Spiders

The day after my phone was stolen I was talking to a musician at the University. His name is Wisdom and he teaches drumming. Has been for almost twenty years. He also makes drums. I would stand at the bus stop with him and talk about his craft and what goes into it. How do you know a good drum from a poorly made one, that sort of thing.

When I told him about my phone, he said that he was sorry; a very common response to misfortune. If you trip on a step, strangers around you will say, “O, I am sorry.” He then told me that you have to be careful at that bus stop. “There’s lots of spiders there. You have to be careful of the spiders.”

There is a kind of story here called AnansesEm, (the E should look more like a backwards 3, I don’t know what kind of sound it’s supposed to make,) which means Ananse stories. Stories of Ananse, (sounds like A-nan-say) are very popular. They date back centuries and are still a part of the theatre and literature of Ghana.

Ananse is a spider that takes human form. He is a trickster and possesses the spider talent of weaving. He makes beautiful Kente cloth and can tell lies that he weaves into complex manipulations. He tends to be lazy and prefers when others work and give him their wages. In the novel “The Clothes of Nakedness” he accomplishes this by being a job broker. He finds work for the unemployed and in exchange they give me a percentage of their wages.

In “Ananse in The Land of Idiots,” Ananse plots to marry a princess and claim the wedding gift of a kingdom for himself. He accomplishes this by having the groom murdered and impersonating him at the wedding. In the end he has his accomplice murdered and gets away with the bride, the kingdom and an army to defend himself when he is discovered.

In “The Story Ananse Told,” Ananse tricks a king into losing his kingdom and becoming dinner for a family of forest monsters. Ananse’s accomplice in this deceit also becomes dinner; Ananse gets away and has the last laugh. Most of these stories are comedies.

In “The Marriage of Anansewa,” Ananse starts out a poor man but strikes upon the idea of proposing a marriage between his beautiful daughter and four kings. The kings shower him with gifts and money but then, independent of each other, all decide to marry her on the same day. In order to get out of this pickle, he makes his daughter fake her own death. When one of the kings responds honourably (and with more gifts), to the news of her death, Ananse prays that she may be brought back to life and please the noble king. Horatio Algers it’s not.

The novel “The Clothes of Nakedness” ends when the Ananse character, (called Mystique Mysterious), is overcome by his lust and tries to rape the wife of a man he is “helping” but is thwarted by a friend of the family. So far it is the only story where Ananse doesn’t get what he wants. But, he does murder the husband of the woman he tried to rape and has the family friend executed by firing squad for another murder.

So even when he loses, he never loses as much as the people around him.

Those are all the stories of Ananse that I have read so far. In the forward to the Marriage of Anansewa he is described as “a kind of Everyman, artistically exaggerated and distorted to serve society as a medium for self-examination.”

Based upon my first four encounters with Ananse I’m not sure that I agree with that statement. The way he preys upon others, upon their weaknesses and feelings, he strikes me much more as a malevolent force and very far away from the idea of an “Everyman.”

Besides, he’s apparently not above picking pockets for cell phones and that can’t be the act of an Everyman.