Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigerien (review)

Geneviève Calame-Griaule is a leading scholar of African folklore, with publications that span over thirty years. This volume, the latest contribution to her already impressive bibliography, affords a fascinating glimpse into the world of the Isawaghen, a population who inhabits the arid and remote Azawaq region of central Niger. A sedentary group in the midst of nomadic peoples, the Isawaghen have been at the crossroads of various cultures, including those of their neighbors, the Touaregs and the Hausa, but also those of peoples farther afield in Northern and Eastern Africa. The Isawaghen were unknown to Western ethnographers until the 1960s. In the early 1970s, Calame-Griaule, along with her colleagues Suzy Bernus and Pierre Francis Lacroix, conducted fieldwork among the Isawaghen settlements of Ingal and Teguidda-n-Tessoumt. Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigérien (Tender Tales, Cruel Tales from the Nigerien Sahel) includes French translations of thirty-six tales collected by Bernus, Calame-Griaule, and Lacroix from four different storytellers: three women, Taheera, Aminata, Khadi; and one man, Albadé the Blacksmith. The tales are arranged as selections of each storyteller's repertoire. Calame-Griaule introduces each storyteller and, after each tale, includes a commentary with ethnographic, folkloric, and thematic analysis. She also frames the entire collection with an in-depth general introduction that provides the reader with valuable information about the Isawaghen, their oral tradition, and its relationship to other African traditions.

Throughout this volume, Calame-Griaule notes the hybridity of the tales she presents. Given their contact with nomadic peoples, the Isawaghen have incorporated into their own folklore elements of Berber, Arabic, and sub-Saharan traditions. Their tales include references to customs and animals (such as elephants) that are not part of Isawaghen daily life. They also feature songs, proverbs, and expressions in languages other than the Tasawaq spoken by the Isawaghen. At the same time, of course, the stories told by Taheera, Aminata, Khadi, and Albadé the Blacksmith reflect the cultural specificity of Isawaghen life (including vestimentary, culinary, social and religious customs and attitudes toward love, beauty, and cruelty). The cast of animal characters one finds in this volume depicts the natural habitat of the Azawaq or other nearby regions and includes jackals, hyenas, rabbits, horses, and elephants. Human characters, Calame-Griaule contends, are often portrayed with the particular bias of the elderly women storytellers whose tales form the majority of those included in Contes tendres, contes cruels. The penchant for strong women (especially young women and wives) and the irony directed at chiefs and blacksmiths (liminal figures in Isawaghen society) are frequently visible in these stories. A more familiar folkloric feature is the initiatory rite of passage, which Calame-Griaule posits as central to the interpretation of this corpus. "Passages" of all sorts—not only from childhood and adolescence to adulthood, but also those of marriage, familial change, aging, communal integration, and death—structure these narratives. It is the initiatory function that, according to Calame-Griaule, explains the recurrence of violence and cruelty in these tales. Symbolic renewal or rebirth requires a purging or death of physical proportions.

The reader unfamiliar with African oral traditions will find especially interesting the tales that bear resemblance to well-known narratives from other world folkloric traditions. As is often the case with such variants, the differences from the version familiar to the reader shed new light on the tale-type as a whole. For instance, Taheera's "Blanche neige au soleil" ("Snow White in the Sun"), a variant of AT709, makes explicit several of the familial conflicts that are camouflaged in Western European versions. The central narrative conflict is that between mother and daughter, rather than between stepmother and stepdaughter, as in many Western European versions. In another interesting twist, the seven genies who care for her once she has left home treat her as a sister, which sets the stage...