For Chad, I read Told by Starlight in Chad by Joseph Brahim Said. It was translated by Karen Haire Hoenig, but I’m not sure from which language! According to the book, the author was educated at French colonial schools, so I’m going to assume the book was originally written in French, but ugh, I don’t like making that assumption… but shoutout to the translator for making this work available! The world would be a narrow place if I could only read books written in English.
Told by Starlight is a collection of stories that I can’t lump into one category. There are fables, myths, and legends with talking animals, magical items, and evil stepmothers. Some tell about the founding of great cities while another explains why eclipses happen and yet another was a mashup of Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel but with a cow. This book reminded me of Folktales of Bhutan because both told stories with recognizable themes and tropes but in ways that were steeped in their local setting. With talking lions and hippos, I never for a moment forgot that I was reading stories from Africa.
Although the stories are wildly different, they all take pride in Chad’s tradition and heritage. That’s what drew me to this book. For Africa, I’ve been reading a lot of books that explore dark themes like colonialism, government corruption, and extreme poverty, and there’s plenty of that in Chad. At the moment, Chad is ranked 189th out of 193 countries on the Human Development Index, and the U.S. State Department strongly discourages travel to that land-locked country, so I was interested in a more upbeat perspective. Or, put it another way: all places have culture and stories and traditions that matter.
Is this the sort of book that I will be urging all my bookworm friends to read? Nope!
But did this book introduce me to stories that deepened my sense of the world? Absolutely.
I’ll leave you with this quote that gave me fresh insights into oral traditions:
As far back in time as men can remember, albeit they forget very fast, the oral tradition is there to remind them constantly of events that happened before they were born. Its elasticity and capacity for changing and evolving allows the tradition to yield to the exigencies of the moment; it adapts according to the place and the time in which the individuals live. And thus it guarantees the orderly continuation of custom, linking the past to the present and the present to the future.
Told by starlight in chad, pg. 65
That’s the sort of passage that makes me want to run back to college and spend a year in the stacks writing a thesis about the power of stories.