Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Reading Diary B: West African Folktales(continued)



There was a dragon in this story! A dragon! I was surprised and confused that there would be a dragon in a West African folktale. I do not know why I was so surprised but for some reason I just don’t think of dragons when I think of West African folktales/fairytales. The story was very interesting. I knew from previous stories that Anansi and his son, Kweku Tsin, could shapeshift into different animals but I did not know that they were the moon and sun as well. It always seems that Kweku Tsin is always the hero in these stories and not Anansi. This makes me wonder why Anansi is the more well-known character than his son. Why isn’t Kweku Tsin the face/main character of these stories instead of his father?
 


As I mentioned earlier, I was surprised to read about a dragon in West African folklore/fairytales but, I was not surprised that there was a tiger even though, there are no tigers in Africa. I think this is because West African stories are filled with animals that I didn’t even think twice about the absence of tigers. I liked this cute story about friendship. When the tiger decided to pretend to be dead in order to test the man’s friendship, I have to admit that I expected the worse. For some reason, despite the title, I doubted the man’s loyalty to the tiger but I am glad that I was proved wrong.

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