Le Figuier magique et autres contes algériens dits par Aouda (review)

This book comprises eight folktales, presented in facing-page Arabic/French translation. The Arabic is in the dialect of the narrator, Aouda, whom Micheline Galley met in 1963 while she was working as a teacher in Algeria. Each tale is followed by a set of extensive notes that explain linguistic and stylistic points. This in turn is followed by a learned comparative-folkloristic “Commentary” (with tale-type and motif analysis) that explores the cultural context. Following all the folktales is a short essay titled “The Language of the Tales,” in which the author discusses Aouda’s narrative style in light of some general observations about oral narrative style (lexical, syntactic, formulas, narrative sequences, among other subjects). This is then followed by a visual section consisting of a photograph of the teller, a couple of photographs of markets, and six reproductions of paintings on glass. Painting on glass is a genuine folk art in the Arab countries of the Maghreb (particularly Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), the images illustrating religious and folkloristic themes, as they do here; the visual material does not always relate directly to the tales, but its inclusion adds some cultural depth to the discussion. Following the pictures we find a transliteration of the tales into the Roman alphabet. The book has a helpful index that lists words with concrete reference as well as concepts. Following all of this, attached to the inside of the back cover, is a CD of the tales in the narrator’s voice. The presence of this CD makes this a unique book.

This volume is the culmination of a project comprising the repertoire of Aouda, which began in 1971 with the publication of Badr az-zine et six contes algériens (reprinted 1994). The tales included in the present volume are therefore limited to Aouda’s repertoire, but this limitation is compensated for by the completeness of the record for a single outstanding teller from the Arab cultural area and the intellectual honesty of the editor/author, who never lets the reader forget Aouda’s presence in the book. In addition to her photograph, the teller is there in her voice. We hear it on the CD and we see it in print in the double Arabic/Roman transliteration of the tales. She is there as well in some of the notes and in the author’s discussion of her narrative style, referred to above.

As for the tales, they range in type from the humorous Juha anecdote to an animal tale about friendship (“The Jackal and the Hedgehog”) and a fable about the treachery of mankind (“The Little Lion”). The two Juha stories illustrate his supposed foolishness. The one tale in which he brings the door of the house with him to the wedding because his mother had told him to “guard the door” is part of a living oral Juha canon in the Arab world. Two stories, as Galley notes, have written counterparts in very famous collections. The first, “The Sultan Who Possessed a Treasure” (AT 950), is a remarkable oral version of the famous Egyptian story of the two brothers, otherwise known as “Rhampsinitus,” first made available in English in Gaston Maspero’s 1915 Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt (196–201). The second story, “Abou l-Hasan (AT 1556), is an oral version of the Arabian Nights story “The Sleeper and the Waker” (found in Richard Burton’s translation, and summarized and discussed under no. 263 in volume 1 of Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwven, Encyclopedia of the Arabian Nights, 2004).

The “fabling,” or “heuristic,” process seems to be the guiding assumption behind Galley’s approach to all of the tales: on the title page of each we are offered either a proverb or a proverbial expression whose function is to encapsulate the meaning of the story. Thus for the first tale, “The Magic Fig Tree,” this proverb is offered: “He who digs a hole for his brother will...