Multicultural icon

In the course of the twentieth century, the Anansi stories travelled to the Netherlands, along with the large migratory flow. And once again, the stories showed their flexibility: elements of modern life, e.g. cars, television, Coca Cola, taxi drivers and mobile phones are integrated into the animal tales.^[8] The stories are adapted to a different audience by the contemporary storytellers. Originally these stories were meant for the transmission of culture in the Caribbean, and thus they had an exclusively Caribbean background. Their relocation to the Netherlands led to the intrusion of elements of the new culture, also because the “local eye” had now changed. The children lived in a Dutch environment with a heritage of Caribbean cultural elements. The Anansi tales adapted in part to both the local colour and the altered cultural identity of the intended audience. A nice illustration of this is a self-invented story by Hilli Arduin (recorded by Flora Illes in 2008) about Anansi at the Albert Cuyp market in Amsterdam. Anansi and his family go to the Amsterdam market where they smell nice mangos, climb onto the stalls and begin to fill their stomachs. Before the police and the fire brigade arrive, they have gorged themselves sufficiently and disappear. In this context, Anansi appears in a concrete, modern setting of the Dutch Creoles, but in his traditional form, i.e. as a spider.

Many references to the concrete, new environment and everyday reality got a place in the animal tales, for instance by the introduction of integration problems or multicultural neighbours. Many of the updated stories have a socio-political touch: they mock Dutch bureaucracy or make mention of the emancipation of women. But perhaps the biggest change is an alteration in Anansi’s character: he is now milder; less cruel and selfish, thereby losing his complex dual character (Van Duin 1994 and 2003, 187; Ronhaar-Rozema 1978, 264; Van Kempen 2002, 248). He increasingly loses his perfidious and selfish traits, and adjusts himself to the contemporary morals of social adaptability and mutual respect. This change can be the result of the adaptation to the morals of a wider intended audience. In the country of the colonizer, a vicious folktale character, unmotivated cruelty and a disharmonic ending of fairy tales have become less acceptable over time. As a result of this development, Anansi’s arrival in the country of the colonizer makes his transformation into a milder creature culturally determined.

Another very important addition concerns one of Anansi’s new functions in Europe: identity reinforcement. The Anansi tales are part of the cultural heritage of the Surinamese and the Antilleans. They are carriers of the specific ethnicity of these groups in the foreign, sometimes hostile environment the Netherlands are. They play a role in the “integration with retention of own identity”. The narration of spider tales is often a way to manifest one’s own identity and “roots” (Meder 2007b). The stories of the spider are simply part of the proper education of a Surinamese child, and Hilli Arduin finds it a disgrace if a child is no longer capable of singing the elementary song about B’Anansi:

For I sometimes meet Surinamese people, and their children can’t even sing B’Anansi tingelingeling. Well, then I tell the mothers off… and I say to the children: “Tell your mother she hasn’t brought you up right”… Yes. […] Children really should be able to sing B’Anansi tingelingeling. (Arduin 2008).

The spider thus turns into an ethnic icon, and as an exemplary figure, he plays an important role in the process of the attribution of cultural identity.

At the same time, Anansi has also been appropriated by the white Dutch natives and for that reason he is now part of the multicultural canon of Dutch children’s literature. The spider also managed to secure a position in the Dutch “canon with a small c”.^[9] This small canon links to the bigger official Canon of the Netherlands, and provides stories from everyday culture to match the “big” history of the Netherlands (Van Oostrom 2006-2007). When the big Canon discusses the Dutch colonial past, the small canon provides spider stories that match this past. Anansi has become a figure of history, with which the Creoles share a similar past. In Noni Lichtveld’s contribution, the old African Ananse says to his son Anansi, who follows the slaves to the Caribbean:

Son of the spider, and son of Africa,
Follow our black brothers and friends.
Bring them relief when the chains are galling,
Bring comfort, by telling my stories.
[…]
If you want to be sure
That you will succeed,
Bring comfort to all
Who are being oppressed. (Lichtveld 1984: 8)

Here we can see once more how the crafty spider from Africa – by storytellers and some researchers – is attributed the role of freedom fighter and resistance hero in retrospect. He is placed in the service of the historical memory and appears as an icon of cultural identity. His mythical primal roots provided him with an enormous vitality, which led to the attribution of his role as a cultural hero who keeps alive the important values of freedom and independence.

Another important change in the contemporary Anansi stories concerns the means of communication: the manner in which they are passed on. Both in Africa and in the New World, the stories were mostly distributed orally. In the colonies some sound recordings were made, but only a handful and all relatively late, by people interested in anthropology, like e.g. the Dutch geologist Herman van Cappelle in 1903 (for the final result, see Van Cappelle 1926). Only after the animal tales had properly arrived in the Netherlands, where written culture was dominant, were these stories written down and published in (children’s) books. We can witness the emergence of specific illustrations accompanying the spider tales, complementing the long Anansi tradition with a new medium: visual language. In this newly-developed tradition of illustrated children’s books, the edition entitled Kon Nanzi A Nek Shon Arei (“How Nanzi tricked the king”) is a unique, literary specimen. The book contains the recorded spider stories of the Antillean schoolmistress Nilda Pinto from the 1950s. The stories had originally been written down in Papiamento and were translated into Dutch thirty years later by the minister and researcher Wim Baart. His translation formed the basis for the modern edition mentioned before in this paper. This edition attempted to retain the authenticity of the original stories and the final result is a wonderfully designed bilingual book, with drawings by six illustrators, who portrayed several different interpretations of the spider figure.

Apart from the increasing number of children’s books, the spider stories also led to a continued oral existence. Over the past twenty years, the Netherlands has experienced a revival of storytelling (Booy 1996, 22). Anansi enters the world of organized culture and makes more frequent appearances on the stage – the modern variant of oral literature (Kempen 2002, 149). Some examples of professional and semi-professional storytellers and actors/actresses in the Netherlands who have incorporated Anansi tales into their repertoire for a considerable time are the Surinamese storytellers Gerda Havertong, Thea Doelwijt, Marijke van Mil, Paul Middellijn, Hilli Arduin, Winston Scholsberg and Guillaume Pool, as well as the Antillean storytellers Wijnand Stomp and Olga Orman (Meder 2007b).

The oral corpus of this study also finds its origin in a theatrical communication setting. The Anansi Masters Foundation organized storytelling competitions in Rotterdam and Amsterdam to find out how the stories are being told in the Netherlands nowadays. The competitions were held in theatres and recorded on film. Despite the fact that this narrative setting could be described as artificial and staged, the initiative still provides an insight into the form in which the spider stories are circulating in the Netherlands today. The aforementioned corpus, along with the drawings by Noni Lichtveld and the illustrations from Kon Nanzi A Nek Shon Arei, are the most important data of the research presented below.