Anancy's Score by Andrew Salkey

First published: 1973

Type of work: Short stories

Type of plot: Fable

Time of work: Creation to the Vietnam era

Locale: West Africa and the Caribbean

Principal Characters:

• Anancy, the “spider individual person” who respects no one
• Anancy’s wife, an astute female creature, more than a match in wits for her trickster mate
• Brother Tiger, the philosopher/sage in Anancy’s world
• Brother Dog, a critic, somewhat surly and cynical
• Brother Snake, a positive figure, the harbinger of change
• Brother Tacuma, Anancy’s sometime traveling companion, another spider individual
• Brother Oversea, the self-identified narrator in the short story “Anancy, the Spider Preacher”
• Sister Mysore Cow, Anancy’s friend, who reserves judgment until she can survey the whole picture

The Stories

Anancy’s Scoreis a collection of twenty short stories that feature the adventures of Anancy, a spider person. In the “Author’s Note,” Salkey acknowledges that his Anancy is an amalgamation of the Anansi of West African and Caribbean folklore and his own imagination. True to his folkloric forebears, Anancy, in Salkey’s words,

holds no reservations; makes only certain crucial allowances; he knows no boundaries; respects no one, not even himself, at times; and he makes a mockery of everybody’s assumptions and value judgements.

Using the generic conventions of the fable, Salkey reconstructs Anancy’s stories by employing an omniscient, third-person narrator who is identified as Brother Oversea in one tale. The identity of the narrator is unclear in the other stories. The stories are told chronologically, emulating the oral telling and retelling of tales in the folkloric tradition. In the first story, “How Anancy Became a Spider Individual Person,” Anancy’s story becomes a fusion of Caribbean folklore, Judeo-Christian tradition, and postmodern cynicism. Diverging from the pedestrian “In the beginning” motif, the narrator opts to begin this creation myth with a bitter political commentary:

Once, when neither mushrooms on the ground nor mushrooms up in the air were killing off people, when trees were honestly trees, when things used to happen as if they hadn’t any good reason not to happen . . . all the animals and trees and everything had a magical, straightback dignity of bearing, as if they were special, free creatures and things on the lan’.

Within this land, called “The Beginning,” Brother Anancy and his wife reside harmoniously with all the other creatures. Anancy is content to live idly in The Beginning, spending his days drinking water-coconut and eating bananas, much to the chagrin of his clever, ambitious wife. One day, while Anancy philosophizes with his friends, Brother Dog and Brother Tiger, Anancy’s wife approaches the “serious tree” to talk to the snake. Like her Edenic counterpart, Anancy’s wife succumbs to the snake’s skillful rhetoric. Her rapacious curiosity gets the better of her, and she eats of the delicious red fruit.

Unlike the tempting biblical serpent, Brother Snake at first is depicted as a gentleman, not a demon. After all, he is “helping out the first model of a ’oman in distress.” Anancy, however, views Brother Snake more suspiciously than does his wife, since he recognizes that Brother Snake is really an imperialist who uses political rhetoric to trick the other creatures.

In frustration, Anancy’s wife shoves the fruit into Anancy’s mouth. Immediately, anarchy pervades The Beginning. In fear of the now carnivorous animals, Anancy and his wife flee the garden. They implore the snake to save them from their predators. Brother Snake ably complies. He possesses the power of magic as well as the power of persuasion. He transforms Anancy and his wife into a single creature, a spider. The narrator comments that

Anancy and his wife actually did become one spider individual person, and the cunning ways Anancy is famous for are the cunning ways of his wife locked way deep down inside him, and the pretty web you see him spinning so is because of the goodness of the poet-person in Anancy own first ol’-time self.

Subsequent tales center on Anancy’s traditional role of the trickster. In “Anancy, the Sweet Love-Powder Merchant,” the arachnid-man sells packets of love powder to the women of Mount Calm, women who are plagued by philandering, drunken husbands. Anancy’s get-rich plans go awry when the astute wife of a medical officer discovers that Anancy’s wonder packets are actually the cause of the vomiting sickness besetting the village. Anancy narrowly escapes the angry townspeople by hopping a train to Kingston, leaving the Mount Calm patriarchy to contemplate the powers of female sexuality and Anancy, the latter a fusion of “spider ways of the big city and white brains.”

Ultimately, the trickster figure is transformed into a New World savior. In the last tale, “New Man Anancy,” C. World has been ruined by the white imperialists. The sea polluted, the land worn out, the vegetation blighted, the people exploited, C. World has become a dystopia. Anancy is troubled by all he sees. Intuitively, he knows that C. World needs a leader who holds no ideological ties.

Anancy reaches an epiphany: C. World is his own world, which he has taken for granted. He regards C. World differently, concentrating on its natural lush vegetation. C. World is inhabited not by the weak, but by the strong; it is a world “where all the power is people, no matter how them poor, maltreat and develop under, people with a heap o’ invention coil up inside them like watch-spring.” The exploiters of C. World are its enemy, and they must be confronted. The story ends with Anancy exhorting the C. World denizens to trade ignorance and nonaction for experience and power.

The Characters

The characters in Anancy’s Score follow the constraints of the beast fable. Their purpose is to illuminate moral truth. The emphasis of the characterization in the fable, therefore, is on the abstract concepts that the figures represent, not on psychological development. True to generic convention, most of the animals in this modern-day fable are peripheral; that is, they serve only as consultants or sounding boards for the more charismatic Anancy, who, although the central character, is one-dimensional and representational.

Salkey’s Anancy is derivative, drawn from the popular Anansi (a spider) of West African and Caribbean folklore. The folkloric Anansi is a trickster figure, basically an outlaw. The Anansi is an outsider in both the natural world and the civilized world. He inhabits, simultaneously, the natural and the human spheres and is bent on mocking the laws of both. The Anansi is set upon wreaking havoc on humanity and nature. In the folklore he does so, temporarily.

Although the Anansi stories are retold in a humorous vein, the underlying message they provide is serious. Eventually the Anansi gets his comeuppance in these tales; many times, the consequences are dire. Consequently, in West African and Caribbean folklore, the Anansi’s fate provides a moral lesson. The Anansi stories caution their audience about the dangers of disrupting the community and disregarding its mores. The lesson they teach is a simple one: Responsible members of the community should not and cannot act in the manner of the self-centered, mischievous Anansi. To do so is to risk banishment or even death.

Salkey’s Anancy is depicted much in the tradition of the West African Anansi. He, too, is arachnid, large, hairy, and formidable. He is a creature that children fear. In fact, Salkey has drawn on the children’s stories of the Anansi in his own fictional creation. In one story, “Anancy and the Ghost Wrestlers,” Anancy is described in supernatural terms, as a spider who can swim rivers, scale mountains, and win races of endurance. When he walks, he rumbles like an earthquake. His shoulder muscles ripple and bulge. Salkey’s Anancy is a curious mixture of the arachnid and the human, almost a cartoonlike character. All creatures, human and animal, natural and supernatural, fear him, not only for his wrestling prowess but also for his considerable talents as a magician and sorcerer.

Endowed by Brother Snake with magical powers, Anancy has the ability to transform himself into other creatures: a supernatural atomic horse, a mighty preacher, a poet, and a green-coated spider that goes by the name Hope. A few times, he transforms himself for good, particularly in the later stories in the collection, but more often for less than altruistic motives. The settings of the various stories also have an impact on the characterization of the spider person. Anancy is both timeless—the Anancy of the Creation—and of the time—the Anancy of the Vietnam era and of postcolonial Jamaica.

Critical Context

Salkey, a writer and a journalist, focused on West Indian themes in his novels and poetry, both in his adult fiction and in his children’s books. Anancy’s Score, his fifth published work targeted at an adult audience, represents an ambitious melding of political satire, poetry, and folklore. Some of the Anancy stories were previously published in such diverse venues as literary journals, West German daily newspapers, anthologies of West Indian short stories, and anthologies of African and African American prose. When first published as a collection in 1973, the work was critically acclaimed. Often highly praised by reviewers was Salkey’s skillful recapturing of the lilting rhythms of the Jamaican English dialect, evidencing his keen poetic ear. Although the dialect is at times difficult to comprehend for the uninitiated reader, it is lively and rich, emulating the speech of the Jamaican people.

Like most of Salkey’s other work, Anancy’s Score puts forth his wish that the Caribbean people reclaim their cultural and literary identities, both of which he views as being usurped by Western imperialistic powers. In interviews, Salkey asserted that he was committed to understanding and conveying the struggles of the postcolonial world, a world that suffered the aftershocks of oppression and neglect.

In the same year that Anancy’s Score was released in its entirety, Salkey published Jamaica, a long poem characterized by idiosyncratic diction that expanded on the theme of colonial oppression and the loss of cultural identity of the Jamaican people. Jamaica was written twenty years before its appearance in print. The gap between creation and publication underscored Salkey’s long commitment to Caribbean identity. The new man Anancy of Anancy’s Score thus serves as another Caribbean cultural advocate, emulating the poetic voice in Jamaica. Anancy’s cry to the people of C. World mirrors Jamaica’s poetic-voice exhortation to reassert the Caribbean in history and in art.

Bibliography

Abrahams, Roger D. Introduction to African Folktales: Traditional Stories of the Black World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Offers a brief but lucid discussion of the trickster figure in African folklore. States that such tricksters as the Hare, the Jackal, and the Spider are actually creatures that live between culture and nature, obeying the laws of neither. The trickster illustrates how not to act.

Berry, Jack. Preface to West African Folktales, collected and translated by Jack Berry, edited by Richard Spears. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Proffers a short discussion of the Anansi as a symbol of physical and moral liberation. Claims that his family—a wife and an adopted son—merit more critical and anthropological scrutiny than has been afforded them in the past.

Courlander, Harold. “Anansi, Trickster Hero of the Akan.” In A Treasury of African Folklore: The Oral Literature, Traditions, Myths, Legends, Epics, Tales, Recollections, Wisdom, Sayings, and Humor of Africa. New York: Crown, 1975. Asserts that the Anansi not only is the quintessential trickster in Ashanti and Akan folklore but also is a cultural hero. Although adversarial, he is, at times, a sympathetic and wise character. In the role of the cultural hero, much like the role in which Salkey frequently casts him, the Anansi is responsible for natural and cultural phenomena.

Dundes, Alan. “The Making and Breaking of Friendship Frame in African Folk Tales.” In Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, edited by Pierre Maranda and Elli Köngäs Maranda. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Identifies the pattern in African trickster folktales as a progression from an implied contract with family, friends, or both to a violation of this contract, ultimately ending in the contract’s dissolution.

Jonas, Joyce. Anancy in the Great House: Ways of Reading West Indian Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. Despite the exclusive focus on the Anancy figure in the works of Salkey’s contemporaries, George Lamming and Wilson Harris, Jonas provides a salient analysis of reading Caribbean texts, one that lends itself well to Salkey’s use of the Anancy. Avers that the Anancy, the spider-creator, has become an icon for the Caribbean artist and subsequently voices a dialectical relationship between politics and art.

Murray, Patricia. “The Trickster at the Border: Cross-Cultural Dialogues in the Caribbean.” In Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, edited by Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Examines the trickster figure in postcolonial Caribbean writing and its role in mediating between different cultural values and perspectives.

Nazareth, Peter. In the Trickster Tradition: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejar and Ishmael Reed. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Press, 1994. Compares Salkey’s Anancy to the trickster figures employed by two of his fellow writers. One of the few book-length works to concentrate on Salkey’s stories.