"Strange Suitor" Tales

In this week’s episode we revisit a conversation about the “Strange Suitor” tale type which shows up repeatedly in the folklore of different African peoples. In these stories, a beautiful girl flouts the conventions of her family or community by rejecting all suitors who approach her. A handsome or fabulously wealthy suitor eventually shows up and she all too happily chooses the man, only to find out his true form (usually an animal or some kind of monster), and his true intentions (to kill her). In some instances, she successfully escapes or is rescued. In other instances, she dies. We talked about examples from Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Chad and Zambia.

As far as I can tell, “Strange Suitor” is not an official tale type à la Aarne-Thompson-Uther. If I understand correctly, these tales would be a variation of the “Animal/Monster as Bridegroom” or the “Beauty and the Beast” type of tales. Their repeated occurrence in African folklore, however, reflects anxieties about family/clan loyalty, the importance of choosing a spouse wisely, and sexual continence, all of which are vitally important to survival, then and now.

Thinking about these tales inevitably leads me to consider how folklore acts as a portion of a group’s culture and belief that does not derive from, and often exists despite formal, institutionalized forces, and constantly evolves (both structurally and thematically) to negotiate new social conditions and modalities. As Indian scholars P. K. Sreekumar and Anjana Menon put it, by offering glimpses of what it means and takes to be human, folklore helps people navigate the tensions between personal and social spaces that determine individual identities, working as a veiled algorithm to solve the metaphysical conundrums of duality that permeate our lives, and providing scaffolding for day-to-day situations.

As it turns out, what some people quickly dismiss as just songs, fairy tales and witty sayings end up influencing, sometimes even more than laws and formal institutions, the way people live and act toward each other. What this means to me is that we must be vigilant about examining what is encoded in folklore and what it says about and demand from us.

Specifically, it makes me wonder what the abundance of these “Strange Suitor” tales say about and demand from women in the different African cultures they come from.

The position women occupy in African folklore, and by extension the different cultures, is an interesting one. On one hand, women are said to be the undisputed carriers of wisdom, wit and intelligence, the power behind the throne, or as some people say, the neck that turns the head. On the other hand, women are the source of all evil – a position we share with women in folklore from across the world. In analysis after analysis, women (as daughters, wives and mothers) are simultaneously upheld as the epitome of what makes a man’s life worth living, and the source of all his (and their own) problems.

While it is true that women, as flawed human beings, have contributed their fair share to the troubles we suffer as humans, I question the relevance of the “stick to your own kind” logic which underlies these tales. I question the implications of the conformity demanded from the women in these stories. I see how this all undermines the efforts of people (feminists especially), working to untangle the knots misogyny has tied African communities up in. Too often, especially in our current times, the demands for family/clan loyalty, circumspection in choice of marriage partner and sexual continence, while valid in some instances, only very superficially prioritize women’s best interests. The statistics about the abuses women across the continent suffer prove so.

Hopefully, the folklore continues to evolve and we have more stories in which the duplicitous suitors tempting people (not just women) with false promises are unfair expectations grounded in misogyny and other prejudices. Stories in which the monstrous suitors with borrowed body parts are the oppressive structures which seductively mimic but ultimately distort human relationships. Stories which acknowledge that as an expression of love, intimacy or plain desire, sexuality can take on an infinite variety of forms, not all of which will necessarily conform to prevailing notions of propriety. Stories which offer us space for growth and multidimensionality suited for the globalized world we currently live in.

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