ABSTRACT

In a West African folktale famously retold by Verna Aardema in Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears: A West African Tale (1975),1 King Lion, symbol of rulership, courage, and epic heroes, among other things, has convened a tribunal and called before it rabbit, a symbol of speed, soft frailty, and trickiness, among other things. “Rabbit,” cried the king, “why did you break a law of nature and go running, running, running, in the daytime?” (15). Seeking the ultimate cause for why Mother Owl has refused to call upon the sun to rise-a shading of the world bearing apocalyptic implications-King Lion does not punish rabbit, who was responding to a chain of events initiated by mosquito’s lie to iguana. That fact that the topic of the lie was mosquito-sized yams, which set in motion a series of events concatenating discord between iguana-python-rabbit and causing Mother Owl not to raise the sun, and the fact that this Sunless state threatened the entire world suggest four cardinal principles that characterize my study of the heroic epic performance.