Gender-Role Perceptions in the Akan Folktale

The vital role that the folktale plays in the process of socialization in society has been recognized by critics like Bruno Bettelheim who provides insight into the pedagogical value of fairy tales. Usually in the primary oral culture the folktale constitutes a major, early source for the liberation of the imagination. Built largely on fantasy, the tale has therapeutic, emotional, and cathartic usefulness as well as didactic functions. This literary art form provides a passageway through which society confirms its strengths and growth strategies, while inducting new generations into its life-flow. The influence of the tale is felt even more strongly in oral cultures than in those that are script-centered. This paper does not share in Walter Ong's dichotomy between "primary oral" and "chirographic" cultures (16-30). The cultural fusions that take place within and between villages, towns, and suburbs are in reality much more complex than a simple binary division between "oral" and "written." The paper agrees to a limited extent with the manner in which Deborah Tannen marks "orality" because she shows the issue as a flexible strategy for speaking and communicating employed by literate speakers as well (326-47).

The tale may be seen as a social leveler in the sense that during the performance of the tale, barriers that would separate the sexes, classes, and age groups in other social contexts are broken. As a result one finds children, women, and men, the rich and the poor gather at the same venue to share in this ancient oral literary art form. Both women and men narrate tales either in the setting of the hearth or as professionals during clearly defined social events (see Okpewho).

While the narrator may become a performer in the process of the narration, the audience plays the multiple functions of listener and active participant—commentator, actor, or musician (see Finnegan; Dorson). The folktale is popular literary art in the true sense of the expression; it is a literary art form directly created, controlled, and enjoyed by the people across space and time. When in the telling, for example, a member of the audience contributes to the narration with a statement such as "I was a witness to this event," or when the narrator directs a phrase such as "You should have seen this for yourself," or a sentence such as "My children, you must listen carefully to what this animal said . . ." to the audience, the comments serve to obscure the passage of time by suggesting that once upon a time is now, and that in the world of the tale the past and the present can converge. The tale, together with its importance, is thus drawn from a distant past and made to approximate the realities of the present time.

These and other similar comments are sometimes made in order to create the space for a song or a contribution, or to allow for a reversal of roles between narrator and audience. The intervention may also be made so as to slow down the flow of the narration or to underscore the effectiveness and relevance of the story for the rest of the audience. The remarks are obviously fictive in the mode of the tall tale, but they are appropriate here because they meet the improvisatory element in the folktale. More than these, the interventions allow the narrative to make claims to occupy a hermetic space by drawing attention to itself as a tale. The listening and active audience is expected to adhere to the morals of the tale, having collectively participated in their formulation.

The context of the narration allows the artist, the audience, and the critic to operate at the same time and place. The audience for any particular performance or narration is immediately identifiable, and the impact on the audience is relatively readily ascertained. This relationship between narrator and audience in a performance is different from the one created by the written...