Bringing the gods down to earth: Anansi's love for food

Anansi's love for food often gets him in trouble. Source

The Ashanti folklore character Anansi the Trickster is perhaps my favourite example of food fixation in folk tales. He is an interesting character, as, despite his mischief and greed, he is not morally segregated into "good" and "bad" like most of the characters I have explored.  Anansi is always after food, often to the detriment of himself and his family. His love for food quite literally shapes who he is; one tale explores how, in his greed and laziness, Anansi tied several strings to his eight legs and his neighbours' cooking pots so that he could hurry to eat each type of food rather than help to cook them. Instead, he found himself stretched out instead, giving the spider eight thin legs (Mcnamara). In another tale, Anansi discovers a magic cooking pot, but even as his family grows hungry, his greed manifests itself: “What if I should use up all the magic of the pot on them, and have nothing more left for myself!" (Barker, 22). This selfish conceitedness is at odds with protagonists of the other folk tales I have explored; the red hen is diligent, and All Fur is loving and caring. But for Anansi, his chronic laziness and love for food define him. 

Yet Anansi is not considered an inherently malicious or evil creature. Instead, his antics in the pursuit of food serve to humanise him. This reverse apotheosis displays aspects of Bakthin's grotesque realism, with Anansi's underhanded tactics culminating in: "degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level" (21) Even as a god, Anansi's greed and failed schemes allow the audience to better connect with his character through the most visceral medium- food. Where All Fur, uses food as symbolic of nurture and sustenance, and the red hen to show the fruits of labour and food as a reward, Anansi represents the allure of food at its most primitive, stripping nobility and virtue to reveal a very human hunger.  As a trickster god, Anansi is free from the restrictions placed on other deities, because his stories serve a dual purpose: "As a folklore figure he is both human and divine, a person and an animal, creative and destructive, a success and failure." (Hynes and Doughty). For a powerful deity to be castigated and punished for his greed brings him down to earth for the human audience.

In Anansi's folk tales, food serves not to reinforce the stratification of divinity and mortality as in Paradise Lost. In eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve, proved themselves unworthy of Paradise in the eyes of God, but as a deity, Anansi's actions mark him as fallible. Food is so significant because it becomes a bridge between Anansi and the human audience.

Works Cited:

• Bakhtin, Mikhail, and Helene Iswolsky. Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press, 2009.
• Barker, W. H., and Cecilia Sinclair. West African Folk-Stories. Yesterday's Classics. North Carolina, 2007.
• Hynes, William J., and William G. Doty. Mythical Trickster Figures Contours, Contexts and Criticisms. University of Alabama Press, 1997.
• Mcnamara, Anna. “‘Why Anansi Has Eight Long Legs.’” USC Digital Folklore Archives, 14 May 2013, Source.