdquo (Togo) do point to the ethical closure of several African Anancy tales Afro-American tales on the other hand most often foreground a spider which escapes punishment The condi-

13 Carol Tennessen ldquoAuthority and Resistance in Language From Michel Fou-

cault to Compegravere Lapinrdquo (doctoral dissertation University of WisconsinndashMil-waukee 1985) 89

14 Joyce Jonas Anancy in the Great House Ways of Reading West Indian Fiction (Westport CT Greenwood 1990) 2


tions of life under slavery explain such a shift Slaves needed a folk hero whom they could praise for his ability to defy more powerful forces rather than a figure punished for defying the given order Anancyrsquos perennial rebel-lion against social norms and his use of comic trickery made him an attractive figure of resistance for this downtrodden people His survival in folktales in the Americas attests to his capacity to weave new opportunities out of disrup-tion discontinuity and defeat In several tales however Anancy fails to reach his goal and is duped by another character His failure underlines the dangers inherent in letting onersquos guard down but serves also to emphasize the fact that Anancy remains unchastened and continues to spin his web of trickery ndash a powerful message for any listener faced with daunting obstacles

Indeterminacy of the medium The folktale owes its fluctuancy first and foremost to its oral nature Its orality enables it to fit the circumstances which surround its unraveling integrating geographical and other features as the storyteller uses topological or vegetal props to help him spin his tale meteorological features (in accounting for times of drought or rains) or temporal situation (in adapting his tale to the time of day) As Kandioura Drameacute remarks ldquothe folktale emerge as versatile artistic creations that are not only recyclable but highly transformationalrdquo15 It is interesting to note that whereas most European tales take place in bygone times African and Afro-American folktales provide the sense of an ongoing present which reinforces the multiplicity of the tale by foregrounding it in each occurrence African and Afro-American tales did not take place ldquoonce upon a timerdquo but rather unravel here and now with an opening call for re-sponse such as ldquoLa cour dortrdquo ldquoor ldquoKrikrdquo to ensure full audience participa-tion As Roger Abrahams concludes ldquoOral performance tends to focus on the concrete qualities of the here and now and on the practicalities and problems faced daily in the village or small-community contextrdquo16 This may explain the importance of the art of Signifyin(g) in folktales ndash not only here but most importantly so To talk directly would have been impossible in such small tight-knit communities without running the risk of breaking the community apart On the other hand indirect arguments that ldquogo round for longrdquo to use a phrase Abrahams borrows from African-American street talk would have been the most artful and effective form of speech In most cases the audience

15 Kandioura Drameacute The Trickster as Triptychrdquo in Monsters Tricksters and

Sacred Cows ed A James Arnold (Charlottesville UP of Virginia 1996) 237 16 Roger Abrahams African Folktales (New York Pantheon 1983) xix


is very familiar with the storyline of the tale down to its conclusion This familiarity however does not suggest immutability but rather fluctuancy as the storyteller and the audience are both freed from the dictates of imparting information and can avail themselves of the opportunity to celebrate the Signifyin(g) powers of language

Abrahams further notes that storytelling owes its vitality to two charac-teristic 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 interruption of call-and-response songs17

The delivery of the tale thus reflects on the extradiegetic level the trickery of the trickster since the storyteller must call upon his mastery of language to ensure that the community listens to the whole tale and must resist the critical commentary of the audience through Signifyin(g) As he is forever punning forever troping he reveals speech as an agency of both order and disorder

The Signifyin(g) potential of the story is however lost on any listener who is not part of the community and is all the more lost on any researcher who relies on a written transcription of the tale In an article entitled ldquoTricksters and Triptychsrdquo Drameacute draws a comparison between triptychs and trickster tales He argues that ldquowhile the outside of the panels is usually offered to everybodyrsquos gaze it is only during church rituals that the inside pictures spring to life when they are opened for the initiatesrdquo18 Likewise trickster tales are superficially open to everybodyrsquos gaze but their true meaning re-mains hidden to be revealed only during the performance of the tale to those who are aware of the lsquoinside panelsrsquo of the Signifyin(g) processes in play Drameacute traces the efforts made by a team of French researchers in the 1970s to create ldquoa simple rational and practical system whereby a complete index of African tales could be drawnrdquo19 based on a limited set of Dogon tales The complexity and monumentality of the task speak for themselves with respect to the eurocentric assumption that Africa can be reduced to a neat set of deter-minate signifiers preferably a lsquosimplersquo set The team experienced the full import of the difficulties inherent in creating a system to capture a fluctuant medium but never felt the tremendous impact of the indeterminacy of lan-guage of its Signifyin(g) nature because they relied on written accounts

17 Abrahams African Folktales 14 18 African Folktales 252ndash53 19 African Folktales 234ndash35 (my emphases)


often once removed from the language used (in the case of tales translated from a local language into French) sometimes twice removed (from a local language into English and then into French) It is revealing that even under such circumstances the African tales would not lend themselves to a practical index

In an article exploring ldquothe message in the mediumrdquo20 ME KroppndashDakubu endeavours to do justice to the versatility of the folktale by adopting an approach that is truer to the medium explored He works with three ver-sions of a tale (thereby tacitly acknowledging the existence of variants) one recorded on tape in Dagaare one written in Waale and one written in Asante and English By grounding his research on oral documents or ones written in the native language Dakubu is able to bring to the fore the importance of cul-ture in the weaving of different versions of the same plot thereby uncovering the palimpsestic meanings hidden within the language used in each tale as he reveals the folktale to be not just semantic but also polysemic

Anancy is King of Stories Anancyrsquos role as a trickster is paradoxically yet intimately linked with his role as a creator figure As Robert Pelton stresses the spider is ldquoa symbol of the liminal state itself and of its permanent accessibility as a source of recrea-tive powerrdquo21 His liminality as well as such characteristics as his ability to spin a web out of his own substance and his tendency to live in holes all helps explain why several peoples credit him with divine powers of creation The Kakas in Cameroon believe that his underground existence allows him access to ancestors and spirits hence his use in divination The Ashanti believe that their people was created by a large spider while among the Bambaras the spider represents the highest level of initiation In the New World the Jamai-can storyteller Louise Bennett aptly summarizes the creative role ascribed to Anancy ldquoEverything that happened in the world was started by Anancyrdquo22

Several African tales also underline Anancyrsquos ability to weave his way between gods and mortals In a Limba (Sierra Leone) story Kota and Yemi wish to seek wives in the land of the sky and Anancy takes them there In another tale he reaches into the kingdom of Death to secure food or revive

20 ME KroppndashDakubu ldquoWhy Spider is King of Stories The Message in the

Medium of a West African Talerdquo African Languages and Cultures 31 (1990) 33ndash56 21 Robert Pelton The Trickster in West Africa (Berkeley U of California P

1980) 35 22 Louise Bennett ldquoMe and Annancyrdquo in Walter Jekyll ed Jamaican Song and

Story (1907 New York Dover 1966) ixndashx ix


dead relatives In ldquoSpider and Deathrdquo (Togo) he goes to ask Death for food and avoids paying for this favour with his life by deluding other animals into taking his place in a Jamaican tale he retrieves his children from Deathrsquos hands and brings them back to life

But Anancy is not a benevolent god ndash he is a secular creature who ldquooperates in a real world where the hero cannot count on supernatural powers and clever cheating replaces magicrdquo23 As he knows neither good nor evil Anancy enables all values to come into being In ldquoSpider and the Calabash of Knowledgerdquo (Ghana) he brings knowledge to people while in ldquoHow diseases came to the Ashantirdquo (Ghana) he is responsible for the spread of various dis-eases His attempt to secure more power in various tales is often foiled by people who fear that an increase in his powers might lead to his causing yet more havoc In a Hausa tale from Nigeria he thus asks a woman whether she will grant him more cunning She agrees to do so if he brings the tears of a lion an elephant tusk and the skin of a dingo Once he has tricked all these animals into parting with the requested items however he is refused his prize because the woman fears that if he were taught more cunning he would destroy everybody

His divine powers of creation as well as his ability to move freely between the divine and the secular worlds lead Anancy to pursue enduring fame He secures the latter in several African tales by asking God to make all the stories previously told about God or ascribed to Him deal with Anancy and be called Anancy Stories According to the tale entitled ldquoWhy we tell stories about spiderrdquo (Ghana) Anancy obtains the divine privilege of having stories told about him after meeting Godrsquos request for a swarm of bees a python and a leopard which he coaxes or lures into various traps In another version of the tale Anancy goes to the chief of the gods Nyankupon to ask that all tales told by men might be known as Anansy stories instead of Nyankupon stories This particular tale helps account for Anancyrsquos popularity even in stories where he makes no appearance

Anancy lost none of his craving for fame on crossing the Atlantic Accord-ing to a Jamaican folktale Brer Tiger was king of the forest and had many things named after him such as Tiger lilies Tiger moths and Tiger stories Brer Anancy asks for the stories to bear his name and after catching a live snake for Tiger is granted his request Helen Flowers notes that ldquothe term Anansesem (spider stories) is used to refer to all storiesrdquo in the Caribbean24

23 Feldmann African Myths and Tales 17 24 Helen L Flowers A Classification of the Folktales of the West Indies Motives

and Motifs (New York Arno 1980) 5


Some scholars such as Walter Jekyll in Jamaican Song and Story and Velma Pollard the editor of Anansem25 a series of West Indian texts for young readers thus use the term to refer to various stories whether or not they feature Anancy

Among folktales none seem more indeterminate from an intradiegetic per-spective than the trickster tales Edwards argues that ldquosince each plot is ulti-mately unique the only thing that unites them is the ludic unpredictability of the trickster character himselfrdquo26 The adaptability of the oral tale told in a language born of Signifyin(g) processes combined with the indeterminacy of the trickster figure made trickster stories a perfect trope for the African dia-spora Anancy presents himself as a particularly salient example of indetermi-nacy whether one considers his geographical location his deftness at dis-guise his multiple roles or his uncanny mastery of Signifyin(g)

A creature of the limen Suspended by a thread of its own creation anchored to elusive points the spider creates the illusion that it can both walk upon the earth like other pedestrian animals and fly like birds Based on this ability several African and Afro-American tales explain how Anancy became a creature of the limen In ldquoAnansirsquos hat-shaking dancerdquo (Ghana) he goes bald as a result of vanity and hides his shame in the tall grass (a liminal area outside and yet close to the village enclosure) In several variants of the tale ldquoInside the Cowrsquos bellyrdquo (West Africa and the New World) he is pursued for a misdeed and runs away far enough to hide but close enough to keep on with his misdeeds Several West Indian tales explain how Anancy came to live in a liminal space such as the rafters of a house an outbuilding or a fence the most common location being the cassy-tree In ldquoAnancy and Brother Tigerrdquo (Jamaica) Anancy lets monkeys bear the blame for his stealing the tigerrsquos fat and hides on rooftops to avoid their wrath In ldquoMan Bwailrdquo (a tale told by a Jamaican immigrant in Honduras) Anancy tricks monkeys into jumping into a pot of water then boils them up He is tricked in return but escapes by hiding in dry leaves In ldquoThe end of nansirdquo (Jamaica) Anancy is a lazy overseer and a thief who has to hide in old sheds In ldquoTerycooma and Brer Nancyrdquo (Montserrat) Anancy hides in nooks and crannies for fear of Teecooma (Tucumi) while in ldquoIn the raftersrdquo (Ste Croix) and ldquoHurricane comingrdquo (St Thomas) he escapes

25 Walter Jekyll Jamaican Song and Story (New York Dover 1966) Velma

Pollard Anansesem (Kingston Jamaica Longman Caribbean 1985) 26 Edwards The Afro-American Trickster Tale 84


from Lion and hides under the eaves In ldquoFire testrdquo (Jamaica) he steals apples and flees into the cassy tree while in ldquoBone for a stumpldquo(Jamaica) he ends up there when Goat kicks him in retaliation for his trickery This geographical indeterminacy surfaces in contemporary stories featuring Anancy In ldquoAnancy beat panrdquo (Trinidad) a recent story by Paul KeensndashDouglas Anancy sits on a window-sill to watch his neighbourrsquos TV and eventually seeks refuge up a tree on a remote beach after having tricked various animals into participating in a steel pan competition for no pay Anancyrsquos liminal position enables him to be aware of social norms and avoid submitting to them He uses the infor-mation gathered from his vantage point for his own profit breaking rules and taboos in order to attain his objectives Anancy the socially peripheral or marginal becomes symbolically central and predominant by virtue of forever reconfiguring social norms It may even be argued that without him there would be no social order since ldquowithout deviance and marginality there could be no order classification or changerdquo27

Betwixt and between appearances Indeterminate physical appearance is another of Anancyrsquos salient features Unlike the image of the Monkey that of a spider does not immediately evoke the Signifyin(g) dimension of discourse As Gates argues Monkeyrsquos simian looks and talent for mimicry make him a perfect trope for Signifyin(g) The spiderrsquos appearance may make him an unlikely trope for the reversing pro-cesses involved in Signifyin(g) Yet Anancy ldquocomes across as a strange dis-gracious unpleasant creature half human and animalrdquo28 Anancy is often described as a human being endowed with ill-formed arms shoulders knees and legs He is either human or spider or both In one Uncle Remus story Anancy is a half-woman half-spider creature called Aunt Nancy In the Baha-mas Baacutenansi is a trickster and hero either boy man or monkey According to Louise Bennett

the way I learnt about Anancy I knew Anancy as a child and it was a joy-y-y-y We loved to listen to the stories we loved to hear about this little trickify man you know and one thing we knew that this man was magic and we

27 Zinta Konrad Ewe Comic Heroes Trickster Tales in Togo (New York Garland

1994) 143 28 Marcelle ColardellendashDiarrassouba Le liegravevre et lrsquoaraigneacutee dans les contes de

lrsquoOuest Africain (Paris Union Geacuteneacuteral drsquoEacuteditions 1975) 150 (my tr and emphasis)


could never be like him You know - he is a magic man He could spin a web and become a spider whenever he wanted to [laughter]29

Anancy does not content himself with a hybrid identity but dons various tem-porary disguises to further confuse other characters andor reach his objec-tives In ldquoAnanse is put in his placerdquo (Ghana) he coaxes various animals to follow his example and assume disguises in order to hide physical faults and seduce young women In ldquoPig an long-moutrdquo (Jamaica) he dresses up as a poor ragged old man a blind man a poor tear-up old lady a sore-footed boy and a little half-starving child all in order to get food from a rich gentleman In ldquoAnancy an crabrdquo (Jamaica) he dresses up as a girl to gain employment from an older woman In ldquoDis Yah one ya Balrdquo (Jamaica) he turns upside down to get into a party for free by tricking the blind man who is checking those seeking entry In ldquoHow Anancy went to fish countryrdquo (Jamaica) he dresses as a doctor to cure the blindness of Queen fish The same disguise serves a more lowly purpose in ldquoNancy gives a bathrdquo (Nevis) where he induces sick monkeys to jump into his pot or in ldquoThe Bone Sweetrdquo (Jamaica) when he convinces his wife that she must get her sick husband to eat a whole hog (or a goat) by himself In ldquoBird Cherry Islandrdquo (Jamaica Grenada and Cape Verde islands) he uses feathers to fly like a bird and reach the island where he will gorge on cherries while in ldquoBone for a Stumprdquo (Antigua) he turns into an ant to escape punishment for stealing food In ldquoAnancy and the kingrsquos daughterrdquo (St Vincent) he wins the kingrsquos daughter by turning himself into a cloud of smoke

In other tales Anancy uses disguises to ridicule or incriminate other char-acters In ldquoAnancy and Monkey Businessrdquo (Trinidad) Anancy decides to trick Monkey who is always strutting around flaunting his best clothes Anancy gives Monkey a lovely jacket lined with stinging ants and asks him to perform a wide array of tasks such as jumping rolling around moaning etc The other animals canrsquot believe their eyes when they see Monkey obey In ldquoLe mariage de Coqrdquo (French West Indies) he lends Coq his best clothes for his marriage but demands them back during the party thereby exposing Coqrsquos lack of any proper clothing of his own In ldquoAnancy and Monkeyrdquo (Jamaica) he is hired to watch over the white manrsquos sheep (a position that implies both geographical and social in-betweenness since he hovers around the sheep and occupies a half-way position between the white man and the black population) takes advantage of his position to steal some sheep then lures Monkey into wearing a sheep jacket which will incriminate him as the thief In ldquoTigerrsquos sheep skin

29 Quoted in Daryl Cumber Dance Folklore by Contemporary Jamaicans (Knox-

ville U of Tennessee P 1988) 12


suitrdquo (Jamaica) he similarly convinces Tiger to wear clothing that will point to him as the thief

When disguises do not suffice Anancy may pretend to be dead in order to reach his goals In ldquoSpiderrsquos funeralrdquo (Sierra Leone) and ldquoThe return of Anancyrdquo (Ghana) he feigns death respectively to obtain riches and to keep a whole bean crop to himself while in ldquoMock funeralrdquo (Bahamas Andros Island) he does so to catch and kill thieves

A poem by the Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey best illustrates Anancyrsquos hybridity and propensity to wear disguises

Anancy is a spider Anancy is a man Anancyrsquos West Indian And West African Sometimes he wears a waistcoat Sometimes he carries a cane Sometimes he sports a top hat Sometimes hersquos just a plain Ordinary black hairy spider Anancy is vastly cunning Tremendously greedy Excessively charming Hopelessly dishonest Warmly loving Firmly confident Fiercely wild A fabulous character Completely out of our mind And out of his too Anancy is a master planner A great user Of other peoplersquos plans He pockets everyonersquos food Shelter land money and more He achieves mountains of things Like stolen flour dumplings He deceives millions of people Even the man in the moon And he solves all the mysteries On earth in air under sea And always Anancy changes From a spider into a man And from a man into a spider


And back again At the drop of a sleepy eyelid30

Anancy spinning tales of trickery out of his mind stands as the epitome of resistance to the given order a creature out of ldquoourrdquo minds Coming from the forested countries of West Africa Anancy becomes a trope of marronnage escaping plantation life for the wooded hinterland of folktales Unlike the maroon however who often achieves heroic status through martyrdom Anancy escapes unscathed most attempts to stop his Signifyin (g) and spins ldquothe thread of his personality into the warp and woof of the national liferdquo31 not only in the Caribbean but in the African diaspora at large

Hero villain and dupe Indeterminacy manifests itself also in the various roles Anancy assumes in African and Afro-American folktales Unlike European tales where charac-ters are assigned a particular role and fulfil a set function African and Afro-American folktales depict Anancy as hero villain andor dupe occasionally within the same story When he assumes the role of hero his heroic deeds are always performed through trickery and thievery In ldquoHow Spider read the sky godrsquos thoughtsrdquo (Ghana) Anancy spies on the king to help his youngest son win a contest which will enable him to reign In ldquoTiger in wellrdquo (San Andreacutes Island Colombia) he saves Monkey from the grip of Tiger by convincing the latter that he must pray before eating He will often escape punishment by fooling another character into taking the blame In ldquoPots and Kinsrdquo (St Kitts) Anancy steals a pot which produces food and lets Tookerman be blamed for it In ldquoAnancy and Tigerrdquo (Jamaica) he steals the tigerrsquos fat and eats it before teaching the monkeys who thereby incriminate themselves In two Suri-namese tales Anancy burns a church or steals a watch and gets another animal into trouble for the act

Not only is his role as hero questionable on account of the deviousness of his means but when he does bring good to people he often does so inadver-tently or even worse by failing to reach his original selfish goal Denise Paulme concludes that one of the differences between the two great African tricksters Anancy and Hare is that the former is presented as the awkward neophyte whose tricks occasionally fail while Hare is the initiated or at least

30 Quoted in Parang A Poetry Anthology for Caribbean Primary Schools ed Cecil

Gray (Sunbury-on-Thames Nelson 1977) 14 31 Florence Cronise amp Henry W Ward Cunnie Rabbit Mr Spider and the Other

Beef (Chicago Afro-American Press 1969) 15


the good pupil who will succeed at the first attempt In ldquoSpider and the Cala-bash of Knowledgerdquo (Ghana) and ldquoAnancy and Common Senserdquo (Jamaica) Anancyrsquos attempt to keep knowledge to himself by preserving it in a calabash is foiled when he breaks it and knowledge spreads through the world In two other West African tales his disobeying of a witchrsquos magic fills the world with animals and his ignorance brings the hoe to men In ldquoSpider brings sorrel to peoplerdquo (West Indies) Anancy finds the sorrel bush but is unaware of its potential use The sorrel petals accidentally fall into boiling water turning it into a delicious drink which Anancy sells at the market not knowing yet whether or not the drink may be poisonous

Anancyrsquos original intention is never to benefit society as a whole As Wad-lington argues the trickster embodies two antithetical experiences of man with the natural world his society and his own psyche on the one hand a force of treacherous disorder that outrages and disrupts and on the other hand an unanticipated usually unintentional benevolence in which trickery is at the expense of inimical forces and for the benefit of mankind32 Paulme thus concludes of her study of Ture the Zande spider trickster (Central Africa) that the latter is

the benefactor to whom mankind is indebted for agriculture for water for the plants and for fire with which to cook them A rebel but also a civilizing hero Ture doubtlessly follows his natural penchant for disorder and opposi-tion by stealing these essential gifts which the spirits would try to hold on to he does not think of rendering services to men the whole point for him is in the trick thus played33

Were Anancy a lsquotruersquo hero displaying such qualities as honesty or courage he would forfeit his indeterminacy to fit one role and thereby lose the very foun-dation of his identity By doing good inadvertedly or against his best wishes he remains a creature of the limen

Other tales such as the popular ldquoInside Cowrsquos Bellyrdquo illustrate Anancyrsquos switch from the role of ldquohero-scamprdquo to that of villain In the tale two animals go into the cow to eat fat or meat but must not touch the heart or another internal organ such as the liver Once the taboo has been violated the animal dies and either the animal who entered second is punished or both trespassers What is striking in the variants of this tale is the fact that Spider

32 Warwick Wadlington The Confidence Game in American Literature (1972

Princeton NJ Princeton UP 1975) 33 Denise Paulme ldquoImpossible Imitation in African Trickster Talesrdquo in Forms of

Folklore in Africa ed Bernth Lindfors (Austin U of Texas P 1997) 71 (my empha-sis)


or another trickster can either be the one entering first issuing the taboo and occasionally escaping unscathed (the hero) or the one entering second break-ing the taboo and being punished (the villain)

Perceived as a villain by those whose taboo he has broken whose property he has infringed upon Anancy remains a hero for the downtrodden those who need to develop coping strategies As Leonard Barrett argues

Regardless of his treachery and cunning Ananci has those components which make him a folk-hero par excellence for elusive and nimble of spirit and witty of tongue he is representative of techniques of survival at their best34

Anancyrsquos appeal among slaves black Americans who have suffered systema-tic discrimination and the precarious micro-states whose economies are vulnerable to the vagaries of international capitalism lies in his being the epitome of survival holding out the hope that anyone can transcend the limitations of his condition

In several tales however Anancy fails to reach his goal His failure re-minds listeners that he does not enjoy divine powers and immunity but remains a creature of human frailty John Roberts argues that this particular aspect of the trickster tales played an essential social role serving to ldquoremind enslaved Africans not only of the value of behaviours that they associated with the trickster but also of the consequences of acting like the duperdquo35 Anancyrsquos lsquofailurersquo may be due to his desire to be different from or to emulate another character to revenge enacted by a former victim or to his inability to trick another trickster In a West African tale Anancy asks God for two extra legs to set him apart from the rest of the insectarthropod world When his wish is granted he is made to feel so ashamed of his new awkward appear-ance that he chooses to hide away In ldquoWanto and the snout of Naabarekardquo (Gbaya region) Anancy wants a snout like a fish but once given one is unable to eat in ldquoThe spider of Sarardquo (Chad) he tries to get pregnant swells up and bursts Paulme argues that ldquoone does not imitate with impunity one must bow to the rules know how to moderate onersquos desiresrdquo36 ndash a message of prime importance in a highly structured society Such tales would carry a similar message in a plantation society where mimicry was often rewarded by social improvement at the expense of onersquos identity

34 Leonard Barrett The Sun and the Drum (Kingston Jamaica Sangster 1976) 35 35 John W Roberts From Trickster to Badman The Black Folk Hero in Slavery

and Freedom (Philadelphia U of Pennsylvania P 1989) 38 36 Paulme ldquoImpossible Imitation in African Trickster Talesrdquo 71


Anancy may also be the target of revenge on the part of a former victim In the Ashanti tale ldquoAnansi and his visitorrdquo (Ghana) Anancy prevents Turtle from having her share of the food by asking him to go and wash his hands and eats all the food in Turtlersquos absence When invited for dinner at Turtlersquos table located at the bottom of the river he is asked to remove his jacket No longer heavy enough to remain on the bottom of the river he floats away from the table In other cases Anancy meets his match when another trickster uses the same tricks he used In ldquoNancy and honey-treerdquo (Antigua) Anancy is tricked by a magic tree which gives honey but then glues the thief He manages to set himself free then tricks other animals and eats them before being tricked by Monkey and turned into a spider In ldquoAnancy and Monkeyrdquo (Jamaica) he and his acolyte lure animals into their lair by fastening a rope around them until Monkey comes along and refuses to be pulled up These tales serve to remind the audience that there are dangers involved in tricking but also para-doxically that Anancy continues Signifyin(g) despite the odds

Occasionally Anancy will not be both hero and dupe within the same story but will take on different roles in variants of the same plot In ldquoSpoils the dogrdquo (Antigua) although both Dog and Anancy steal food only Anancy gets beaten as he is riding on Dogrsquos back In ldquoAnancy and the riding horserdquo (Africa the southern states of the USA Andros Islands Barbados the Virgin Islands Trinidad Jamaica Martinique Guadaloupe Antigua and Ste Croix) Anancy promises young women that he will trick a fierce animal into letting him ride on his back He manages to do so and rides triumphantly in front of them In the Ste Croix version however Anancyrsquos companion Tukerman mounts Anancy and in the Antiguan version Rabbit does so while in ldquoAnancy is riding-horserdquo (Jamaica) Anancy is not riding the horse but is the riding-horse ndash the one being duped

ldquoBird Cherry Islandrdquo (Southern US states the West Indies) offers another example of variants with role-reversal In one version of the tale Anancy bor-rows feathers from birds in order to fly to an island with fruit-trees where he eats all the fruit Despite being stripped of his feathers by the angry birds he manages to cross back to the mainland In ldquoThe Gift of Flightrdquo (variants in Africa and the New World) however Anancy is unable to return In yet an-other version he and an acolyte named Tacuma go to the island and gorge themselves on fruit Tacuma then asks Anancy for shelter for the night He eats all of Anancyrsquos eggs but makes him believe they are still all there Anancy can thus assume a multitude of roles the hero who manages to get the cherries the villain who tricks the birds out of their rightful share and the dupe who is tricked by Tacuma In a variant of one tale Anancy rises to the


heights of greatness but in the very next he cannot avoid being caught and is punished for the same greed or foolishness that motivated his earlier success

Whatrsquos in a name However important they may be geographical liminality multiple appear-ances and role-reversal are but superficial manifestations of an indeterminacy that is grounded in language Whether it be in the various names Anancy bears the lisp which affects his speech patterns or his constant use of verbal trickery language is the ultimate Signifyin(g) tool with which Anancy sub-dues stronger forces

When researching Anancy one is confronted with the issue of naming the spider trickster The existence of an array of names explains why I have chosen to respect the titles given by researchers for the folktales mentioned but have opted for simplicityrsquos sake to refer to him under the most com-monly accepted name of Anancy His various names in African tales can be accounted for by the different languages spoken in the countries where he appears His aliases range from Ture among the Zande Djakocirclecirc among the Beacuteteacute Kendebba among the Agni-Baouleacute Kakou Ananzegrave among the Agni Kweku Ananse among the Akan to Anansi Ananse or Ananzegrave among the Ashanti The multitude of Ashanti spider tales as well as the extensive slave trade from Ghana may explain why the names for the spider in African-American folktales bear such a striking resemblance to the names recorded among the Ashanti

Even though English is spoken by a majority of the population in most of the New-World countries where Anancy may be found names still vary greatly Anancy can be found in Nova Scotia as Nanacy Nancy Brer Nancy or Brother Nancy in the Carolinas as Ann Nancy or Miss Nancy in Jamaica as Hanansi Anansi or Nansi in Curaccedilao as Nanzi in St Martin as Ahnancy in the Bahamas as Baacutenansi Nansi Boy Nasty or Gulumbanansi in one Uncle Remus tale Aunt Nancy a creature who is half woman half spider In one and the same story Anancy may also be called Anansi Nansi Buh Nansi and Compeacute Anansi He thus draws from both the African and the English or French language ndash Anancy Brother Nancy Compeacute Anansi ndash to adapt to the language spoken by storyteller and listeners The same argument may be made regarding his accomplice who is variously portrayed as his companion his wife or his son and can such variant names as Tacoma Tacomah Tukoma Tukuma Tookerman Tookerman Terycooma Whereas a single name would have been an indication of a set or consensual identity the


multiplicity of names points to Anancyrsquos (and Tacomarsquos) ability to assume any identity that suits him

Lies and secret words In most tales Anancy manipulates language to his benefit simply by lying to humans or animals In ldquoSpider the Swindlerrdquo (Ghana) he coaxes a crocodile into telling him what his weakest spot is and uses the information to kill him In ldquoSpider the artistrdquo (Ghana) he offers to paint the tongue of his dupes and when the animals have become sufficiently weakened by waiting for the design to dry he eats them up Anancy may elsewhere display a reversed ability to [mis]use language when he reveals the names that gods and kings try to keep secret from humans In the Ashanti tale ldquoHow Spider read the sky godrsquos thoughtsrdquo (Ghana) Anancy disguises himself as a bird and then flies within earshot of the sky god to discover the name for the yam the god is thinking of The issue is not merely that of identifying the yam but of accurately naming it Anancy then shares the information with the youngest son of the god who reveals the name of the yam and thus succeeds his father In ldquoOutwitting to learn a namerdquo (Antigua) Brer Nancy will only share his yam with his family if they can name it In ldquoYung-kyum-pyungrdquo (Jamaica) Anancy has to find the names for the kingrsquos three daughters a feat which enables him to marry the youngest of them while in ldquoAnancy and Lizardrdquo (Jamaica) Anancy guesses the secret name of the kingrsquos daughter and pre-vents Lizard from revealing his trick by making him eat hot porridge (which is why Lizard is constantly moving his head up and down in pain)

Such tales remain but a lesser clue to Anancyrsquos Signifyin(g) powers Claudia MitchellndashKernan argues that labelling a particular utterance Signi-fyin(g) draws attention to its metaleptic content as it involves ldquothe recog-nition and attribution of some implicit content or function which is poten-tially obscured by the surface content or functionrdquo37 Aware of the metaleptic nature of language Anancy is able to turn the apparently least deceptive words numbers into deadly weapons In ldquoThe Most Powerful Namerdquo (Nigeria) Anancy uses the analogy between the words for God and the num-ber six to kill and eat various animals Tricked into saying ldquosixrdquo each animal immediately dies for having dared utter Godrsquos name In ldquoAnancy and the yam hillsrdquo (Jamaica) Anancy makes five yam hills and asks various animals to count them Each one falls dead five being the name of the Queen which no

37 Claudia MitchellndashKernan ldquoSignifyingrdquo in Mother Wit from the Laughing Bar-

rel ed Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs NJ PrenticendashHall 1973) 314


one may say without dying Whole sentences can serve the same purpose as numbers and induce the demise of various characters as in ldquoThe Yam Farm and the Problem Tonguerdquo (Ghana) where Anancy kills some farmers to steal their yams or in ldquoThe Stone with Whiskersrdquo (Sierra Leone) ldquoThe Noble Adowardquo (Ghana) and ldquoSpider and Ratrdquo (Togo) where he kills some animals to eat them

Spinning a Signifyin(g) discourse however is an art to be performed with the utmost care Anancy must at times fall into his own verbal trap ndash other-wise he would become the undisputed god of language and cease to be a trickster Tales abound in which Anancy forgets the magic word or himself utters the deadly number or sentence In ldquoSpider the wild boards and the old womanrdquo (Agni region) Anancy steals a magic knife which cuts all his enemiesrsquo heads but he does not know how to stop it and is in turn beheaded In ldquoSpider and Turtledoverdquo (Agni region) Turtledove weaves a flying basket and uses it to collect food Anancy does the same but forgets the words to make it stop flying In ldquoThe Enchanted Loomrdquo (Ghana) Anancy is so eager to get cloth that he forgets the words for stopping the magic loom and is spun away to Europe In ldquoSpider propels animals from a treerdquo (Togo) and ldquoSpider and Ratrdquo (Togo) Anancy falls into his own trap when he is made to pronounce the number ldquosevenrdquo and dies Likewise in ldquoAnancy and the yam hillsrdquo (Jamaica) Anancy loses his patience with Guinea fowl which will not count to five and himself becomes the dupe when he says the dreaded word In a variant of the same tale called ldquoWhy people now eat rabbitrdquo (Jamaica) the roles are reversed Rabbit plays the figure game on animals (ten is the magic number) until Anancy comes along and tricks him In ldquoWheelerrdquo (Jamaica) ldquoAnancy and honey treerdquo (Antigua) ldquoWheel me back Mr Wheelerrdquo (Dominica) and ldquoCaught in his own traprdquo (Ste Croix) Anancy finds a stump by the riverside and discovers an object inside which when prompted by the right sentence will sling the user over great distances He survives the ordeal and tricks other animals before being fooled himself In the Jamaican variant ldquoFling-a-milerdquo Anancy puts his hand into a hole is flung away and tricks other animals before being outwitted by Monkey Anancyrsquos use of discourse in the aforementioned tales point to the non-referential nature of language its metaleptic content which may harm or even kill the uninitiated or unwary Because they read language on the sur-face level without any consideration for double entendres farmers and animals fall prey to Anancy Because he forgets the palimpsestic layer of meaning Anancy falls prey to his own discourse

Two other Anancy tales point to a somewhat different use of Signifyin(g) Taking advantage of his opponentrsquos idosyncracies Anancy is able to make


him fall into a trap which in effect was just waiting to be set In ldquoAnancy and Hate-to-be-contradictedrdquo (Ghana) Anancy manages to have the latter contra-dict himself then punishes him by cutting him up into pieces In ldquoAkwasi-the-jealous-onerdquo (Ghana) Anancy tricks the latter into letting him sleep with his wife Aso by telling him his name is ldquoRise up and make love to Asordquo When called by his supposed name Anancy is happy to oblige his host

Anancy today Jonas notes that the eagerness of university students to research Anancy tales is at marked variance with the reality that these are slowly disappearing Gates likewise points out that ldquofew black adults can recite an entire Monkey talerdquo38 Anancy however survives in the Signifyin(g) discourses of the Afri-can diaspora through various art forms such as traditional and modern folktales music and literature Anancy still inspires contemporary storytellers such as Bernard Dadieacute in West Africa and Paul KeensndashDouglas in the Carib-bean as well as folktale writers such as Andrew Salkey from Jamaica All spin stories which feature Anancy up to his traditional tricks living on thresholds adopting various disguises Signifyin(g) his way through life In ldquoAnancy beat panrdquo (Trinidad) Paul KeensndashDouglas demonstrates Anancyrsquos ability to adapt to present cultural conditions in Trinidad as Anancy applies his trickery to acquire a steel pan for free and enter a steel-pan contest Andrew Salkey has made his Anancy into a physical and metaphorical spiderman deeply involved in the continuing struggles throughout the Third World39 In Anancyrsquos Score he continues the tradition of spider tales by introducing contemporary topics into stories such as ldquoVietnam Anancy and the black tuliprdquo or ldquoAnancy the atomic horserdquo

Anancy also spins his way into poetry pantomime and theatre Edward Brathwaite (Barbados) has incorporated him in several of his poems in Islands40 Sylvia Wynter (Jamaica) has written a pantomime entitled Rock-stone Anancy while Stafford Harrison (Jamaica) has completed a play called Anansi and Unsung Heroes out West performed at the Ward Theatre King-ston in October 1978 Perhaps more importantly Anancy continues to weave his way into the fabric of Afro-American life through childrenrsquos books The poem by Salkey quoted in full above appeared in an anthology for primary

38 Gates The Signifying Monkey 76 39 Andrew Salkey Anancyrsquos Score (London Bogle LrsquoOuverture 1973) back page 40 Edward Brathwaite Islands (London Oxford UP 1969) Wynterrsquos and Har-

risonrsquos works are unpublished


school children while Velma Pollard edited a collection of Caribbean folk-tales legends and poems for juniors under the title Anansesem and P Duh-gam published a West Indian colouring and vocabulary book called Island Hopping with Anancy41 Only some of the pieces published in Anansesem feature Anancy up to his usual tricks In Island Hopping Anancy is the main character a wanderer with no fixed abode pictured on each page as hiding in the bushes in the trees or behind a stump He goes island hopping to intro-duce various animals to be found around the Caribbean under the different names they bear Anancyrsquos presence in publications for children indicates his enduring presence in the Afro-American world and the likelihood that he will endure for generations to come

A poetics of Anancism In Signifyin(g) other texts whether the Otherrsquos or each otherrsquos African-American authors not only spin new narrative strategies but to use Gatesrsquos words embody through their punning and troping the ambiguities of lan-guage

Music and literature offer particularly fertile grounds for the exploration of Signifyin(g) processes Gates has outlined the Signifyin(g) nature of jazz 42 Likewise reggae calypso and zouk all illustrate Signifyin(g) processes at play Bob Marley Sparrow and Kassav all use not only words but also musi-cal scripts to re-read the Otherrsquos texts from religious hymns to traditional songs Even the creation of an instrument in itself such as the steel pan may be perceived as a Signifyin(g) process Born of the oil drums left behind by the Americans in Trinidad and Tobago its origins and current uses as accom-paniment for calypsoes point to the ability of its creators and users to turn the propensity of the Other to elicit riches from Caribbean soils and the Otherrsquos tongue into powerful Signifyin(g) modes of discourse

In The Signifying Monkey Gates traced a Signifyin(g) tradition back to EsundashElegbara the double-faced Ashanti god of indeterminacy and offered various Signifyin(g) readings of African-American literary texts ranging from slave narratives to Alice Walkerrsquos The Color Purple A similar poetics of Anancism emerges from reading Anancy tales Borrowing from Bakhtin one could argue that Anancy stands for ldquodialogized heteroglossiardquo a ldquolin-guistic homelessnessrdquo that results in ldquoa verbal and semantic decentering of

41 P Duhgam Island Hopping with Anancy (Kingston Kingston Publishers 1986) 42 Gates The Signifying Monkey 69


the ideological worldrdquo43 He spins a mythohistorical web of trickery ldquoa place and space of hybridity that creates by its very presence in the world (which is often invisible unseen a gossamer of the margins) new combina-tions and juxtapositionsrdquo44 for reading musical and literary discourses within the whole African diaspora thus revealing and revelling in infinite creolization processes WORKS C I TED

Abrahams Roger African Folktales (New York Pantheon 1983) mdashmdash The Man of Words in the West Indies Performance and Emergence of Creole

Culture (Baltimore MD Johns Hopkins UP 1983) Babcock Barbara ldquo lsquoA Tolerated Margin of Messrsquo The Trickster and his Tales

Reconsideredrdquo Journal of the Folklore Institute 112 (1975) 147ndash86 Baker Houston J Anancy in the Great House (Westport CT Greenwood 1990) Bakhtin Mikhail M The Dialogic Imagination tr amp ed Michael Holquist (Austin U

of Texas P 1981) Barrett Leonard The Sun and the Drum (Kingston Jamaica Sangster 1976) Bennett Louise ldquoMe and Annancyrdquo in Walter Jekyll Jamaican Song and Story

(1907 New York Dover 1966) ixndashx Brathwaite Edward Islands (London Oxford UP 1969) ColardellendashDiarrassouba Marcelle Le liegravevre et lrsquoaraigneacutee dans les contes de lrsquoOuest

Africain (Paris Union Geacuteneacuterale drsquoEditions 1975) Cronise Florence amp Henry W Ward Cunnie Rabbit Mr Spider and the Other Beef

(Chicago Afro-American Press 1969) Dance Daryl Cumber Folklore by Contemporary Jamaicans (Knoxville U of Ten-

nessee P 1988) Drameacute Kandioura ldquoThe Trickster as Triptychrdquo in Monsters Tricksters and Sacred

Cows Animal Tales and American Identities ed A James Arnold afterword by Derek Walcott (New World Studies Charlottesville UP of Virginia 1996) 230ndash54

Duhgam P Island Hopping with Anancy (Kingston Jamaica Kingston Publishers 1986)

Dundes Alan ldquoThe Making and Breaking of Friendship as a Structural Frame in Afri-can Folktalesrdquo in The Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition ed Pierre Maranda amp Elli Koumlngaumlas Maranda (Philadelphia U of Pennsylvania P 1971) 171ndash85

Edwards Jay The Afro-American Trickster Tale A Structural Analysis (Bloomington Indiana UP 1978)

43 Mikhail Bakhtin The Dialogic Imagination (Austin U of Texas P 1981) 366 44 Baker ldquoForewordrdquo to Anancy in the Great House vii


mdashmdash ldquoStructural Analysis of the Afro-American Trickster Talerdquo (1981) in Black Literature and Literary Theory ed Henry Louis Gates Jr (New York Methuen 1984) 81ndash103

Feldmann Susan African Myths and Tales (New York Dell 1963) Flowers Helen L A Classification of the Folktales of the West Indies Motives and

Motifs (New York Arno 1980) Forsythe Dennis Rastafari For the Healing of the Nation (Kingston Jamaica Zaika

1983) Gates Jr Henry Louis The Signifying Monkey A Theory of Afro-American Literary

Criticism (New York Oxford UP 1988) Gray Cecil ed Parang A Poetry Anthology for Caribbean Primary Schools (Sun-

bury-on-Thames Nelson 1977) Jekyll Walter ed Jamaican Song and Story intro Philip Sherlock Louise Bennett amp

Rex Nettleford (1907 New York Dover 1966) Jonas Joyce Anancy in the Great House Ways of Reading West Indian Fiction intro

Houston J Baker (Westport CT Greenwood 1990) Konrad Zinta Ewe Comic Heroes Trickster Tales in Togo (New York Garland

1994) KroppndashDakubu ME ldquoWhy Spider is King of Stories The Message in the Medium of

a West African Talerdquo African Languages and Cultures 31 (1990) 33ndash56 MitchellndashKernan Claudia ldquoSignifyingrdquo (1971) in Mother Wit from the Laughing

Barrel ed Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs NJ PrenticendashHall 1973) 310ndash28 Paulme Denise ldquoImpossible Imitation in African Trickster Talesrdquo in Forms of

Folklore in Africa ed Bernth Lindfors (Austin U of Texas P 1997) 64ndash103 Pelton Robert The Trickster in West Africa (Berkeley U of California P 1980) Pollard Velma Anansesem (Kingston Jamaica Longman Caribbean 1985) Roberts John W From Trickster to Badman The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and

Freedom (Philadelphia U of Pennsylvania P 1989) Salkey Andrew Anancyrsquos Score (London Bogle LrsquoOuverture 1973) Shelton MariendashDenise ldquoLiterature Extracted A Poetic of Daily Liferdquo Callaloo 151

(1992) 167ndash78 Tennessen Carol ldquoAuthority and Resistance in Language From Michel Foucault to

Compegravere Lapinrdquo (doctoral dissertation University of WisconsinndashMilwaukee 1985)

Wadlington Warwick The Confidence Game in American Literature (1972 Prince-ton NJ Princeton UP 1975)

v


Signifyin(g) discourse Taking his cue from West African origins but also from New World influences Anancy provides ldquoa tolerated margin of messrdquo3 stemming from a liminality which manifests itself both as a tale and in a tale As fluctuant as the spider which occasionally inhabits it the folktale is a form of expression not only shaped but deshaped and reshaped by cultural influ-ences whose every occurrence is a new creation As such this manifestation of creolization processes at play in the New World provides a fitting place for Anancy to spin his web of trickery

Anancy the spider emerges as a masterful trickster whose indeterminacy is revealed in the geographical location and functions he occupies within each tale as well as in the appearance and language he adopts to achieve his ends Dweller at the crossroads inhabitant of nooks and crannies Anancy is never in a specific enclosure yet never out Likewise he never fulfills a given role He is never quite a hero as he often employs the basest means to reach his goals even on the rare occasion when they are lofty His trickery makes him akin to a villain who preys upon the innocence of others to satisfy his cravings This ldquohero-scamprdquo as Roger Abrahams calls him at times pays a high price for his misdeeds when he is duped by a stronger force or a craftier trickster Hero villain dupe Anancy defies categories in order to retain his indeterminacy

Indeterminacy also characterizes Anancyrsquos physical appearance Like the spider Anancy is a creature that defies categorization He is sometimes por-trayed as a human being endowed with a spinning gift sometimes as a spider with human features male or female Lastly Anancy is aware of the protean nature of language and is forever punning to outwit other characters whether through downright lies or through more refined ways of using what Henry Louis Gates Jr has characterized as Signifyin(g) powers4 In his search for an intertextual grid to read African-American literature Gates draws both on the standard definition of signifying ndash carrying meaning to the surface ndash and on the African-American usage of the term Signifyin(g) ndash testing the ability of a word to bear conventional meanings ndash to posit a discourse of trickery Signi-fyin(g) is not a practice limited to African-Americans As the Jamaican writer Dennis Forsythe explains the ldquoAnancy art of lsquoMouthingrsquo of throwing words (or lsquomammy-guy-ingrsquo in Trinidad) and Anancy body-language techniques

3 Barbara Babcock ldquoA Tolerated Margin of Mess The Trickster and his Tales Reconsideredrdquo Journal of the Folklore Institute 2 (1975) 157

4 In The Signifying Monkey Gates chooses to underline the difference between signifying the standard use of the English word and Signifyin(g) the black use He places the lsquoyrsquo between parentheses to respect the Afro-American pronunciation of the word I retain this spelling here for the same reasons























151 (1992) 171






















































































































































v























151 (1992) 171






















































































































































v






















































































































































v

creolizing anancy: signifyin(g) processes in new world spider tales

Documents