My goal is to create a book of African folktales about animals from public domain texts. I'll do some light editing of the texts (getting rid of archaic thees and thous, for example) and I'll also write up some notes so that the stories will work for an audience of general readers, people who are interested in African folklore but who might not know anything about these traditions before they start reading. I hope the final result will be a book that people will enjoy reading and, even better, a book that will inspire them to seek out even more African folktales to read and enjoy.
And there are so many African folktales to read and enjoy: literally thousands of stories available in English. I've been curating a collection of African folktale books that are just a click away at the Internet Archive, and there are over 200 books so far, both public domain books and more contemporary books available via Controlled Digital Lending.
The idea is to create something like Paul Radin's African Folktales or Harold Scheub's African Storyteller, but done with public domain texts only, and with an OER CC0 license so that people can adapt the contents for their own educational purposes. That means the book can be free of cost, and I think that is important.
Just today I saw this item at Twitter:
That made me ask a related question: why should the people of Africa or the African diaspora have to pay to get access to their own stories? So, using the power of Pressbooks, I'll be able to create a book in digital format that will be free to download and very mobile-friendly (yay for Pressbooks and epubs! you can see my previous Pressbooks publications here). I'll put this book into the public domain (CC0) since all that I'm adding is notes and curation; the core of the project is already in the public domain after all!
Radin's book and Scheub's book are not free. They are both great books, available for sale and also available for checkout at the Internet Archive and at many libraries... but not free. I want to write a book that will be free, and now that I am retired, I have the luxury of time to make that possible, repurposing and annotating public domain sources.
Working exclusively with public domain sources has its limitations (I'll have lots more to say about that as the project takes shape), but I can also make sure I do a good job of finding really good public domain stories to include. Over the past 6 months, I have been collecting and transcribing African animal tales from public domain books in English, and I've now got over 1700 stories transcribed, just waiting to be republished in new forms/formats. And those are just the animal folktales! I'm thinking that if this project goes well I will do a follow-up volume with hero stories or fairy tales or dilemma tales or some other genre of African folktales.
As I said above: SO. MANY. FOLKTALES.
And why the focus on animal tales? Lots of reasons, but the simplest answer is: they are my favorites. My academic career focused on Aesop's fables, which are not exclusively animal fables, but animal characters predominate. Even after working on Aesop for almost 40 years, I'm still fascinated... and a new question of fascination to me concerns the back-and-forth between the Aesopic tradition and African folktaltes (but that's a topic for another post and another project).
More recently, I became obsessed with the African American stories of Brer Rabbit; that was back in December of 2018, when I read Julius Lester's Brer Rabbit book over winter break (best English version of the stories hands down in my opinion). Then in the summer of 2019, I retold all of the Joel Chandler Harris stories in without the eye-dialect that Harris used, and without the repugnant Uncle Remus framing: Ole Brer Rabbit. That's also when I started learning about the African origins of these stories. I had to rely on other scholars for that; my knowledge of African folktales was minimal. I vowed that as soon as I retired (which ended up happening sooner than expected because of the pandemic), I would immerse myself in the study of African folktale traditions.
So, I retired in May 2021, and that's when I started inventorying the contents of African folktale books in English, focusing on public domain books to start with because those offer the greatest freedom for reuse. I've also found articles in folklore journals in the public domain, and I've now indexed animal stories from over 100 public domain books and articles.
As I've transcribed the stories (i.e. made corrections to the OCR provided by my online sources), I've kept track of the length of the stories: they range from 36 words to over 8000 words. The label "story" encompasses quite a wide range! I've been working with the shorter to stories to create a Tiny Tales book that I should be able to publish on October 31, clearing the decks just in time for NaNoWriMo; you can find out more about that here: Tiny Tales from Africa.
For NaNoWriMo, I'll be able to take a look at the longer stories and find the best ones to include in a book. I'm hoping to cover a wide range of sources, so the idea will also be to find the single best story, or maybe two, from a given source, knowing that people can then go read that book or article for themselves and enjoy all the stories that it contains.
Anyway, that's the plan! I set up my NaNoWriMo page and now I'm just waiting for November 1 to arrive. Whatever happens with the writing, I know I am going to enjoy reading so many stories, looking for the ones I want to work with and share.
No comments:
Post a Comment