This spider trickster god originated in West Africa (most likely Ghana) and spread to the Caribbean and southern United States through storytellers who were often slaves or people of mixed (or Creole) descent. He appeared in traditional stories as a spider, although he is also associated with the Brer Rabbit stories of the Deep South, and thus can change into other physical forms. He can also appear as a human, but his human figure is almost always spindly. He can appear as a human with spider-like traits, such as long, thin legs. To the unaware, his small, spindly appearance makes him appear weak and insignificant. However, through his cunning and intellect, Anansi manages to outmaneuver stronger, larger characters, and thus he epitomizes the cunning use of intellect to gain power. Most of his stories have a humorous tone and are meant to teach a moral, even when that moral is not explicit.
The Anansi tales are believed to have originated with the Ashanti people in Ghana, as the Akan or Twi word for spider is “anansi.” The stories are believed to have been transferred from Africa to the Caribbean and then to the African American traditions of the American South through the transatlantic slave trade (James 2009).
Trickster Gods and Social Change
Anansi, as a trickster figure in a folkloric tradition, is much more than just comic relief in an otherwise serious story. Trickster figures in mythology appear worldwide, from Coyote in Native American traditions to Loki in the Norse pantheon to the Pucks of Irish/Celtic traditions and fairy tales.
Jungian scholars assert that the archetype of the trickster is an important counterbalance to the more well-behaved elements of society: through breaking rules, tricksters often can instigate very positive social change and subvert oppression. The trickster is a rule-breaker, or one who uses the rules to his or her own benefit to gain power over others who have been abusing their power. In these types of stories, tricksters often beat the stronger foe using riddles, verbal wordplay, creative joking, and other literary tricks, or what African American scholars, in particular, call “signifyin(g).” This theory was developed in The Signifying Monkey (Gates 1988), where Gates explored the trickster ways of another African folkloric figure, Esu-Elegbara, who is very similar to Anansi in a number of ways.
Scholars argue that the practice of signification can be a method through which a marginalized culture or class (such as African Americans during slavery) subverts the privileged group through storytelling traditions that promote secrecy, deception, and sabotage. As an example of this signifying language, many of the Anansi stories are told in and written with special attention to the dialect of the Caribbean, with nonstandard English. Scholars argue that the practice of valuing the speech patterns of the less powerful culture, rather than being simply bad grammar, is a form of signification. Its usages subverts the dominant culture’s insistence on “correct” English (Gates 1988). For example, many Anansi stories use a vernacular style of speech, representing an accent with “dropped g’s” and words spelled phonetically rather than according to their dictionary spelling. The phonetic spellings introduce a patois within the written versions of the story.
In this way, Anansi, as a strong trickster in African American folklore, illustrates one method of retaining a marginalized culture’s traditions. Slaves and later African American oral storytellers preserved and transmitted a history of their African ancestors in an era when reading and writing was forbidden. Storytelling also served as a link to their traditional African roots and a reminder of their identity.
Keeper of Stories
Anansi is known as a keeper of stories, and thus has been embraced by storytellers as a symbol of their special art. A popular folk story known as “How Anansi Got His Stories” tells how Anansi came to embody the art of storytelling. In this story, the Sky God, Nyame, had kept all the stories to himself after creation, hoarding them so they were not shared in the world. Anansi decided that the stories needed to be shared with everyone, so he asked the Sky God what the price for these stories would be. Nyame, thinking he was putting one over on Anansi, set a very high, seemingly impossible price for the stories: Anansi must capture and bring back Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, the Mmoboro Hornets, and Mmoatia the dwarf.
While Nyame was congratulating himself on outwitting the tricky spider, Anansi went about capturing each character. Each of Anansi’s exploits is better than the last. He tricks Onini into his snare with a measuring contest, appealing to the snake’s sense of vanity. He tricks Osebo by digging a deep hole and offering to rescue him, taking advantage of the leopard’s superior sense of strength. He tricks the Mmoboro Hornets by pretending it is raining and offering them shelter in a trap gourd, taking advantage of their hive-mind and lack of original thought. Finally, he tricks Mmoatia using her greed and anger. When Mmoatia gets annoyed with Anansi’s doll’s lack of polite answers, the dwarf attacks the doll and gets herself stuck. Anansi turns each of the characters’ strengths against them (size, physical force, sheer numbers, and self-centered sense of justice) to win the contest of wits with the Sky God who thinks he has outsmarted Anansi.
When Anansi brings back his seemingly impossible conquests, Nyame is stunned. Nevertheless, he agrees to award the prize, and Anansi gains all the stories in the world, thus also increasing his own repertoire of future tricks. Through the use of stories, Anansi gains significant power over the much stronger Sky God. To the children listening, this can be seen as a powerfully subversive lesson.
Variant retellings of this story include A Story, A Story by Gail E. Haley; “The Pot of Stories” in The Parade by K. P. Kojo; Trickster Tales: Forty Folk Stories from Around the World by Josepha Sherma; Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti by Gerald McDermott; The Hat-Shaking Dance and Other Tales from the Gold Coast by Harold Courlander; Ananse and the Box of Stories: A West African Folktale by Stephen Krensky; The Story Thief by Andrew Fusek Peters; Spider and the Sky God: An Akan Legend by Deborah M. Newton Chocolate; Anancy and the Sky God: Caribbean Favourite Tales by Ladybird Books; Ananse by Brian Gleeson; and The Magic of Ananse a film by Tamara Lynch.
Because of his ability to defeat his powerful enemies through the cunning use of language, scholars argue that Anansi was a symbol for slaves of resistance and power (Zobel Marshall 2012). This is also particularly obvious in the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar-Baby, which strongly parallels that of Anansi. In that story, the famous rabbit tricks his enemies into tossing him into the place where he is most safe—the briar patch—and thus, he is able to escape certain death and mock his captors. Like Anansi, Brer Rabbit represents the blending that took place within slave and Creole cultures in the Caribbean and the American South.
A similar Jamaican story of Anansi being caught by a Tar-Baby demonstrates how Anansi’s clever trickery isn’t always presented as a virtue. In this story, Anansi is punished for his trickster ways. The story goes that Mrs. Anansi had a big field of peas, but Anansi, being lazy, believes she will not share with him. He decides to trick his wife and family into giving him some of the bountiful crop anyway. He pretends to be on his deathbed, telling them he is about to die. He asks them to bury him with a pot of water and a hole in his grave, so he can watch over the peas. Every night he sneaks out, cooks some peas, and enjoys his feast before going back to rest. After a while, Mrs. Anansi wants to know who is stealing all her peas. The eldest son, who has clearly been paying attention to Mr. Anansi’s clever ways, thinks it is his father’s doing. He puts a stump covered in tar and a hat at the head of his father’s supposed grave. When Anansi comes out and the “person” refuses to acknowledge him politely, Anansi kicks the stump. After getting both feet stuck in the tar, he then strikes it, trapping his hands as well. So the next morning, his family finds him stuck, revealing his deceit. He is so embarrassed at being caught that he retreats up to the rafters in the barn where he stays, hiding in his embarrassment, forever a tiny spider. By serving as a warning against craftiness and deceit, this tale illustrates the flexibility of Anansi stories to portray whatever moral the storyteller wants to teach.
The tradition of “Spider Stories” is rich, with hundreds of Anansi folkloric tales, and he remains a popular figure in contemporary writers’ imaginations. From Neil Gaiman’s bestselling Anansi Boys to Marvel Comics versions of the trickster spider, the legacy of Anansi continues.
Kimberly Ann Wells
See also Brer Rabbit; Coyote Tales; Trickster Rabbit; Tricksters, Native American
Further Reading
Beckwith, Martha Warren. 1924. Jamaica Anansi Stories. Washington, DC: American Folklore Society. Available online. https://archive.org/details/jamaicaanansisto00beck.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Haase, Donald. 2008. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
James, Cynthia. 2009. “Searching for Ananse: From Orature to Literature in the West Indian Children’s Folk Tradition—Jamaican and Trinidadian Trends.” Trinidad University of the West Indies. http://www.sacbf.org.za/2004%20papers/Cynthia%20James.rtf. Accessed August 20, 2015.
Zobel Marshall, Emily. 2012. Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.