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[ 171 ] ANANCY’S WEB/SUT’S STRATAGEMS Humor, Race, and Trickery in Jamaica and the Old Southwest JoHn loWE OvEr tHE cEnturiEs, tricKstEr talEs and storiEs HavE been generated in most parts of the world, and many of them found their way to North America via the slave ships that supported the plantation economy of the New World but also disseminated the people of the African diaspora. One of the chief exports from Western Africa was the Ashanti people, whose folklore centered on the spider trickster Anansi/ Anancy. As the opposite of Nyame, the creator and namer, Anancy represents humor, chaos, and ambiguity, all of which of course have an interrelationship with creativity. His disorienting yet invigorating activities are a useful counterbalance to the stability (which can be overly rigid) of Nyame1 (Christen 6, 7). While he maintains his arachnid identity in some of the stories, he often takes on human form and deceives all sorts of people.2 Yet many of his activities are creative and beneficial; destruction often becomes a way of clearing the ground for new forms.3 In the New World, Anancy appeared wherever the Ashanti people (from present-day Ghana and Ivory Coast) were enslaved—but particularly in Jamaica, where Anancy tales, often referred to as “Anansesem,” remain popular to this day. Anancy, like many Native American tricksters , is mischievous, profane, and unable to control his voracious appetites . At one point, he is said to be “the biggest rascal in the world” (62). In the Bahamas he was said to be “B’Nansi—or Nansi, Boy Nasty, or Gulumbanansi, a trickster and hero, either boy, man, or monkey” (Crowley 29). Also, similar to what appears in the Native American tales, the concept of Anancy occupying a position between man and god, with his mythical web sometimes pictured as a ladder to heaven is common among inheritors of the Ashanti.4 As many critics have noted, Anancy resembles African Americans’ Brer Rabbit, a weak creature who uses [ 172 ] JoHn loWE what blacks call “mother wit” to get the better of larger animals. As such, Anancy also has an African analogue in the signifying monkey, who often tricks and outmaneuvers larger creatures such as the lion and the elephant through subterfuge and wily “signifying.” These small-dimensioned tricksters were chosen by enslaved people to stand for the “ways out of no way” they had to construct. Anancy originally worked his web in West Africa, in what we now know as Ghana. As Robert Pelton has stated, “He is both fooler and fool, maker and unmade, wily and stupid, subtle and gross, the High God’s accomplice and his rival” (28–29). This description also applies to the fools, knaves, and confidence men of the Old Southwest humor genre of the nineteenth-century US South. Characters such as Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood especially come to mind, with their wiliness, greed, outsized appetites, and generally gross appearance and behavior. Also, in the printed versions of both Old Southwest humor and the Anancy stories, a redactor took down the tales (which of course began in oral culture), and attempted in retelling them to reproduce the story in the language of the original teller, whose salty vernacular added a great deal of appeal for the general reader. In the case of the Old Southwest humorists, most redactors, as has often been noted, were members of the professional class, and they usually spun the tales out to make them virtual short stories. In some cases the tales were invented , but the large majority of them came from folk sources. Similarly, the Anancy stories have almost always come to us from white redactors/ collectors (Martha Warren Beckwith and Walter Jekyll are early examples ), who use proper English to foreground and explain the significance of their collections. By contrast, the Old Southwest tales, as has often been noted, usually have a frame story narrated by a white professional of some sort in proper English, while the tales themselves feature dialectdripping characters who employ voluptuous vernacular. In the Anancy stories the animals/tricksters/human protagonists all speak in dialect and vernacular. Anancy, like Simon Suggs and Sut Lovingood, is a transgressor who delights in breaking boundaries. Circulating stories about these figures create a communal discourse, one that sifts and ponders cosmic issues through humor. Anancy stories, like other trickster tales, often center on inordinate appetite, greed, and outsized transgressions of social norms. As such, all these tales feature the body and its appetites, functions...

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