American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit
Updated: Aug 8
I grew up loving the Brer Rabbit stories. I still have my copy of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, a collection “Retold by Jane Shaw from the originals of Joel Chandler Harris” that was published in 1977 when I was four years old. I’ve read them recently to my younger brother who is 38 and mentally handicapped. He loves hearing the stories and he always gets a kick of out of Rabbit pulling one over on everyone else. Even in these updated reworkings (Harris’s original collections were published between 1880 and 1948), Uncle Remus still figures prominently, and, despite my enjoyment of the tales, I have long been troubled by the Remus character and his unmistakable representation as the stereotypical “happy darkie” who has “nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery.”
Enter Emily Zobel Marshall’s American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit, a compact, robust, insightful, and powerful examination of the trickster figure. Despite its brief length, Marshall’s work is astounding in both its depth and breadth: examining Brer Rabbit’s African roots and the trickster figure’s connection to other African and Caribbean folklore characters (particularly the spider-figure Anansi); the role Brer Rabbit played as a resistance figure for the enslaved (by using trickery to undermine and challenge the plantation regime); how, in moving from the oral tradition to the printed page in the late 19th century, the trickster figure was emptied of his powerful symbolism by white American collectors, authors, and folklorists in their attempt to create a nostalgic fantasy of the plantation past; the profound tensions between the perpetuation of damaging racial stereotypes and the need to keep African American folk traditions alive; and, finally, the ways in which the trickster figure was reclaimed by 20th century African American novelists like Ralph Ellison, Nella Larsen (heretofore unknown to me), and, in particular, Toni Morrison.
Marshall had me hooked through the first four chapters, but as she shifted into analyzing the works of Ellison and Larsen (who share a chapter) and Morrison (who gets her own), and their use of the trickster figure in their own stories, my energy began to wane. From the outset, American Trickster is firmly academic, but in the final two chapters its thesis-like qualities began to overwhelm, for me anyway, the overall readability. It didn’t help that while I’ve read Ellison’s Invisible Man, I’ve never read Larsen or Morrison, and 17 pages devoted to the latter’s 1981 novel Tar Baby (more than 10% of the book) was more than I could ever want or need. Still, I largely got what I came for. The legacy of the Brer Rabbit stories is, of course, complicated, but with an understanding of their roots, their journey, and the ways in which they have been reclaimed, they can still be enjoyed, even celebrated, when the trickster figure has been liberated from his oppressors and restored his original agency and potency.
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