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1. Conventional Versions: The Soucouyant Story in Folktales, Fiction, and Calypso

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The Things That Fly in the Night
This chapter is in the book The Things That Fly in the Night
1 /Conventional Versions: The Soucouyant Story in Folktales, Fiction, and CalypsoFor it was indeed all about fear that this old man, as others had done before him, thought it his duty to teach the adolescent I was so that the adult I would later become would continue to carry it within him and use it in his turn against other adults and other children.—Yanick Lahens, “The Survivors”The soucouyant story is quite old; there are a number of references to these diabolical creatures in narratives by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and French plantation owners and visitors to the region who penned tales that had been repeated to them by African Caribbean locals. However, traditional African cultures were oral, and the prohi-bition against literacy for enslaved peoples compounds the problem of having a lack of early primary materials with which to work that were recorded by the same group who generated them. Caribbean musicolo-gist J. D. Elder notes that many U.S. and British folklorists showed inter-est in African Caribbean lore from the period 1895 to 1930, but their efforts concentrated on collecting Anansi (trickster spider) stories, prov-erbs, riddles, and children’s rhymes and games, including a few song-games. And as Roger Abrahams observes, tale gathering was typically performed by outsiders to the community who recorded according to their own projects and/or only the items that locals allowed them to hear. Not only was there an obvious racial boundary that might have influenced storytellers throughout the African diaspora, but the fact that the collectors did not actually live in the communities that maintained the tales might have caused details to shift. (In Afro-American Folktales,Abrahams cites Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men as an important exception to this trend.) Despite these factors, the figure of the soucouy-ant (or whatever name she is called, depending on the region)1—the frightening old hag, skin-shedder, bloodsucker, fly-by-night—remained persistent in the cultural imagination. The renaissance of folk literature
© 2019 Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

1 /Conventional Versions: The Soucouyant Story in Folktales, Fiction, and CalypsoFor it was indeed all about fear that this old man, as others had done before him, thought it his duty to teach the adolescent I was so that the adult I would later become would continue to carry it within him and use it in his turn against other adults and other children.—Yanick Lahens, “The Survivors”The soucouyant story is quite old; there are a number of references to these diabolical creatures in narratives by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and French plantation owners and visitors to the region who penned tales that had been repeated to them by African Caribbean locals. However, traditional African cultures were oral, and the prohi-bition against literacy for enslaved peoples compounds the problem of having a lack of early primary materials with which to work that were recorded by the same group who generated them. Caribbean musicolo-gist J. D. Elder notes that many U.S. and British folklorists showed inter-est in African Caribbean lore from the period 1895 to 1930, but their efforts concentrated on collecting Anansi (trickster spider) stories, prov-erbs, riddles, and children’s rhymes and games, including a few song-games. And as Roger Abrahams observes, tale gathering was typically performed by outsiders to the community who recorded according to their own projects and/or only the items that locals allowed them to hear. Not only was there an obvious racial boundary that might have influenced storytellers throughout the African diaspora, but the fact that the collectors did not actually live in the communities that maintained the tales might have caused details to shift. (In Afro-American Folktales,Abrahams cites Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men as an important exception to this trend.) Despite these factors, the figure of the soucouy-ant (or whatever name she is called, depending on the region)1—the frightening old hag, skin-shedder, bloodsucker, fly-by-night—remained persistent in the cultural imagination. The renaissance of folk literature
© 2019 Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Preface ix
  4. Acknowledgments xiii
  5. Introduction 1
  6. 1. Conventional Versions: The Soucouyant Story in Folktales, Fiction, and Calypso 35
  7. 2. Nineteenth-Century Connections: European Vampire Stories and Configurations of the Demonic Black Woman 86
  8. 3. Draining Life Rather than Giving It: Maternal Legacies 125
  9. 4. “Queering” the Norm: Vampirism and Women’s Sexuality 159
  10. 5. Reconstructing a Nation of Strangers: Soucouyants in the Work of Tessa McWatt, David Chariandy, and Helen Oyeyemi 189
  11. 6. Shedding Skin and Sucking Blood: Playing with Notions of Racial Intransigence 221
  12. Conclusions 253
  13. Notes 265
  14. Works Cited 273
  15. Index 291
  16. About the Author 296
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https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813565750-004

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Preface ix
  4. Acknowledgments xiii
  5. Introduction 1
  6. 1. Conventional Versions: The Soucouyant Story in Folktales, Fiction, and Calypso 35
  7. 2. Nineteenth-Century Connections: European Vampire Stories and Configurations of the Demonic Black Woman 86
  8. 3. Draining Life Rather than Giving It: Maternal Legacies 125
  9. 4. “Queering” the Norm: Vampirism and Women’s Sexuality 159
  10. 5. Reconstructing a Nation of Strangers: Soucouyants in the Work of Tessa McWatt, David Chariandy, and Helen Oyeyemi 189
  11. 6. Shedding Skin and Sucking Blood: Playing with Notions of Racial Intransigence 221
  12. Conclusions 253
  13. Notes 265
  14. Works Cited 273
  15. Index 291
  16. About the Author 296
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