How to Read a Folktale: The Ibonia Epic from Madagascar

by Lee Haring

How to Read a Folktale offers the first English translation of Ibonia, a spellbinding tale of old Madagascar. Ibonia is a folktale on epic scale. Much of its plot sounds familiar: a powerful royal hero attempts to rescue his betrothed from an evil adversary and, after a series of tests and duels, he and his lover are joyfully united with a marriage that affirms the royal lineage. These fairytale elements link Ibonia with European folktales, but the tale is still very much a product of Madagascar. It contains African-style praise poetry for the hero; it presents Indonesian-style riddles and poems; and it inflates the form of folktale into epic proportions. Recorded when the Malagasy people were experiencing European contact for the first time, Ibonia proclaims the power of the ancestors against the foreigner. Through Ibonia, Lee Haring expertly helps readers to understand the very nature of folktales. His definitive translation, originally published in 1994, has now been fully revised to emphasize its poetic qualities, while his new introduction and detailed notes give insight into the fascinating imagination and symbols of the Malagasy. Haring's research connects this exotic narrative with fundamental questions not only of anthropology but also of literary criticism. This book is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.

Genres: Madagascar, Folklore

164 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

Reviews

[Asaria · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading the world - Madagascar

2* mainly for weak academic parts. My thesis supervisors would have cried while reading due to poor style. Especially the opening words in each chapter. I expect from professionals something better than classroom essays
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As for the epic/poem itself, I'm not the best judge since I haven't been the biggest fan of the genre in general.

Some motifs I found particularly annoying like baby ordering his mother or fight over a married girl. But you can find a few experiments in the structure of the poem that were interesting too. Also, some word repartees are fun.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

- fav names: Manly Princess, the Self-Circumcized Man, Lazy Can't Lift, Needs No Help Eating, Oozes Bran Water, Shakes Like an Eel, Birds Nest in his Horns, Sir Wild Hog, too many to name
- "I understand the unsignified, I know the unsaid."
- "In this variant a locust comes out of the fire, settles on the head of Ibonia's mother, sinks into her body, and so becomes the origin of the wonderful child. A long conversation is held between the child and its mother before its birth as to where he should be brought forth, a great number of places being proposed, but successively rejected for various reasons, until at length he is born while his mother sits in a golden chair of immense size. Wonderful portents accompany his birth; for he announces that he is "God upon earth", and that a thousand canoes could not bear him over the water, &c. All living things are broken, the rocks and the heavens resound, the earth turns upside down and this, sthey say, was the origin of earthquakes."
- names as nomadic: "They take their style from the widespread Malagasy and African practice of changing one's name at different stages of life. When his mother tries to name him, he hears and rejects four honourific names. While his mother is in labour, he pours forth an extended passage of self-priase in hainteny: I am an edible arum in the chink of a rock / uncrushed by any foot / its leaves not eaten."
- the combat myth: "Not infrequently, the elabouration of the theme has a faintly Oedpial flavor. Thsu in Bantu Africa (and beyond) a hero is born to a woman who survives after a monster has eaten her spouse (and everyone else). The son immediately turns into a man, slays a monster or monsters, restores his people—but not his father—and becomes chief."
- Ibonia is not just a "donative" hero but a "purgative" hero, because he purges the threat
- Malagasy history, and therefore the narrative of Ibonia, being so determined by firearms—v American
- "In a swallowing-monster story collected from a Sakalava informant on the west coast in 1907–1910 and published by Renel, a pregnant woman craves the liver of the mythical beast kiridy (a name meaning something like Tough), who has already swallowed people and animals. Her husband sets forth, traversing desert and crocodile-infested rivers, becoming hungry and discouraged. When he finally finds the kiridy, he shoots and misses; he is killed and swallowed. Back to the wife: she gives birth to a son (the hero), who grows precociously fast and strong. After his playmates say, and his mother admits, that his father was killed by the kiridy, he sets out with a gun in search of the monster, finds it, kills it, and begins cutting it open. From inside, his father says, “Be careful not to cut me with the axe, son” (echoing heroes like Ibonia who speak from inside their mother’s womb). Opening the stomach, he releases all the people and animals."
- "In Bascom’s classic formulation, myths are “prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told, are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past”. Legends are stories “regarded as true by the narrator and his audience, but they are set in a period considered less remote, when the world was much as it is today”. Folktales are not set in real time. They are “prose narratives which are regarded as fiction”."
- play, playful stories such as folklore are an incitement to normativity, enforce conformity

[Shiva Saravanan]

It was interesting to see the different variations (some of which were a lot weirder than the one that is presented in full).

[kayleigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for uni, interesting introduction to the course

[Lulu]

1877