2. Varieties of Performing

Chapter 2 benefits from a larger corpus collected over several years by Noël J. Gueunier and his collaborator Madjidhoubi Said. Numerous versions of Africa’s most widespread folktale, the defiant girl who marries a monster in human disguise, reinforce the importance of making a proper marriage. The popularity of the tale, in many versions in a small island, show performers varying it in tone and borrowing elements from other tales. One version is totally politicized. Other adaptations change the wife from victim into a potent folktale heroine. Narrators also tell about the trickster Bwanawasi (note his Swahili name), use semi-autobiography or familiar names and places to keep their hearers engaged, perform a classic French fairytale, or create stories of their own parodying traditional models or even cinema thrillers. In such a dominated society, parody is a prime tool for reappropriating inherited or borrowed materials. That is the style of creolization, the process whereby people in situations of unequal power renegotiate language and culture and create new art, music, and literature.