ABC 3. The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs

I am super-excited about this week's book (see all the May books) because it relates to something I love just as much as traditional folktales... and that is: traditional proverbs. For the coming week, we'll be enjoying this beautiful book, illustrated by Ashley Bryan, where each proverb has its own lovely illustration: The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs. Maybe you will want to tweet your favorite proverbs from this book... or other favorite African proverbs. Use the #AnansiBookClub hashtag if you do. :-)

As Ashley Bryan explains in the introduction, his mother was an endless source of proverbs growing up, and then when he was investigating African folklore (see this post for more), he started collecting the proverbs that he found. This book contains some of his favorite problems, with his distinctive illustrations that really help bring the proverb to life. There's not a detailed bibliography, but he includes a cultural provenance with each proverb. For example: A log may lie in the water for ten years, but it will never become a crocodile. I love how Bryan uses the illustration to suggest the way that a log might ... might ... be crocodile-ish, but nothing compared to a real crocodile. This is a saying of the Songhay people of western Africa.

It only takes a few minutes to read through the text of this book, but if you ponder the proverbs and look at the details of the art, you might find yourself spending a lot of time with this book. It is time well spent in my opinion! I'll update this post throughout the week with some more African proverb resources too. In the meantime, enjoy!

The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs

by Ashley Bryan

There is a wealth of African proverb resources at the Internet Archive if you are interested in learning more; I'll be updating this blog post for the rest of the week with some of those resources!

One resource is a big book (BIG: almost 1500 pages!) that I created by stitching together different public domain collections of African proverbs: African Proverbs and Riddles. The sources were published between 1854 and 1926, reporting on proverbs from a wide variety of African cultures.

As you see in that collection, the folklore genres of proverbs and riddles are often studied in common, and just as many African cultures abound in proverbs, they abound in riddles too. Riddles are often harder to translate than proverbs, as they can depend on word play (whereas proverbs rely as much on ideas and imagery as on word play), but there are still some riddles that are very translate-able, so I wanted to share this collection of African riddles in English...... illustrated by Ashley Bryan! The book is The House with No Door by Brian Swann, and it's just a click away at the Internet Archive. You can read more about the book here.

A really fun thing about illustrated riddles is that the illustration can give you a hint about at least one way to solve the riddle (many riddles, of course, can be interpreted in ways that allow multiple creative solutions). 

For example: I stepped on it; it stepped on me.

Or: Trousers rolled to his knees, the prince dashes about in his many-colored coat made without thread.

Just as with the proverbs, Bryan's illustrations help you to find more meaning in the words... do you see the water in the first riddle's picture? And look at the rooster in the second picture. I especially like the way how the human prince in the picture has his trousers rolled to his kneeds too, even though his many-colored coat is made with thread.

Bilingual African Proverbs. Bryan's book is in English only, but if you would like to read a book of African proverbs that includes the original languages and the English translation, a great choice is Dianne Stewart's Wisdom from Africa: A Collection of Proverbs. 

Dianne Stewart is a South African writer (more about her folktale books), a speaker and teacher of Xhosa, who also studied African languages at university. Here's what the proverbs look like in the book: the original proverb with information about its cultural context, the translation, plus some commentary too.

If you are interested in the idea of combining proverbs with images, then here's a remarkable book you can find at the Internet Archive: Kofi Asare Opoku's Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa with illustrations by Dindga McCannon. 

The proverbs appear in English without any specific cultural attribution but the illustrations make the book absolutely worth your time! For example, The hand of the child cannot reach the shelf, nor can the hand of the adult get through the neck of a gourd.

And here's the one that inspired the title of the book: If you want to speak to God, speak to the winds.

And you can find out more about the remarkable Dindga McCannon in this NYTimes article: The World Catches Up With Dindga McCannon.

And to finish up the week, I would strongly encourage you to watch this amazing documentary about Ashley Bryan; it's just $4 to rent from Vimeo. What an amazing man, and what an amazing life!

I Know a Man ... Ashley Bryan