African Folktales at Internet Archive: The House with No Door

Yesterday's African folklore book from the Internet Archive was pretty heavy-duty stuff (the Sierra Leone folktales told in dialect from Cronise's Cunnie Rabbit), so for today's story I've opted for something lighter: a lovely book of riddles by Brian Swann, and illustrated by Ashley Bryan (whose Beautiful Blackbird book I posted about last weekend): The House with No Door. These African riddles are just a click away with digital lending from Internet Archive!

The book is set up with riddles on pages with beautiful illustrations, and often the illustrations is providing a hint about a possible answer to the riddle — although as the author notes, there are often many answers to a riddle. In the back of the book you will find a list of possible answers to all the riddles, although with a detailed bibliography for the riddle sources. The riddles come from many different tribal traditions across Africa, and they were published in academic journals that most readers don't have access to, so Brian Swann has done people a good service by collecting riddles from those sources to include in this book.

Here's one that I like: I make long journeys flat on my back.

There's a hint in the illustration:

Can you figure it out?

(See the canoe?)

So, if you are a fan of riddles, this is highly recommended, and it would be a fun one to read with children too since the illustrations are very much worth talking about, both because they are beautiful but also because they are full of clues!

The House with No Door: African Riddle Poems

by Brian Swann and Ashley Bryan

online borrowing link

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef

Today's Internet Archive African folklore book recommendation is a follow-up to yesterday's recommendation of Virginia Hamilton's Ring of Tricksters. As I mentioned in that post, Hamilton relied on two old sources for the African stories in that book: Florence Cronise's Cunning Rabbit book, and C. Kamba Simango's stories in Natalie Curtis Burlin's Songs and Tales book. Both of those books are in the public domains and are thus always available at Internet Archive: you can read them there online, download the PDF, etc. Today I'll focus on Cronise's book, and then tomorrow I'll write something about the remarkable Kamba Simango.

Here's the Internet Archive listing of Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef by Florence Cronise, with editorial help from Henry W. Ward, and illustrations by Gerald Sichel. 

Unlike the more contemporary books I've written about in previous posts (by Grainger, Bryan, Lester, and Hamilton), this old book by Cronise is not one I would recommend for pleasure reading exactly, although it is an incredibly valuable resource, and what I want to do here is give people a sense of what a genius job Virginia Hamilton did in adapting the creole texts from this book into stories of her own. Hamilton stripped the folktale of its cloying frametale, and then used a creole style while infusing the story with her own details.

Here, for example, is where Cunning Rabbit (a chevrotain; see information here), is fighting with Spider, and Spider hoists Rabbit up into the sky. This is the version in Cronise:

Cunnie Rabbit go to de sky; he blow one horn wey he hole nah he han'. W'en he blow um dark come, w'en he blow um agin, do' clear. He fa' down, he grip de wuld, VIP! 

And here is Hamilton's version:

Cunnie Rabbit, him goes up to the sky. Up there, he holds him a horn. Why so? 'Cause he can! He can-do and be-do Cunnie Rabbit. he hate it all, can-do all. He blows the horn, and the dark comes down. He blows it again, and down comes dayclean. An'en, he falls down next and takes him hold of the earth — whoomp! But Cunnie Rabbit, him, get'um back up!

Isn't that great? I love the way Hamilton both echoes the old text while doing new things and making it all fit together. I would really like to learn how to be able to do that. 

Meanwhile, I am working on creating creole texts of the stories stripped of the frametale and then rendered in more conventional English; more about that project here: Editing Creole Stories for Wider Audiences.

So, the texts in Cronise are fascinating to use for comparison with Hamilton in order to get some insight into her own verbal art. Another useful feature of this book is the illustrations, which are quite nice, and which can also be compared with the Barry Moser illustrations in Hamilton's book. For example, here is Tortoies riding Leopard as depicted by Sichel in Cronise's book:

And here is Moser's version in Hamilton's book:

Comparing pictures in detail (and digital versions let you zoom in for detail) is a great way to better appreciate the distinctive features of both versions.

So, today's recommendation is a "daily double" ... BOTH Hamilton's Ring of Tricksters and Cronise's Cunnie Rabbit, just a click away at Internet Archive. :-)

African Folktales at Internet Archive: A Ring of Tricksters

After writing about Ashley Bryan and Julius Lester, I knew I wanted to write something today about another one of my favorite children's authors: Virginia Hamilton. You can get an overview of Hamilton's life and career at Wikipedia. 

Like Bryan and Lester, Virginia Hamilton worked with both African and African American storytelling traditions, and the book I want to feature today includes stories from the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa: A Ring of Tricksters: Animal Tales from America, the West Indies, and Africa. And yes, this beautiful book, with illustrations by Barry Moser, is available for digital lending at the Internet Archive; it's just a click away. 

The book contains four stories from African American storytellers (two rabbit trickster tales, plus a fox and a wren trickster too), three from Caribbean storytellers (all Anansi stories), and four from African storytellers. I will focus on the African stories in this post, and I'll return to this book again later when I start profiling African American and Caribbean books at the Internet Archive... but that will be a while since there are lots (LOTS) of African folklore books I want to profile first.

The four African stories that Hamilton includes come from Sierra Leone (three stories) and Mozambique (one story). Although Hamilton provides notes on the stories, she does not provide information about her actual sources, although my guess is that the three Sierra Leone stories come from the stories Florence Cronise collected in Sierra Leone and published in 1903 (Cunnie Rabbit, Mr. Spider, and the Other Beef: West African Folk Tales), and that the Ndau story from Mozambique comes from the stories told by Columbus Kamba Simango and published by Natalie Curtis Burlin in 1920 (Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent). Since both of those books are available at Internet Archive also, I'll say something about them in future posts.

One of the fascinating features of the Sierra Leone storytelling tradition is the character of the trickster "Cunnie Rabbit," who is actually not a rabbit but instead a water chevrotain, also called a fanged deer, which is a tiny, elusive creature; you can find out more at Wikipedia. The chevrotain is also the main trickster character in Malaysian folktales! Here's a picture of a chevrotain (photo by Dave Curtis):

And here's one of Barry Moser's illustrations for a "Cunnie Rabbit" story in Hamilton's book:

And here's an illustration of "Cunnie Rabbit" by Gerald Sichel in Cronise's book:

The way that Hamilton tells the African stories is marvelous, using many of the pidgin features of the Sierra Leone stories, but making them easier to follow than the versions in Cronise's book (I'll do some comparisons when I write up a post about that book). Here's Cunnie Rabbit digging for water during a drought:

By and by, Cunnie Rabbit, him, runs home. There, he start'um dig down. He did and dig down. For what? Him rabbit is digging for a well, what for! Water comes soon, and he drinks he-self cool, way down inside him.

Likewise, in the Ndau story, Hamilton uses all the Ndau names for the animals: Shulo the hare, Hamba the tortoise, and so on, and she also includes some of the singing (I'll say some more about that when I do a post on Simango's stories). 

So, in short, wonderful stories await you... you can jump into the "ring of tricksters" anywhere and see what you find! The tricksters are all just one click away:

A Ring of Tricksters:

Animal Tales from America, the West Indies, and Africa

by Virginia Hamilton

online-borrowing link

(see the animal blowing his horn underneath Elephant?

that's Cunnie Rabbit!)

African Folktales at Internet Archive: How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have?

After writing about Ashley Bryan yesterday, I knew I wanted to write about another remarkable African American children's author today: Julius Lester. He is the author of the astounding (I mean: ASTOUNDING) Brer Rabbit books illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (I will have lots to say about those books in the future!)... but today I want to write about Lester's collection of African folktales called How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? ... it's available for borrowing from the Internet Archive, just a click away!

In this book, first published in 1989, Julius Lester drew on both African and on Jewish sources for the stories, which reflects his own fascinating life journey. Upon learning that his great-grandfather was a Jewish man who had married a freed slave, Lester began learning about Judaism, and in 1982 he converted. You can read more about this at Wikipedia, and here: Iconic Black Jewish Writer Julius Lester Should Be on Every Parent’s Radar.

So, in this book, Lester has told 9 African stories, 2 Jewish stories, and also a story in which he combines African and Jewish folktales into a new story of his own invention. He provides notes and bibliography for his sources in the back of the book. (I will profile some of the sources he used in future posts.) The illustrations are by David Shannon.

The title story of the book comes next-to-last; it is based on an Ngoni story from southern Africa that Lester found in Elliot's Long Grass Whispers, which is not available at Internet Archive but which is available at Hathi Trust (it's an excellent book also). Here's a quick summary of the story, but you should click and read Lester's version; it is perfectly charming!

Leopard was admiring his own beautiful reflection when Crocodile rose up out of the water and mocked Leopard's vanity. Leopard, however, was not fazed; instead, he asked Crocodile to please count his spots so he could know exactly how beautiful he was. Crocodile refused and plunged back into the water. Leopard was so eager to know the number of his spots that he offered a prize to the animal who could count them all. Weasel tried, but could only count to four. Elephant tried, but he after he reached ten, he had to start with one again; he muddled his way through the teens and then announced that Leopard had more than twenty spots. Bear was able to count quite high, up to thirty and beyond, but he kept interrupting himself with questions and observations along the way and had to keep starting over. Finally, Rabbit offered to solve the problem. He touched one spot and said, "This one is dark." Then another. "This one, however, is light." "Dark, light, dark, light, light, dark, dark, dark" and so on. Finally Rabbit had touched every spot on Leopard's whole body. "Two spots!" he said. "Light and dark." Leopard knew somehow that this was not right, since he was sure he had more than two spots, but no one knew how to show Rabbit was wrong. So, Rabbit won! The prize? A portrait of Leopard!

illustration by David Shannon

And of course that is just one story... go read the rest! They are just a click away, thanks to Internet Archive's digital lending library:

How Many Spots Does a Leopard Have? by Julius Lester

online-borrowing link

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Beautiful Blackbird

Yesterday, I wrote about Lisa Grainger's Stories Gogo Told Me, a collection of 44 folktales from southern Africa. Today, I'm writing about a book by one of my favorite children's authors and illustrators, Ashley Bryan: Beautiful Blackbird, copyright 2003. The book is available for borrowing at Internet Archive: books to borrow (there are two copies, so if one is checked out, you can borrow the other one). This is a children's book which contains just one story:

The beautiful illustrations are done with colored paper collages, and Bryan explains at the end that he is using the scissors his mother used to use for sewing to create the paper collages in the book.

Here's the story as Bryan tells it (summarized): The birds were all kinds of colors, but not black. Only Blackbird had black markings; he was all black. Ringdove summoned all the birds to see who was most beautiful. They admired themselves in the water. Then they decided Blackbird was most beautiful, and they danced in his honor. Ringdove wanted to be black too. Blackbird said they were different birds, not the same, but he offered to paint a black ring around Ringdove's neck to go with Ringdove's name. Other birds wanted black markings too, so Blackbird made spots, stripes, and lines on the different birds. Then all the birds rejoiced because they were all even more beautiful than before. 

Here are the birds admiring themselves before the transformation:

And here are the birds after Blackbird does his work:

Bryan explains that the story comes from Zambia, as reported in The Ila-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia by Smith and Dale, published in 1920; you can read the story online at the Internet Archive here: How the Ringdove came by its ring. In that story, the Blackbird (Mintengwe) actually curses the other birds when they ask him to share his color. Blackbird puts the ring on the ring dove, the spots on the Guinea-Fowl, etc. as in Bryan's story, but he curses them at the same time. For example, he gives Guinea-Fowl spots like a leopard and says the leopard will eat Guinea-Fowl. Here's how he curses Ringdove: "You shall always eat the grain belonging to men, so that you may die." The end result: "as for the rest of the birds, they are in trouble; they are killed, they are ensnared, they are persecuted. Some are caught in traps. And all because they were cursed by Blackbird."

I really like Bryan's feel-good take on the story, and it obviously makes a far better children's story this way... but it's also good to be able to look at Bryan's source in order to see how he took the story in his own direction, with his own characteristic verbal art and illustrations too. You can find out more about Ashley Bryan and his remarkable career at the Ashley Bryan Center website.

There are more of Bryan's books at Internet Archive, and I'll feature some of those in later blog posts.

Beautiful African Folktale Books at Internet Archive

Over the past two years, I've been acquiring a big personal library of African folktale collections, mostly used books that I have been able to find on the cheap, some not-so-cheap. Meanwhile, during that time, the Internet Archive has launched an amazing controlled-digital-lending project so that many of the books I have been diligently collecting in my own personal library are also available for "check-out" at Internet Archive: it is a library for the people... for all the people! 

Previously, online books were limited to public domain materials, which are useful too, but often badly constrained by their colonial contexts. Now, however, thanks to the Internet Archive, there is a far wider range of African folktales online.

So, as I start indexing and slowly but surely summarizing the folktales in my personal library, I'm going to focus on the books that are also available for borrowing at the Internet Archive so that any reader of this blog can go take a look at the book for themselves. I'll be able to profile one or two books a week this way, so anyone who wants to give themselves a crash course in the beautiful folktale traditions of Africa can do so with books borrowed from the Internet Archive.

Today, I'll start with a lovely book published by Penguin Books (South Africa): Stories Gogo Told Me by Lisa Grainger, copyright 2007. Here's the online-borrowing link from the Internet Archive.

Grainger's book contains 44 stories collected from oral storytellers throughout southern Africa: Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. Grainger provides the storyteller's name and additional information for each story, and the stories are fairly short, very nicely told, with abundant illustrations; the illustrations are by Celia von Poncet. So, for example, here's the illustration for the first story: the tortoise had taken feathers from all the birds so he could fly, but when the birds took back their feathers, the tortoise fell down, which is how his shell became cracked:

I've created a Google Doc for the book which quickly lists the table of contents, and I've written up summaries of two of the stories that were of interest to me; I'll be adding more summaries later: Stories Gogo Told Me GoogleDoc. You'll see an automatic table of contents at the top which provides links to the summarized stories, and those story summaries also show up in my Story Feed, as you can see here: there's the story about the tortoise, and a hilarious story about hippos who fling their dung. (More about the RSS feed and Diigo here.)

Later on, I'll add more story summaries; for now, I'll stick to just one or two summaries for each book in order to get the book pages set up, and then I'll go back in and do more story summaries.

In my first post here at this blog brainstorming about the projects I would like to undertake in the coming years, I mentioned how much I admire Sharon Elswit's Story Finder resource books. 

Now, with the amazing books made available by Internet Archive, I'll be able to focus my efforts on doing "story finder" type projects for books that everyone can access, either public domain books or else books that can be borrowed from the Internet Archive.

So, stay tuned for lots more African folktale book write-ups here... books that are just one click away, thanks to the Internet Archive! I had the Grainger book checked out just now to take those screenshots, but I've returned it, which means that wonderful book is just sitting there, waiting for you to check it out:

Stories Gogo Told Me by Lisa Grainger

online-borrowing link