Trickster Figure

The trickster figure appears in the myths and folktales of nearly every traditional society. In the study of mythology and folklore, the trickster character may be a god, goddess, man, woman, spirit, or animal. There are significant differences between trickster characters in different traditions. They may be cunning, comic, or foolish, but in African and now in African diasporic literature, they usually perform an important cultural task. The roots of the African American trickster figure can be traced to fundamental terms maintained through mnemonic devices peculiar to the African oral literary tradition that continue to function now both as meaningful units of New World belief systems and as traces to their origins. These cultural fragments were not obliterated but retained major elements that survived the Middle Passage. African American folklore derives from the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology known as Esu-Elegbara. He is known in African American literature as Exu, Echu-Elegua, Papa Legba, and Papa Le Bac. Esu-Elegbara of the Yoruba people in Nigeria speaks to the aspects of culturally retained epic memory that manifests itself in African New World literary traditions. Because these individual tricksters are related parts of a larger, unified figure, they are usually referred to collectively in the United States as Esu (also known as Eshu), or as Esu-Elegbara. These variations on Esu-Elegbara speak eloquently of a continuous metaphysical presupposition and a pattern of figuration shared through time and space among certain Black cultures in West Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The trickster figure is relevant to identity and identity studies because it embodies an African worldview and contributes to one's understanding of the significance of connecting early African American writing to the oral African tradition.

Esu as trickster informs and becomes the foundation to locate, reassemble, and then theorize complex diasporic fragmented experiences unique in the west. Additionally, Esu is complementary—that is, he connects truth with understanding, masters the elusive, and works to dispel the mystical barrier that separates the divine world from the profane. Much of Esu's literature concerns the origin of nature and the function and interpretation of language. Esu can be seen as the indigenous Black metaphor for the literary critic or as the study of methodological principles of interpretation itself, or what the literary critic does. Using the [Page 847]trickster figures as a historical or cultural center ensures that the entire analytical process remains located in the culture that produced the work. Other trickster figures can be identified in Legba “the divine linguist” from the Fon people of Benin; also as Exu in Brazil, Echu-Elegua in Cuba, Papa Legba in Haiti, and Papa La Bas in the Ioa of Hoodoo in the United States.

In 1988, Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented the concept of the signifying monkey in Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism based on the functionality of the divine Esu trickster figure. The text examines the origins of the African American cultural tradition of “signifying” and ties that tradition back to West African oral traditions. Gates noted how the trickster figure had assimilated into the ordinary dimensions of African American life and that African ancestors continued to make their presence felt in African American literature. Gates's use of the monkey figure can be traced back to the Yoruba myth of the origins of interpretation that is relevant to the use of Esu as the figure of the critic and is helpful in explaining the presence of a monkey in Latin American versions of their primal myth. The presence of the monkey in Yoruba myth, repeated with a difference in Cuban versions, stands as the trace Esu in African American myth, a trace that enables us to speculate freely on the functional equivalence of Esu and his African American descendant, the signifying monkey.

...