African Folktales at Internet Archive: The Night Has Ears

Most of the books I'm featuring in this series of Internet Archive African folklore posts are books of folktales, but there are other genres I will want to feature also, such as riddles, and starting today: proverbs! Since I shared a riddle book illustrated by Ashley Bryan earlier — The House with No Door: African Riddle Poems — I thought I would start off the proverb books with one by Ashley Bryan also: The Night Has Ears. Thanks to the marvelous Internet Archive, the book is just a click away with digital lending:

As Bryan opens the book, he explains, "I grew up in a household of proverbs. My mother had a proverb ready for any situation, attitude, or event." (I'll note there that in Bryan's Beautiful Blackbird book, he used his mother's old sewing scissors to create the paper collages used as illustrations there!) Then, as he started doing research into African folktales, he kept finding references to proverbs everywhere. That's been my experience also; many stories include proverbs, and many of the people who collected African folktales also collected proverbs; the two genres go hand-in-hand. 

In this book, Bryan has done a beautiful job of pairing up illustrations and proverbs. Just like in the riddle book, the details of the drawings provide an occasion to think more deeply about the meaning of the proverb. For example, look at this beautiful page with the Yoruba proverb: Patching makes a garment last long. This type of proverb is literally true (which is not always the case with proverbs, like the proverbial watched pot)... but the real power of the proverb is in its application to many things, not just garments. This beautiful illustration of generations is a way to prompt about what it means for things to "last long" and why that is important, and how beautiful patching can be:

Folklorists who study proverbs are called "paremiologists" (from the Greek word for proverbs, paroimia παροιμία), and there is something they call "proverb literacy." Children who grow up surrounded by proverbs, as Ashley Bryan did, gain fluency in proverbs. Those children are able to understand proverbs, learn them, and use them independently. Over time, proverb literacy has been decreasing, and people of all ages find it increasingly hard to "get" what proverbs say, to understand the way that proverbs express meaning. I personally believe that teaching proverbial literacy is one of our most important tasks as educators. Books like this one by Ashley Bryan are a great contribution to that process!

The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs

collected and illustrated by Ashley Bryan

online lending link

I'm using labels at this blog to organize the blog posts, so you can also click on this label Author: Bryan to see the three different books of his that I've featured so far, and that is just the beginning (I am a huge fan of all his work): much more Ashley Bryan to come! I'll just add for now this short video at YouTube: it's Ashley Bryan in action!