Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean (review)

This is not your ordinary collection of folktales. After thirty years of work in the multicultural islands of the Indian Ocean, Lee Haring offers us instead a masterful translation (both linguistic and cultural) of storytelling across traditions, and a manifestation of what may well be called “creolized scholarship.” Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean is thus a fresh collection of folktales in which traditions from Africa, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East blend together to produce a corpus of creolized verbal art.

Diverging from standard practice, Haring innovates on the well-known genre of the “folktale collection volume” by joining his voice in a dialogic manner with that of traditional old-time and current storytellers. In the preface, he describes his presentation of the stories as follows, addressing the reader directly: “Some are cited without interruption; a few are translated only in part, or summarized. Into others, I interpolate commentary as if I were reading to you and then looking up to explain something from time to time.”

But more is going on here. Set in non-bold typeface to distinguish them from the bold of the regional storytellers’ narrative, Haring’s comments are not your standard fare of glosses, annotations, or marginal notes; they are woven into the very flow of the stories themselves. To be sure, in many of the stories Haring’s words far outnumber those of the actual tale. And though in the preface he wryly comments that the use of different typefaces allows us to clearly distinguish voices in the text, thereby making it possible for the reader to “skip the boring parts (whichever those are),” I for one discovered in the course of reading that I looked forward as much to what Haring “looked up” to tell me as to what was coming next in the story itself. In this respect, the author’s performance of each tale is a new, enlightened version of local narratives (for the first time in English) for an audience of readers beyond the Indian Ocean.

Haring contextualizes and elucidates each tale, providing historical and geographical facts, correspondences with important tale indexes, particulars about the tellers, relevant details of literary and cultural scholarship, and the like. More important, and perhaps more intriguing, however, we learn through the reflections and insights provided by Haring how to think about these stories, how to process them as creole art, how to extrapolate from them to better understand the larger culture, and how to relate them to the broader fields of literature and literary criticism. Only a scholar fully versed and immersed in the culture and narrative tradition of the Southwest Indian Ocean could have attempted this feat with such authority and elegance. Indeed, Haring models for us a form of “creolized” scholarship that uncovers a “creole aesthetic,” requiring nothing less of him than a deep cultural intimacy with the region, a discriminating capacity to both cross and collapse disciplinary boundaries, and a finely honed understanding of the performance styles and poetics of this cultural area.

Stars and Keys borrows its title, as Haring explains, from the Latin phrase on the coat of arms of Mauritius: Stella Clavisque Maris Indici, The Star and Key of the Indian Ocean. The author then puns on Stars, appropriating the word to title a section of the volume that highlights storytellers (pictured in the book) who are star performers. In another of the book’s five sections, titled “Keys,” he plays on that word to identify tales that unlock a creole aesthetic. The opening section of the book, composed primarily of “origin” narratives, takes its title (“Land of the Man-Eating Tree”) from one of the stories. The section “Diaspora” follows, where Haring considers displacements and transpositions, paying important attention to (among other elements) “interperformance,” the role of tricksters, and the dynamics and effects of...