I LIBERIA II
1. English reader-friendly version of tale two: Lion's bloody feast
who let him go.
Start again! Lion said, seduced.
Clever Fox won him over eventually. Then Lion said very calmly:
- "You alone know how to count. Tell me, where did you learn to count?" -
"I have learnt to count from his majesty's beautiful face and from his good intention", Clever Fox said. That is how Clever Fox flattered Lion, and he lived happily ever after.
2. Interpretation
Although there is a remarked presence of Hare as trickster in most Gouro tales, the ultimate trickster in the Gouro tale repertoire remains the Fox. In Gouro the expression ji 'clln kwanen, means the 'Clever Fox', or simply kwanen, 'Fox', with whom a clever social character is compared in real life.
The Gouro say mi kwanen, literally meaning 'little old man'. The name Kwanen derives from kwa, meaning old. Due to the amount of experiences a person may gather throughout the years, he may be viewed as wise or intelligent. Because Fox thwarts all sorts of traps that humans set in the bush, and thus frustrates them in their plans to catch him,the Gouro believe that Fox must likewise be outwitting the other characters of wild life. His name kwanen or 'little old man' is thus coined by the Gouro who associate wisdom, knowledge,and cleverness with age. Fox is, so to say, as wise as an elderly character who outwits the enemy in his planning.
Here, the story showcases one type of the many confrontations between Fox and Lion. In a way, Fox is a character that is determined by frailness and physical disadvantage compared to Lion. But if Fox is confronted with the physically more powerful and fierce Lion, it is a metaphor to mean the power of the words vs the physical strength. Fox symbolizes the power of the words through his intelligence, and Lion, the physically brutal. Fox demonstrates in this tale how a rage can be doused with cogent verb, the determinism of which is reflected in the word'clever'.
Lion is threatening and authoritarian. Zro, be pehi 'sial Or 'You Gazelle, start!' Lion said. In a Gouro tale performance, an audience can perceive through such an utterance the cruel intention of Lion: to kill his guests. The voice the performer adopts here is an imposing and threatening one. In Gouro, a voice that wishes to express courtesy in such an utterance would say: Zro I bwa ble be pehi
'sie,
meaning 'Gazelle you may/can start', which is not a strenuous order. If the story features Gazelle in these terms, it is because the Gouro believe that Gazelle is a naive character who always makes an easy prey for lions. She will always be identified as bobo je zro or 'Gazelle the naive'. The na"ive Gazelle who opens the bloody feast is thus opposed to the clever Fox who closes it.Gazelle, like other animals that were slaughtered by Lion, lacks wisdom and rushes into 'counting'. They were intimidated by Lion's authority. At the level where the animals are called on by Lion to come and count in front of him,the storyteller becomes animated by the creative and imaginative power of selection. S/he can freely go through an imaginary selected listing of animals of his/her choice that have to come and perform in front of the authoritarian Lion until s/he reaches the one who wins Lion over, the Fox.
The teller's voice must imitate the fearful voices of these characters. The fearful state of mind is further translated in the story in that some animals omit purposely to say 'one' to avoid the death sentence given by Lion.
Where the other animals start fearfully, 'clever Fox' starts with coolness, using a trick: 'Clever Fox calmly started: The very first is anger provoking'.
The functions that play the epithet 'clever' here go beyond the mere nature of formulaic expressions. In effect, "Lord and Havelock and others noted that the use of stereotyped expressions or formulas (such as epithet) lies at the root of Oral performances." (Ong 1977: 103). They demonstrated that the Homeric poems and other residually oral epics consist largely, if not
entirely, of fixed expressions: the cliches which, according to them, oral cultures live on and which literate cultures teach their members to scorn.
Homer for example, always presents his heroic characters but with epithetic attributes of some kind: Odysseus is 'wily Odysseus', Nestor is 'wise Nestor' and Achilles is 'swift-footed Achilles'. In effect, if in tales a 'soldier' is not a mere soldier but a 'brave soldier'; not a 'princess', but a 'beautiful princess', not 'Fox' but 'clever Fox', it is simply because characters of significant actions must be conferred a strong identity and be exhibited under their higher ideal forms. The reason behind that is to unfold truth from its maximal perception so that the morals that are drawn from that comes as a byword, and too often in the form of a proverb, which in very few words tells a story. Such an utterance plays a psychodynamic function in recalling implicitly the whole story. As such,when it is said 'stupid Gazelle', or 'wise Tortoise', or else 'wicked Hyena', it is presenting the moral attributes of their behaviour in two words.
The epithetic determination of 'clever' Fox and its formulaic nature have a psychological significance. It brings back an element to consciousness, it constantly reminds the audience of the admirable witty quality of the Fox.
The epithet 'clever' presents Fox as a mentor whose useful deeds have to be appreciated to the maximum. Such an epithetic form in a Gouro narrative particularly is a psychological warrant: it does not add uselessly to thought, but it is the substance of thought itself.
In the present tale, the cardinal values may be presented in various performances in terms of moral power versus physical power, Fire versus water, and ultimately, Good versus Evil. In effect, Lion who is animated with a wicked intention comes up with an effortless way of organising his bloody feast by inviting all the animals to come and learn to count in his presence.
Counting necessarily involves a starting number which is the number'one'.
In fact, the Gouro do not have a word for'zero' because zero implies nothing concrete, it simply does not exist because it is emptiness. In the counting .
process then, one appears to be an insult to Lion who is one-eyed. But Lion himself will learn to count from his 'beautiful one-eyed face' and from his fiendish intention when a totally opposed character,clever Fox, seduces him with an unexpected manner of counting. If 'clever Fox' is kept till last to intervene, it is to allow the audience to fully appreciate the intelligence through which he fails Lion in his plan to kill him. Even if it is a last intervention which has a defect,because it only comes when all the animals are dead and does not profit the animal community, it still remains a useful ploy in that it teaches the audience a lesson. Lion and Fox, in that manner, portray the omnipresence of dangers in life, and therefore members must provide solutions like Fox in order to survive.