ABC 21: A Story, A Story

It's time for the second book in our October calendar for Anansi Book Club (plus you can see all the Anansi Book Club posts at this blog). This week we're reading A Story, A Story: An African Tale, written and illustrated by Gail Haley.

In fact, there are multiple copies of the book available, so if one copy is checked out, just click on one of the others!

This book was published in 1970, and it was the Caldecott Medal winner for 1971. You can see why; the illustrations for this Anansi story are beautiful. Haley has opted to depict Anansi in his human form; here he is with Leopard.

The story is the famous tale of Spider's quest to make all the stories his own. I hope you will enjoy Spider's adventure, and I'll be back each day with more comments and thoughts about the story, starting with this video at the Internet Archive, an old educational video made from this book way back in 1973: A Story, A Story.

While this book is best known because of the artwork (that's why it won the Caldecott), my favorite thing is actually Haley's careful use of language to try to recreate, to at least some degree, the oral storytelling tradition from which this book emerges. In her preface to the book, for example, she explains about one of the use of repetitions in the story: "For example: "So small, so small, so small," means very, very, very small."

My favorite thing is her use of ideophones, which are not just a distinctive feature of African storytelling but of African languages themselves. Here are just a few of the ideophones that you will find in the book: "Ananse ran along the jungle path — yiridi, yiridi, yiridi..." and "he crept through the tall grasses — sora, sora, sora" as you can see here, where Ananse is creeping through the grasses to play his trick on the hornets in their nest (click on the image for a larger view):

For more about ideophones in African and in African American storytelling, see the essay by anthropologist Florence Baer about the persistence of African ideophones in the Brer Rabbit stories retold by Joel Chandler Harris,"The Accidental Folklorist," which specifically mentions the "yiridi yiridi yiridi" of Akan storytellers (click image for larger view):

There is also an article about ideophones at Wikipedia although the African section of the article is very poorly developed; for more, see the chapter by Tucker Childs on African Ideophones in Sound Symbolism which you can read at the Internet Archive. Just to get a sense of the extraordinary range of ideophones, here are a few different ideophones for the sound of falling rain as expressed in the Kisi language of western Africa:

So, it's a long way from Haley's children's book to this technical linguistic paper by Childs, but if you want to learn about ideophones, I urge you to read it; although the intended audience is academic linguists, the paper is very readable and very eye-opening too. Storytellers can learn a lot here about weaving ideophones into your language, just as Haley did for this book.

Another nice storytelling feature that Haley uses to re-create a traditional oral storytelling scene is the use of the formulaic introduction that transitions into the story world, and then a closing formula that marks the end of the story. Different storytelling cultures use different formulas like these, even English with its "Once upon a time..." and "...they all lived happily ever after." Here are the formulas that Haley uses:

We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. A story, a story; let it come, let it go.

This is my story which I have related. If it be sweet, or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me.

And of course it is from that opening formula that Haley got the title for the book! If you're interested in learning more about these storytelling formulae, here's a nice article to peruse at the Paris Review: “Once Upon a Time” and Other Formulaic Folktale Flourishes by Anthony Madrid. :-)

The story that Haley is retelling here about how Anansi won all the stories is a very widely told tale, and it's just one of many examples of a tale type sometimes called "trickster seeks endowments," which is widely known both in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. A great way to see many (MANY) examples of this tale type is in William Bascom's brilliant book, African Folktales in the New World, which has a whole chapter devoted to this type: Trickster Seeks Endowments. And yes, it's just a click away at Internet Archive!

I personally think it's great to look at other versions of the "same" folktale type so that you can then appreciate the distinctive qualities of each one!

For the last update to the post, I wanted to share some information about the author and artist: Gail Haley was born in 1939, so she is now in her early 80s and living in North Carolina. You can find out more about her at Wikipedia and at her website. She is also a puppeteer and a collector of masks, which inspired this book: Go Away, Stay Away which you can also read at the Internet Archive. In the afterword to the book, Haley describes driving-out-demon festivals around the world, and in this book she focuses on the way that type of festival was observed as a spring cleansing ritual in European countries like Switzerland and Austria, etc.

Plus there are more books by Gail Haley there, all just a click away. If you enjoyed her Ananse story book, maybe you will want to explore some of her other work!

A Story, A Story: An African Tale

by Gail Haley