If This Thing Came to You, What Would You Choose?

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are many ways to reinvent the endgame of a story, and one of my favorite examples is a form of African oral literature called Dilemma Tales.

These sorts of tales are truly “oral” literature, and don’t necessarily travel well to the page, outside the event of their telling. That’s because the greatest energy of dilemma tales comes from an audience’s response to the story, which poses some moral or narrative conundrum, one that can be answered by anyone listening. In small villages, African folk tales are often told in a group setting, at night, with people of all ages sitting and listening by fire or lamplight. With a dilemma tale, they get to participate. As the folklorist William Bascom writes, because such narratives “leave the listeners with a choice between alternatives,” they “evoke spirited discussions, and they train those who participate in the skills of debate and argumentation.”

Here’s an eerie dilemma tale from the Bura people of Nigeria, “The Leftover Eye”:

“Pay heed to this tale. It is a tale of things that have never happened. But we will suppose these things did happen for certainly such things are possible.

“This is a tale of a man who was blind. His mother, too, was blind. His wife and his wife’s mother were also blind. They dwelt together in a wretched condition; their farm was poor and their home was badly built. They consulted together and decided to go away. They would journey until they came to some place where their lot would be better.

“They set out and traveled along the road. As they walked, the man stumbled over something. He picked it up and felt it, and then knew that he had come upon seven eyes. He immediately gave two eyes to his wife, and then took two for himself. Of the three eyes remaining to him, he gave one to his mother and another to his wife’s mother. He was left with one eye in his hand. Kai, this was a startling thing. Here was his mother with her one eye looking at him hopefully. There was his wife’s mother with her one eye looking at him hopefully. To whom should he give the leftover eye?

“If he gives the eye to his mother he will forever be ashamed before his wife and her mother. If he gives it to his wife’s mother, he will fear the angry and disappointed heart of his own mother. A mother, know you, is not something to be played with.

“This is difficult indeed. There is the sweetness of his wife. She is good and loving. How can he hurt her? Yet his mother, too, is a good mother and loving. Can he thus injure her? Which would be easier, and which would be the right way to do this thing?

“If this thing would come to you, which would you choose?”

Some tough choices here. I often teach this story to my undergraduate fiction students, when we’re discussing story structure and story endings. I throw that last line at them and ask them to respond. There are always inventive suggestions, but what quickly becomes clear is how hard it is to resolve the story in any neat way. The two mothers, for example could simply share the extra eye, each week one of them fully sighted, the other not. But is this really a solution, especially when the older women fall into vicious fights when the time for the switch arrives?

Or what if the husband takes out one of his eyes, so each mother could then have two eyes? How respectful and self-sacrificing of him! Problem solved, right? But then, with his one eye he notices the looks of pity his mother and mother-in-law begin to direct his way, and worse, he sees the lingering glances his wife bestows on passing two-eyed men . . .

This is what I love about dilemma tales, aside from the raucous fun of listeners challenging each other’s choices: they make it clear that narratives don’t like to be so easily tucked into bed and instead much prefer kicking off the sheets and throwing some pillows. Every ending has lurking within it a “but then,” or “what if” or “even though.”

Good to remember, that any fictional ending really is a stage set for further, though unwritten, possibilities. Just like our messy, unpredictable lives.

“The Leftover Eye,” can be found in African Myths & Tales, edited by Susan Feldmann.

The quotes from William Bascom are from his article “African Dilemma Tales: an Introduction,” in African Folklore, edited by Richard M. Dorson.

If This Thing Came to You, What Would You Choose?

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