Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigerien

Contes tendres, contes cruels du Sahel nigerien. By Genevieve Calame-Griaule. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Pp. 293, photographs, bibliography, index. 22.50 paper)

In this book, the dean of French Africanist folklorists has revisited the treeless, drought-ridden West Africa of her early fieldwork, with its "landscapes of infinite horizons, the soil crackled by drought, the iridescence of the salt-pans, the tents of matting in the encampments, and the elegant veiled silhouettes of the nomads, the clay towns peopled with black-robed women and turbaned men" (283). These landscapes became familiar to Genevieve Calame-Griaule when she first visited the arid Sahel with her father, the anthropologist Marcel Griaule. In those years, Griaule created the first great masterpiece of collaboration between a European and an African sage, Dieu d'eau (1948, translated 1965 as Conversations with Ogotemmtti), the elaborate account of the mythico-religious system of the Dogon of Mali. After that beginning, Genevieve Calame-Griaule deepened and extended research into the relation between Dogon worldview and verbal art. The result was her magisterial Ethnologie et langage, a classic of African folkloristics (1965, translated 1986 as Words and the Dogon World). She brought together a team of four more researchers into a number of West African societies in Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Niger, and Togo. The team has produced numerous papers and books studying the meaning(s) of West African narratives through comparative analysis, interrelating texts with ethnographic data. Under her leadership they have founded an Africanist discipline of ethnolinguistics, based on the principles that "certain significations can only be discerned through textual and contextual analysis, whereas others require recourse to ethnographic and extra-textual exploration" (translated from a 1984 essay). Their regular seminars provide for the exchange of research findings. With other scholars they edit and produce the principal French folklore journal, Cahiers de litterature orale. Also a leader of the Societe des Africanistes, Genevieve Calame-Griaule has made significant studies of both linguistic and paralinguistic codes. Research for this book was carried out in Niger, among the group called Isawaghen, between 1970 and 1978. Two members of the research team are dead, Pierre Francis Lacroix and Suzanne Bernus; the two principal storytellers, Taheera and Aminata, are also gone. Thus the book becomes a memorial to them as well as a memoir of their expedition, a scientific study, and a continuation of the Griaule tradition. Itself a personal experience narrative, the book is a model of presentation of African tales, their tellers, and their setting.

The author's introduction, clearly and agreeably written, describes Isawaghen society and its dry surroundings. Though a palm grove gives the town of In Gall the impression of an oasis (19), many a European would find the arid setting of these clay-and-straw houses, pictured in the author's photographs, more forbidding than the author did (17-24): "At the time we knew the town, it had but a single tree in one courtyard" (18). The society, economy, and language of Isawaghen people are presented.

The section on Tasawaq oral literature, which like the society is "a crossroads of ethnicities and cultures" (25), could be read with profit by folklorists anywhere. The author's discussion of themes goes far beyond these thirty-six Tasawaq tales. The accumulated research of French Africanists has established that the dominant theme in all African tales, which again looms large in this collection, is initiation (40-43). They have thus applied to verbal art van Gennep's classic insight about separation and reintegration. Another generalized African theme in the author's introduction is the ever-present danger of individualism. Her observations about the use of animals as narrative characters also reach over the whole continent, if not farther (38-39). Her notes on material culture, custom, and religion in the tales carry on Boas's tradition of seeking reflections of life in oral narratives. Characterization of women and men, supernaturals, and animals are discussed (43-53). Even in the portrayals of conventional characters, the author discerns subtleties in the practices of her narrators (46-47). Opening formulas and other formal features, such as the separation of tale diction from ordinary talk, are also discussed (54-58).

The author organizes her book around her four narrators: Taheera (who contributes 22 pieces), Aminata (six pieces), Khadi (three), and Albade the smith (five). The first two of these narrators are exceptionally skilled. Taheera's audiences "especially appreciated the very great variety of her repertoire" (67). The author also remarks on her unusually precise memory, her irony, and her sense of the comic. Aminata, "a superb storyteller," had an admirable sense of images, a skill in dialogue, and unfailing humor (192). The smith's style is crisper, his content more violent. When the author and her colleague Edmond Bernus began to film him, they discovered that the smith and his brother were actually a duo. "Thus we were present at a surprising performance, the brother laughing at the right places, asking questions, feigning incredulity, exclaiming, and stimulating the teller so much that he began to behave like a real actor (still seated crosslegged)" (260-261). Texts, contexts, analyses, and critiques make Contes tendres, contes cruels a crown for the work of France's most distinguished scholar of oral literature.