Customer Reviews

Brother Anansi and the Cattle Ranch (Readalong)

5 star:		(0)
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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

... have had a place in the literature, oral and written, of people of all times and places: Coyote and Raven for Native Americans, Norse Loki, Monkey in China, and Anansi the Spider, originally from Ashanti folklore of West Africa but transported in the slave ships to the Caribbean and to the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, where this story was collected. Like those other trickster, Anansi can be helpful or destructive, benevolent or malevolent. In this bi-lingual folk tale, Anansi deliberately sets out to 'get the better' of Brother Tiger, who has won money in the lottery. Anansi persuades Tiger to invest in a cattle ranch, from which they will both profit, For a while, the partners share equitably, each living with his family on opposite sides of a river. Eventually, however, Anansi decides that it's time to display his cleverness and cheat the gullible Tiger ...

I'd have to dredge up my anthropology and Jungian psychology notes from college to try to explain why these stories about sly, amoral tricksters are so universal and perennial. I might have trouble convincing parents in my community that such stories are 'healthy' for small children. Honestly, I'm not sure they are, though perhaps they were cautionary for people in less complex societies than ours. This book seems to me unapologetically sinister, both the text and the pictures, though Anansi's con-game is amusingly clever and Tiger accepts his victimization in good humor, as par for the course. Perhaps my voice revealed my discomfort when I read this book to my little son; in any case, he didn't seem to like it and never chose it to be read again. That's why it gets only three stars here. Reading Spanish books to my son wasn't about 'teaching' the language; it was about sharing our responses to stories in either Spanish or English. If a parent and a child have nothing much to say to each other, two languages are no better than one.