Here is the full transcript of Emily Zobel Marshall’s talk titled “Anansi, Loki, And Why We Love Trickster Myths” at TEDxLeedsBeckettUniversity conference.
In her TEDx talk “Anansi, Loki, and Why We Love Trickster Myths,” Emily Zobel Marshall explores the universal appeal of trickster figures, such as Anansi from West African folklore and Loki from Norse mythology. She explains that tricksters are often small, cunning creatures who use intelligence over strength to challenge more powerful beings.
Marshall highlights the trickster’s role in storytelling and their ability to navigate and disrupt societal norms and boundaries. Focusing on Anansi, she discusses how the character evolved from West African to Caribbean contexts, symbolizing resistance and survival strategies among enslaved peoples. Marshall also touches on the trickster’s role in contemporary culture, suggesting that these figures teach us alternative ways of communication and challenge conventional societal structures.
She connects her personal interest in tricksters to her family background, including her anarchist father and her grandfather’s experiences in a Caribbean plantation environment. Marshall concludes by contemplating the trickster’s potential to both inspire change and caution against the allure of anarchic rebellion.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
What is it about the trickster figure that fascinates us so much? What is it about these small, amoral, sometimes sinister creatures that turn the table on the powerful, that captivates us through the ages?
First of all, let me tell you what I’m talking about when I say a trickster figure. A trickster is often a small creature, like a spider or a hare, who turns the table on their stronger opponents, using their brains rather than their brawn, so they’re using their intelligence rather than their muscle.
They do this through their linguistic dexterity, through their storytelling. They are wonderful performers; they are wonderful liars. The trickster will do anything to ensure that they remain on top. We have a variety of tricksters in our culture.
Although I’ll be focusing on tricksters from West Africa, in modern popular culture we are obsessed with tricksters. Think, for example, of Bart Simpson, Puss in Boots, Bugs Bunny, the Pied Piper, even the Pink Panther and the Joker from Batman. All of these are amoral creatures who test the binaries and boundaries of good and evil. We could even call Robin Hood a type of trickster figure, but most trickster figures are not as benevolent as Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.
Most trickster figures are out for their own personal gain. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung says that the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages. So, we find tricksters in indigenous folktales across the globe. What I want to try and explain to you and ask is, what is the enduring appeal of the trickster across the ages and across continents?
What is a Trickster?
What is a trickster, and why are we captivated by them? We find tricksters in Greek and Roman mythology, for example, the tricksters Hermes and Mercury. These are tricksters that operate in the borderlands between the world of the gods and the world of mankind, and they bring things from the world of the gods to mankind. They are intermediary figures.
They exist in the betwixt and between, in the liminal zone. The trickster that I am really going to focus on in this talk is Anansi. An Anansi is a small spider that originates in the folklore of the Ashanti people of West Africa. The Anansi stories were brought by enslaved people from West Africa into the plantations of the Americas, and there he evolved, and I’m going to tell you a bit about how he evolved.
So, Anansi is like many tricksters, amoral. He can shape-shift, he can transcend boundaries, he can remove his body parts, and most of all, he is a wonderful storyteller. He has a silver tongue, so he can get his own way by spinning a story. It’s through language that he is able to deceive and to lure and to charm.
Anansi’s Tales
Let me give you an example of a trickster tale. This is a classic Anansi story that’s found both in West Africa and in the Caribbean, and it’s called “Anansi and the Old Tiger Riding Horse.” One day in the forest, Tiger sat in a glade and he said to all the animals in the forest, “I am the most powerful animal of the forest. When I roar, everybody shudders, and yet when Anansi speaks, nobody listens.” Anansi is infuriated.
He tells all the animals of the forest that actually Tiger is nothing but his old riding horse. Then he scuttles home to his house. Tiger is furious. He runs to Anansi’s house, he starts to shake it, “Anansi, come and tell the animals of the forest that this is a lie.” Anansi has a weak little voice from upstairs in his bedroom, “Tiger, I’d love to do that but I’m so sick, I’m so very, very sick.”
Tiger says, “What should I do, Anansi, you have to come and tell them.” “Well, Tiger, I might have to ride on your back, it’s the only way I can get there.” So sure enough, Tiger kneels down and Anansi climbs onto his back and off they go. After a while, here Anansi again, “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, go, stop, stop, stop, you need to go more slowly because I need you to cushion the blow, I need something to sit on, maybe just a little blanket or something.”
So Tiger, sure enough, procures a blanket, Anansi sits off the blanket and off they go to the glade. A little further on, Anansi, again, “Tiger, stop, I’m falling, I’m falling, just a little rope around your neck left for me to hold on to, that’ll help me.” And Tiger obliges. Just before they get to the glade, here Anansi again, “Tiger, Tiger, Tiger, you’re going too fast and then sometimes you go too slow, so just break me off a little twig, and I can just then tell you when to go fast, when to go slow.”
Tiger obliges.
Anansi is slumped on Tiger’s back, they arrive in the glade and then sure enough, Anansi sits up tall and proud as a king and says to all the animals of the forest, “You see, Tiger is nothing but my old riding horse.” And as they say in Jamaica, that story shows you that cunning is better than strong.
Now, the Anansi that you find in his West African context is different from the Anansi that you find in the Caribbean context. So, the Anansi stories that are told by people in West Africa, particularly the Ashanti of Ghana, are stories about a trickster spider who carries messages and wreaks havoc in the world of the deities and wreaks havoc in the world of mankind. He brings wonderful things down to earth, like stories.
For example, in this tale, we hear of how Anansi brought wisdom in a gourd for mankind, for humankind to share. He spreads wisdom around the world by inadvertently breaking the gourd. And it’s also said that all this world’s stories belong to Anansi. Anansi functions in a West African context as a type of wish fulfillment.
Those people listening to the Anansi stories would never do as Anansi does. He is actually an emblem of breaking free from the structures of a tightly regimented society with compliant members. The Anansi that we see in the Caribbean, in the world of the enslaved, is a very different kind of spider. We live in a world where we are constrained by rules.
Tricksters in Society
We are told that we have to behave in a certain way because that is how society expects us to behave. And we are compliant members, mainly, within these societies. We live with the fantasy of the trickster because the trickster shows us ways in which we could break free in the world of fantasy. With people in enslaved societies, the trickster took on a new role.
It was not wish fulfillment anymore, but showed people how to resist enslavement in the here and now. I argue that in the context of enslavement, Anansi showed enslaved people coded strategies of survival. So when they sat together and shared Anansi stories, they would learn how to thwart the rules of the plantation through the medium of the tale. In my work, I’ve shown how these stories help to facilitate a type of psychological resistance in the enslaved.
So, those methods of psychological resistance would then translate into practical ways of resisting the system in the here and now. So, for enslaved people to carve themselves a space within the confines of oppression. The ways in which they would do this would be things like working slowly, rubbing salt into wounds, setting the plantation fields on fire, breaking machinery, using their silver tongue, their linguistic dexterity, to lie to the masa, to the plantation boss, thieving and trickery. All of these are practical methods of survival and resistance.
And those, in turn, would feed into more outright protest, rebellion, and revolt. The power of oral storytelling is that stories adapt and change to suit the needs of the people that tell them. They are malleable. They exist in a perpetual stream of transformation.
This is an image from one of the earliest collections of Anansi stories in West Africa. People tell stories to suit the needs of their environment. I want to let you into a bit of a secret, which you may have guessed already, is that I’m pretty obsessed with trickster figures. And there’s a specific reason for this.
First of all, my father is an anarchist philosopher, and I am the child of hippie parents, for my sins. So, I am somewhat of a free spirit. My grandfather, pictured here, is also from a plantation environment in the Caribbean. He grew up in Martinique, a small island which was under French colonialism.
The village he grew up in was a cane cutting village, and everybody in the village lived as cane cutters. My grandfather was destined for this kind of life, but his grandmother helped him to get an education so he could then write a book about his childhood. That book is called “Black Shack Alley” and has also been turned into a film. This is a book that captivated me as a child.
I grew up alongside it. In the story of his life, there is a storyteller called Monsieur Medouze. Monsieur Medouze plays a central role in the young Joseph’s life. He teaches him about his ancestors in Africa. He also teaches him about the conditions of colonialism and enslavement. So, it is through the story, it is through the medium of the story, that he connects with his history and he understands how to resist it. It is through the story that he then decides to write his own story.
And the final line of the book is, “I must tell my story to those who are blind and those who block their ears. I will shout it out.” I also love to listen to the stories as a child. Any child likes to think of ways to outwit the more powerful adults in their life. Which child doesn’t?
The Contemporary Relevance of Tricksters
So, what can we learn about the trickster figure in our contemporary world? What can we draw from these often amoral creatures? We live in divisive times. We live in a time of corrupt power. We live in a time where everybody is shouting at each other, and nobody is listening. What we can learn from a trickster are new ways of listening and new ways of communicating.
We use our storytelling. We use our language. We don’t use muscle, and we don’t use power. Surely, there is a lesson to be learnt in that. We also learn that we don’t need to necessarily stick to one particular way of being. Why must we conform always to the laws of society?
The trickster shows us that we can inhabit many different identities: genders, racial, class. Can we not move more freely between those? The trickster challenges those binaries and those boundaries. But perhaps also the trickster is there to test us. Because how far do we want to go before we step back safely from the brink and not be lured by the seduction of the anarchic trickster’s song?