Another Note on Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing"

I have been teaching Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, as I noted on a previous blog post. Now that we have read the whole novel, I can say another word on it.

This is an ambitious novel, covering the African experience in Africa and America over several centuries. Starting from the country now known as Ghana we enter society founded on communal principles and but also tensions between ethnic groups. We see people being captured and enslaved for domestic servitude or sent away to Cape Coast Castle, to await the sea voyage to America.

The horrors of life in the Caste,and of the slave trade in general, are graphically represented. The struggles of black people in America and Africa are covered in this novel which ultimately is an epic story of the resilience of the human spirit. It is a story of greed and grief, but also of hope.

Although great numbers of black people perished in the course of centuries, the black man and woman survived and persisted, like the little stone that we see passed on from generation to generation in the novel. The novel uses flashback and other techniques and abounds with imagery, especially of fire and water. In the background there is an intriguing crazy woman.

Homegoing touches on cultural and other differences between Africans and African Americans but also brings up Pan Africanism. I suggest, as i did in a previous post, that  it be read alongside, or following, Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost.

Teaching "The Trickster and the Hero"

For the last three weeks, I have been teaching a January course titled "The Trickster and the Hero." I designed this course in 1990, when I was teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam. I had just been hired by the English Department at St. Olaf College to introduce Post colonial literature and the department chair asked me if I would like to design and teach a January course.

I knew right away that I would like to teach a course on the hero and the trickster. I had done my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980-86 and had written my doctoral dissertation on The Hero in the African Epic. Professor Harold Scheub, one of my professors and my main dissertation advisor, had sparked my interest in the hero and the trickster. 

Almost every year, for the twenty five years I have taught at St. Olaf College, I have taught my hero and trickster course. I start with Paul Radin's The Trickster: A Study in North American Indian Mythology. After that, I usually teach some more trickster tales from other traditions, drawn from various traditions, such as Anansi, Gizo, Nasreddin Hodja, and Hare, the ubiquitous trickster of Eastern, Central and Southern Africa. I often incorporate trickster tales from my own collection, Matengo Folktales.

After exploring oral traditional trickster tales, I move on to epics. Over the years, I have used The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Book of Dede Korkut, Gassire's Lute, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, and Ibonia. I then move on to works of fiction. I have used novels such as Things Fall Apart, The Guide, and The Lonely Londoners, which afford further opportunity to explore the figure of the trickster and the hero in written literature. Then we read Things Fall Apart, and we are now reading The Guide. I hope to conclude with theoretical works which deal with the hero from the perspective of formalism, psychoanalysis, and feminism.

This January, we started with Paul Radin's The Trickster, watched a recording of comedian Louis CK, went on to The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ibonia, Things Fall Apart, and The Guide. With only three days to go, I am in the process of concluding with theoretical perspectives as I have noted above.

Studying the trickster is an opportunity to reflect on a major figure in folklore and literature. So is studying the hero. I say as much in my course description:

The figure of the trickster is one of the most enduring of all the characters we encounter in literature and folklore, from the earliest times to the present. The figure of the hero is equally prevalent and engaging. In this course, we will study manifestations of these figures in the folklore and literature of various cultures and epochs. Our focus, though, will be Middle Eastern, African and Caribbean traditions. We will try to understand the social origins and functions of hero and trickster tales, using theories such as those of Paul Radin, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, and Alan Dundes. We will try also to explore the manifestations and influences of the hero and trickster archetypes in our lives. In addition to folklore stories, we will study selected literary texts, in order to understand how they appropriate the motifs and patterns of trickster and hero narratives. This is a great way to understand an important dimension of the making of literature.

Teaching "The Kalevala," Spring 2015

In the coming Spring semester, I will be teaching Post-colonial Literature and Folklore, courses I have taught many times over the years. I regularly introduce new or different texts, especially in the Post-colonial Literature course.

For the first time, I am going to teach The Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, in my Folklore course this Spring. The other texts are The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gassire's Lute, African Folktales, and The Vanishing Hitchhiker. I also always include recordings of folktales and the video documentary "Angano Angano," which presents Malagasy storytelling in its socio-cultural context.

Here I want to say a few words about The Kalevala, which I have known about for decades and regularly mention in my publications and conference presentations. Even though I have never read it, I know much about it and, for a long time, thought about teaching it. Now, having made the decision to do so, I am excited.

I look forward to sharing with my students the fascinating history of the making of The Kalevala as we know it, thanks to the research of Elias Lönnrot in the early part of the nineteenth century, not to mention the work of translators, especially Keith Bosley, whose translation we are going to use. I look forward to talking about the political and ideological significance of The Kalevala as an expression and vehicle of Finnish nationalism.

Equally exciting is the prospect of placing The Kalevala within the context of the epic as a genre with a history stretching as far back as the Sumerian empire--if not earlier--with all the debates and controversies regarding issues such as definition, structure, performance, and concepts of heroism. Such are the issues that make the epic one of the most challenging and also most interesting genres of Folklore.