ABC 35. Head Body Legs

It's time to start a new month of books for #AnansiBookClub! You can see the February Calendar at the website, and you can also see all the Book Club posts from 2022 and 2023 here at the blog (and additional information at the website about previous months). To start things off this month, it's a writer we've read before here, Won-Ldy Paye, a storyteller from Liberia, and his collaborator, Margaret Lippert: Head Body Legs: A Story from Liberia.

And the wonderful illustrations are once again by Julie Paschkis. This particular folktale is perfect for visual storytelling, helping us to really SEE the strange situation that the story describes, when Head was all one, as were Arms, Body, and Legs. Here's where we first meet Head just rolling along:

You might recall a story from Somalia that we read earlier where "Head" was all on his own and was the hero of the story... but sadly, the author of that book, Elizabeth Laird, removed all of her books from the Internet Archive so you cannot read the story (I still can't get over my shock and disappointment about that), but I do have an illustration I can share from that earlier blog post: the story is "The Miraculous Head" in her book The Ogress and the Snake (which is out of print and not held by many libraries, but there are used copies out there at least for those with money to buy access).

Meanwhile, in Helen Nde's Twitter Space on Friday, she read a selection from Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-wine Tapster in the Dead's Town... and it resonated so much with this Liberian folktale, so I wanted to make sure to include that here! The story Tutuola tells is a "strange suitor" type of folktale, completely different from Paye's story here of how the body came to be, and what happens in Tutuola's story is like Paye's story in reverse: instead of how the body came to be, it's the story of how a body comes apart. It's an amazing story, like this entire novel! The story begins here: The Description of the Curious Creature, and things start getting very weird in this part: Return the Parts of the Body to the Owners; or, Hired Parts of the Complete Gentleman's Body to Be Returned. 

There are other African folktales with body parts as characters like in Head Body Legs, and one of my favorites is a Mpongwe story from Gabon is about Ear and Hands; it's an aetiological story about why mosquitoes buzz. You can read that story in Nassau's West african Folk Lore Tales: Why Mosquitoes Buzz. The story begins: "In the time of Long-Ago, in Njambi's town, Mosquito and Ear went out to take a bath together." I'd love to see Julie Paschkis illustrate this story too!

I also feel obliged to bring up a parallel from Aesop's fables, although it is nowhere nearly as imaginative and fun as "Head Body Legs." The Aesop's fable is one that would not really appeal to children (which is true of so many of Aesop's fables, which were never intended as children's stories to begin with), whereas "Head Body Legs" is a fun story for listeners of any age to imagine. The Aesop's fable is often called "The Belly and the Members," and it was made especially famous by being included in Shakespeare's play Coriolanus; it has its own Wikipedia article too (I laughed out loud to find myself in the footnotes of the article ha ha). You can find lots of versions in English here; here's a version as told by Joseph Jacobs with an illustration by Richard Heighway:

THE BELLY AND THE MEMBERS. One fine day it occurred to the Members of the Body that they were doing all the work and the Belly was having all the food. So they held a meeting, and after a long discussion, decided to strike work till the Belly consented to take its proper share of the work. So for a day or two, the Hands refused to take the food, the Mouth refused to receive it, and the Teeth had no work to do. But after a day or two the Members began to find that they themselves were not in a very active condition: the Hands could hardly move, and the Mouth was all parched and dry, while the Legs were unable to support the rest. So thus they found that even the Belly in its dull quiet way was doing necessary work for the Body, and that all must work together or the Body will go to pieces.

This illustration by John Tenniel (yes, the same Tenniel of "Alice in Wonderland") is more artistic, but still not likely to really inspire the reader's imagination:

I don't think even Julie Paschkis's illustrations could make this Aesop's fable a story that children would enjoy. Aesop was teaching a lesson about cooperation using the body's parts as a metaphor, yes, but without the same wild imagination or the positive direction that you will find in the Liberian folktale.

One of the things I really like about the way the authors and the illustrator work together is the way that the pictures themselves are doing part of the storytelling. For example, when Head, Arms, and Body are crossing the river, the text tells us that the current is strong (which would be hard to show in pictures), but the text does not tell us about the fish and, more importantly, the crocodile, which are there in the picture (click on the image for a larger view):

I'll finish up this blog post by including the two other books that Won-Ldy Paye, Margaret Lippert, and Julie Paschikis created together... and they are both available at the Internet Archive! And I like them both so much! Here are the previous blog posts about them: Talking Vegetables post and Mrs. Chicken post.

The Talking Vegetables

Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile

So, I hope you will enjoy Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret Lippert's books, ... along with all the great art by Julie Paschkis. Plus maybe you'll want to read Amos Tutuola also; you'll find several of Tutuola's books at the Archive. As usual, I'll be back each day this week with updates about the story, the art, along with information about other books by these storytellers. Enjoy!

Head Body Legs: A Story from Liberia

by Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret Lippert