Mr Nansi

One of my favorite characters on American Gods: Mr Nansi

w
v
==============
wiki
…Anansi stories were part of an exclusively oral tradition, and Anansi himself was seen as synonymous with skill and wisdom in speech.[8] Stories of Anansi became such a prominent and familiar part of Ashanti oral culture that they eventually encompassed many kinds of fables….tales to the rest of the world, especially the Caribbean, via the people that were enslaved during the Atlantic slave trade.[11] As a result, the importance of Anansi socially did not diminish when slaves were brought to the New World.

Instead, Anansi was often celebrated as a symbol of slave resistance and survival, because Anansi is able to turn the tables on his powerful oppressors by using his cunning and trickery, a model of behaviour utilised by slaves to gain the upper hand within the confines of the plantation power structure. Anansi is also believed to have played a multifunctional role in the slaves’ lives; as well as inspiring strategies of resistance, the tales enabled enslaved Africans to establish a sense of continuity with their African past and offered them the means to transform and assert their identity within the boundaries of captivity. As historian Lawrence W. Levine argues in Black Culture and Consciousness, enslaved Africans in the New World devoted “the structure and message of their tales to the compulsions and needs of their present situation” (1977, 90).[9]

The Jamaican versions of these stories are some of the most well preserved, because Jamaica had the largest concentration of enslaved Ashanti in the Americas, and akin to their Ashanti origins, each carry their own proverbs at the end.[12] At the end of the story “Anansi and Brah Dead”, there is a proverb that suggests that even in times of slavery, Anansi was referred to by his Akan original name: “Kwaku Anansi” or simply as “Kwaku” interchangeably with Anansi. The proverb is: “If yuh cyaan ketch Kwaku, yuh ketch him shut”,[13] which refers to when Brah Dead (brother death or drybones), a personification of Death, was chasing Anansi to kill him; its meaning: The target of revenge and destruction, even killing, will be anyone very close to the intended, such as loved ones and family members.

However, like Anansi’s penchant for ingenuity, Anansi’s quintessential presence in the Diaspora saw the trickster figure reinvented through a multi-ethnic exchange that transcended its Akan-Ashanti origins, typified in the diversity of names attributed to these Anansi stories, from the “Anansi-tori”[14] to the “Kuenta di Nanzi”.[15] Even the character “Ti Bou….