Antigua and Barbuda / All works
Tale
Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English
Elsie Clews Parsons · 1936
Synopsis
The second volume of Parsons's great collection on the Lesser Antilles devotes a dozen pages to Antigua: eighteen tales taken down in the island's Creole English from four storytellers, among them two young women from English Harbour and a sixty-eight-year-old man. Bra Nancy sends his son to fetch fire from Brer Gahlin, who brings back peanuts from the land of the jumbies; the tales also feature a monkey husband, a name to be guessed, a mute girl, six little pigs, the mosquito's knee and the fly's mouth.
Context
The volume was published in New York in 1936 in the Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, printed in Germany; it follows a first volume of 1933 devoted to Trinidad, the Grenadines and the Windward Islands, and precedes an index volume published in 1943, after the death of the author. Antigua stands there alongside Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Nevis, Saint Kitts, the Northern Islands and Haiti. Each tale bears the number of its teller, whose list gives the name, the place and the age, and the work summarises the tales with their references.
Who it is for
Very brief tales, transcribed in the speech of the storytellers; they can be read island by island or by comparing the versions of a single story.
Prizes and reception
Its summaries of the tales, accompanied by their references, make it a tool for comparing the traditions of the islands.
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