Whatever has gotten into the Prices? asks the apocryphal Professor
Goodfellow in the opening lines of Two Evenings in Saramaka. After all
those books on history and ethnography, he muses, why are they now
turning to children's stories and nonsense songs--mere folklore?
In this innovative work, Richard and Sally Price explore the fully adult
world of Saramaka folktale-land, where animals speak, the social order
is inverted, customs have been only partially worked out, and the weak
and clever triumph over the strong and arrogant. Joining the Saramaka of
the Suriname rain forest for two tale-telling wakes, we witness
mischievous Anasi the spider matching wits with lecherous devils, the
scrawny little kid rescuing his nubile sisters in distress, and the
bitchy white princess being tamed by the one-sided boy. As seas dry up,
books speak out loud, and elephants assume human form, we are present at
a whole sequence of world-shaping happenings such as the invention of
sex, the discovery of drums, and the arrival of death among humans.
Set in the more general context of tale telling by the descendants of
Africans throughout the Americas and of recent scholarship in
performance studies, these Saramaka tales are presented as a dramatic
script. With the help of nearly forty photographs, readers become
familiar not only with the characters in folktale-land, but also with
the men and women who so imaginatively bring them to life. And because
music complements narration in Saramaka just as it does elsewhere in
Afro-America, more than fifty songs are presented here in musical
notation.
Narrative, song, dance, and social interaction merge in these two
evenings of multimedia entertainment, bearing witness to an
Afro-American cultural tradition that remains alive and vibrant,
constantly renewed but always reflecting its links with the past.
