Folktales without borders

Re-reading Marina Warner's From the Beast to the Blond her analysis of a German folktale, the Juniper Tree, reminded me of a half-remembered Palestinian one I'd heard as a child, The Green Bird, and when I checked it in Muhawi and Kanaana's collection it turns out to be a more than striking similarity.

There are quite a few differences in details of course, the one I found intriguing was the father's reluctance to remarry in the Palestinian version, fearing how a step-mother would treat his children, which made him more of a 'sympathetic character' than the father in the Juniper Tree - who nevertheless escapes death, despite similarly unconsious canibalism.

The avoidance of patricide and purging of all evils through the surrogate mother figure might be part of the Grimm brothers' reworking of their materials for the sensibilities of contemporary child

I don't mind bowdlerisation though; some experts seem to imply 'authentic' tales, crude and earthy and true, told by peasant hags in some hut and being disfigured by the Perraults seeking to satisfy a literate elite, but tales passed on orally are also changed at each telling with regard to the audience.

The Green Bird as I remember it told years ago, started of with the stepmother making kib'e and greedily gobbling it all up herself, and as we were old enough to enjoy being scared, we were told in gory detail how she made her step-son into a replacement meal, but there was greater stress on the father's constant worry about his missing son, who he is told ran away. The woman who told it might have heard it in this version, or she might have made her own changes...or maybe she first encountered it reading Muhawi and Kanaana's 's popular anthology.

The relationship between written and oral folktales should not privilege either, and actually with the tradition of elites gathering these narratives and recreating them in forms to suit their literary taste and social, or even political, purpose going back so many centuries, it seems senseless to imagine a folklore purely oral, even if oral narrative was to be seen as the more pure, essential form of these stories. They have always been a collaborative, collective effort, always something made, not just existing, constantly being consciously remade, not spontaneously mutating.

And not necessarily a cosy process around the home fires . The resemblance between Mameluk sagas like Sayf bin dhi Yazin, or Alf layla wa layla, and Russian folklore is usually explained with reference to the the Central Asian hordes marauding across, and then settling in, both areas. Battles and blood baths, are probably also the reason for this instance of cross-culturation between the fertile crescent and central Europe. In fact Warner's book makes a couple of references, in the context of legends based on Biblical figures, to Crusaders bringing back the Muslim folktales about Solomon and Bilqais the Queen of Saba2/Sheba for example, and adding them to the local mix.

So anyway, war and empire building/dashing seems to be an ideal time to swap fairy tales...will something positive come out of the creative chaos the region is currently experiencing after all?

The Green Bird
The Juniper-Tree

"Far more than a bookworm's nostalgia trip"

says the Economist of Francis Spufford memoir The Child that Books Built, and (although how anyone can use a derogatory "only" about such a nostalgia trip is beyond me), it is a lot of things besides that...like a confidence-in-my-mastery-of-the-english-language-booster.

I always thought my private (and if I'm not careful embarrassingly public) idiosyncratic pronunciations were because English was my third language, but a native asserts, and I quote, that "everybody" has "words... learned exclusively from books [whose]...pronunciation is our own, deduced from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it was too late"...so that was reassuring :)

[As a six year old] I couldn't read a lot of the words in The Hobbit. I had accelerated into reading faster than my understanding had grown. If I press my memory for the sensation of reading the second half of the book, when I was flying through the story,I remember, simultaneous with the new liquid smoothness, a constant flicker of incomprehensibility. There were holes in the text corresponding to the parts I couldn't understand. Words like prophesying, rekindled and adornment had never been spoken in my hearing...I could enjoy them. They were obviously the special vocabulary that was apt for the slaying of dragons and the fighting of armies: words that conjured the sound of trumpets. But for all the meaning I obtained from them, they might as well never have been printed. When i speeded up, and my reading became fluent, it was partly because I had learned how to ignore such words efficiently. I methodically left out chunks...

Now that I hardly spell out I do not know, and the things that puzzle me in books do not lie in individual words but in the author's assumption of shared knowledge about the human heart (never my strong point), I still have, like everybody, words in my vocabulary that are relics of that time. The words we learned exclusively from books are the ones we pronounce differently from everyone else. Or, if we force ourselves to say them the public way, secretly we believe the proper pronunciation is our own, deduced from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it was too late to alter the sound of the word. The classic is 'misled', said not as mis-led but as myzled-the past tens of a verb, 'to misle', which somehow never comes p in the present tense. In fact, misled never misled me. One of mine is 'grimace'. You probably think it's pronounced grimuss, but I know different. It's grim-ace to rhyme with face. I'm sorry, but on this point, the entire English-speaking human race except me is wrong.

grimace = grim-ace is one of mine too, but at least that's a fairly uncommon word, I wonder how I missed hearing such mundane words as pigeon (= pig-on ) or plait (= plat)...

Anyway its a pretty unique book - a combination of autobiography, child psychology and literary criticism/classification of children's' literature.... he has a real knack for putting the experience of reading as a child into words.

Another element is the tragic story of his sister, suffering from a rare disease, which is central to his need for the escapism only books can provide. He tells it with some sense of guilt for seeking isolation, but without an ounce of sentimentality as befits her character-in her final illness she declares herself "tired of living at the frontiers of medical knowledge". Here too the comforting power of reading is present - she lingers “ long enough for my father to read her the whole of The Lord of the Rings aloud”.

Om kriget i TV'n

I was about 7 or 8 when I first came across this poem in the fattest book in our library. The books satisfyingly wide spine was the reason it was often the one I chose to flip through whenever I wanted to act truly ‘growed up’; but as it was a collection of over a 1000 Swedish poems, some pieces were short and simple enough for me to actually read.

‘Om kriget i Vietnam’ was not the sort of thing I would usually attempt, but I was hooked from the first line. Of course I knew nothing of Vietnam, but a few days earlier, despite my parent’s best efforts, I had seen a news segment from the then ongoing 2nd (or 91) Gulf War. They thought we were all safely asleep and were watching the evening news, but for some reason I woke up and came into the living room; from the doorway I watched the whole report, complete with the Iraqi corpses and POW’s (paraded across the globe sans condemnation for barbarity) and it wasn’t until the anchor moved unto some local item that my mother noticed me. I remember I slept with her that night.

Those images, perhaps more inexplicable than shocking, were what made me read and re-read the poem. Obviously it was way over my head, I couldn’t even understand some of the words, but I was fascinated by the disjunction between placid Scandinavia and the horrors on TV - it seemed so distant, so unreal, like it was something going on literally inside that black box.


Om kriget i Vietnam

Bakom TV'n ändrades ljuset
utanför fönstren. Mörkret bytes
mot grått och träden framträdde
svarta i det klara grå ljuset
från ny snön. På morgonen
var allt igen snöat. Jag går nu
ut och sopar efter stormen.
Jag hör i radio att USA
gett ut en vitbok
om kriget i VIETNAM
i vilken Nordvietnam anklagas
för aggression. I går kväll
på TV såg vi en filmspelning från
Viet Congs sida, fick höra
helikoptermaskinernas
dova fladdrande,
från marken, från de beskjutnas
sida. I en annan film
för ett par veckor sedan
intervjudnas de amerikanska
helikopternforärna av CBS. En av dem
beskrev sin utlösning
när han äntligen fick skott på
en “VC”: han slungades
tre meter fram
av raketerna. Det blir säkert mer snö idag
säger min granne, svartklädd
på vag till sitt arbete. Han
balsamerar döda och är nåttvardare på
mentalsjukhus. Trackten jag bor i —Lund
med omnejd — blir en allt vitare
bok, solen kommer och lyser
brännande kall over de vidsträkta sidorna.
De döda är siffror, som vilar, vivlar
som kristaller, i vinden over fälten. Hittils
beräknas 2 millioner ha dött i VIETNAM.
Här dör knappast någon
av annat än personliga skäl. Den svenska
ekonomin dödar numera
inte många, i varje fall
inte här i landet. Ingen för
krig i vårt land for att skydda
sina egna intressen. Ingen
bränner oss med napalm
fär en feudal frihets skull.
På 14- och 1500-tålen fanns ingen napalm.
Solen stiger här mot middag.
Det är snart mars 1965.
För var dag.
dödas allt fler i USA’s vidriga krig.
Snöflingorna på fotot av
president Johnson
vid tiden för det sista bombingarna
i Nordvietnam — han steg
ur eller in i en bil — faller
allt tätare over de vita sidorna.
Fler döda, fler rätt fårdiganden,
tills allt snöar igen
i den natt som slutgiltigt
ändrar sitt ljus utanfär fönstren.

-Göran Sonnevi