And so November ends
...and so December arrives.
Dear Friends,
36 years alive and I’m still always a bit shaken when, at the end of November, I see the hazy shape of the next year taking form across the span of December’s four, suddenly very short weeks.
How are you meeting December? I hope with the necessary combination of thoughts and feelings to end the year on the best possible note.
If you are in the U.S., November started on a bit of a tumultuous note. We probed that situation with a folktale about choosing a leader. However you feel about the outcomes of the U.S. presidential elections, please keep in mind that the pendulum of time always has and always will keep swinging from the (proverbial) left to right and back again. We moved on from that to talk about my upcoming book which finally went to press this month! We also read a hilarious story about a donkey named Fritla which puts its owner through the wringer, and ended the month with some thoughts on folktale retellings. Additionally, we concluded our discussion of neck rings in African culture with an exposition on the AmaNdebele of South Africa.
On a side note, I used the term “original version” to refer to folktales in the episode on retellings but I want to clarify that this is a bit of a misnomer (as we talked about in this X/Twitter thread on how to read Mythology and Folklore). There are popular versions of folktales. In some cases, if the rules of storytelling are strict, there is some continuity in how some stories are told. Furthermore, as a commenter on the episode noted, indigenous storytellers are usually scrupulous about including signifiers – specific words, images, sounds, or objects that convey defined meanings and represent the way ideas are expressed and understood in that culture – in their accounts. However, there are often multiple versions of folktales, since they come from oral traditions which are always in conversation with the changes the people experience over time. Canadian Anthropologist Mathias Guenther has an excellent essay about this in Melissa Heckler and Carol Birch’s “Who Says? Pivotal Issues in Contemporary Storytelling.” It is titled “Old Stories/Life Stories: Memory and Dissolution in Contemporary Bushman Folklore”. In it, he discusses in vivid and sometimes heartbreaking detail how conversion to Christianity, sometimes done more out of necessity than conviction, and the loss of their land to colonization affected the Nharo Bushmen of Western Botswana and changed their folktales.
What to expect from MA in December
Quite frankly, I don’t know! With all my writing deadlines for the year complete and no big MA project in the works, I plan to take it easy and focus more on plain storytelling sessions. If anything comes up that warrants a deeper dive, then I’ll go that route. Alternately, we’ve not had a request for a deep dive in a while so…is there a topic/character/creature in African mythology and folklore you are curious about? Let me know and I could make an episode out of it!
Thank you, as always, for being here.
Be well,
Helen