THE EDITOR, Sir:
I HAVE observed with interest that the matter of Anancy as being one of our heroes has come to public attention. Heroes exist in folklore to serve a purpose of social cohesion. Also they enable individuals within a culture to work through their inner feelings, struggles and celebrations.
For many of us who grew up in the colonial era, Anancy stories taught us how to use humour to deal with stress. They taught us how the weak could overcome the strong and how brain power can be used to overcome the power to physically destroy. These stories were useful as many of us felt alienated in a society where it was said that if you are white then you are right; if you are brown then stick around; and if you are black then stay back, and though the descendants of slaves who were the majority were free many of the conditions that allowed for slavery still existed.
Yes, indeed, Anancy was for us a hero. He served the purpose of what I would refer to as protest morality. Protest morality is based on a coherent order of values, and it assumes that laws that are oppressive and immoral should not be obeyed. We saw Anancy as possessing this morality. Unfortunately, like so many of our other heroes and like we ourselves, he would use some of his survival trickster skills on others, even his own family to achieve his personal ends.
Many of us would laugh at these aspects of the stories as well as at the others. We laughed because we see a bit of our trickster selves in Anancy. Nevertheless in that context we sought to learn from his mistakes and though we laughed in our day-to-day behaviour, we knew where to draw the line.
Thus Anancy, even though he was not perfect, represented predictable aspects of a moral order. Although we are not in an era of overt colonialism, and although over a century has passed since slavery was abolished, our children and grandchildren are now growing up in a society where many of the social conditions still persist.
Why is it that some of our teachers are now calling for Anancy to be banned or to become converted? It is necessary for educators to now do some serious research on the capacity for, and methods of, moral reasoning among our young people. At the recent National Prayer Breakfast the president of the Jamaica Baptist Union, the Rev. Neville Callam spoke of the influence of post-modernity in our society. He stressed the growing amorality which could threaten our social order. The Rev. Burchell Taylor in his Grace Kennedy lecture and book entitled Free for All stresses that the increasing rampant individualism in our society could change the face of social institutions as we have known them.
With the influence of cable television and the Internet, and many aspects of modern commerce as well as the high-pressure drug trade and sex industry, a new hedonism and depth of corruption of human relationships and institutions are taking place.
Those values that have stood the test of time now make no sense whatsoever to our children and grandchildren, because the basic assumptions about life and methods of moral reasoning have all but virtually disappeared.
Paradoxically, this change has occurred amidst the persistence of an almost unchanged post-colonial and post-slavery social oppression of class, colour, commerce and politics. Is it that our morality has shifted from protest morality to amorality? Could it be that our folk heroes not only serve as traditional guides, but they also tend to be mirrors that reflect our reality? Could it be that many of us in this generation are projecting onto Anancy a post-modern amorality.
Thus Anancy, the "people's trickster", is no longer serving to provide humour under stress or provide lessons of the weak against the strong and brain power versus physical destruction. Rather his legends are being manipulated to show us the power of the individual who will seek his own ends at whatever cost using as much trickery as he can regardless of the consequence. Among the Ashanti people of Mother Africa and in our traditional society, Anancy has been part of a collective consciousness. He did not serve as a role model for individualism.
If for our young people, who the teachers face on a day-to-day basis, Anancy is being made into an individualist amoral trickster having nothing to do with the struggles of a people on a whole, then that Anancy is a counterfeit. As a medium of exchange of feelings and aspirations, such counterfeit and all others should be banned.
We still need the positive morality of struggle and survival that the complex but real Anancy served to portray to our ancestors and to many of us. Let us not ban him. Let us ban the pretender to Anancy that some of our people, at all levels of society and at all ages who could be falling prey to corruption or who are instigators of corruption, now seem to be inventing in their own image. This pretender does not use an 'insufficient seeming brain' against big and powerful seeming destroyers.
Rather he uses his one-track mind to 'downpress' his fellow man for a Nike, a fistful of dollars, a Pajero or a place in the political galaxy, partisan or otherwise.
I am suggesting that we pay greater tribute to people like Louise Bennett, Philip Sherlock and Barbara Gloudon of pantomime fame, as well as the many rural bearers of oral history who have kept Anancy alive for us. This Anancy has helped many of us to maintain identity and mental health in times when we have been told that we are nobodies. This Anancy has empowered West Indians to beat 'bucky massa' at his own game in almost every area of endeavour from Walsh's 500 to Walcott's Nobel Prize while exporting our own traditions to every corner of the earth.
I have been searching in the corners of my house but can hardly find Anancy these days. I gather that he is allergic to the radiation from the television. I strongly urge those blessed with the task of the preservation and dissemination of our traditional culture, such as government agencies, storytellers, and indeed our teachers, to revive the use of our folk songs and folk tales as a medium of character formation and discussion among persons as to how our society can be. Let us not distort the past. Let us rediscover and build on it.
He who does not learn from the past is doomed to fail in the future. While Anancy seems to be scared away by the television and global communication, do not be surprised if he is not hard at work building his own 'web site' and cable network playing fool to catch wise.
I am etc.,
E. ANTHONY ALLEN
Consultant Psychiatrist
E-mail: tonlit@kasnet.com
