All the stories are Anansi's

I promised myself I'd never write about the books I read. Though registering on Shelfari and listing most of the books I love has certainly brought me one step closer to that. But I still don't feel ready. Just like I can't really write about concerts, or songs. They're engraved, they're remembered and they become a part of me, but I can't externalized that part once it's been properly assimilated.

However, this book, this author completely upended everything. I love this passage, as much as I love Benjamin's 34-paged confession. Here goes the story of Anansi, he to whom all stories belong.

"When I say Tiger, you got to understand it's not just the stripy cat, the India one. It's just what people call big cats - the pumas and the bobcats and the jaguars and all of them.

"A long time ago, Tiger had the stories. All the stories that ever were was Tiger stories, all the songs were Tiger songs, and I'd say that all the jokes were Tiger jokes, but there weren't no jokes told back in the Tiger days. In Tiger stories all that matters is how strong your teeth are, how you hunt and how you kill. Ain't no gentleness in Tiger stories, no tricksiness, and no peace."

Maeve tried to imagine what kind of stories a big cat might tell. "So were they violent?"

"Sometimes. But mostly what they was, was bad. When all the stories and the songs were Tiger's, that was a bad time for everyone. People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song. And in Tiger times all the songs were dark. They began in tears, and they'd end in blood, and they were the only stories that the people of this world knew.

"Then Anansi comes along. If I started to tell you how clever and how handsome and how charming and how cunning Anansi was, I could start today and not finish until next Thursday.

"Anansi won the stories - won them? No. He earned them. He took them from Tiger, and he made it so Tiger couldn't enter the real world no more. Not in the flesh. The stories people told became Anansi stories. This was, what, ten, fifteen thousand years back.

"Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren't just thinking of hunting and being hunted anymore. Now they're starting to think their way out of problems - sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep thei bellies full, but now they're trying to figurer out how to do it without working - and that's the point where people start using their heads. Some people think the first tools were weapons, but that's all upside down. First of all, people figure out tools. Because now people are telling Anansi stories, and they're starting to think about how to get kissed, how to get something for nothing by being smarter or funnier. That's when they start to make the world."

"It's just a folk story," she said. "People made up the stories in the first place."

"Does that change things?" asked the old man. "Maybe Anansi's just some guy from a story, amde up back in Africa in the dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg, pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy story about a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respond to the stories. They tell them themselves. The stories spread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers."