ABSTRACT
A Swahili story, Meat of the Tongue (Carter, 1991), tells of a sultan whose unhappy wife grows leaner and more listless every day. The sultan sees a poor man whose wife is healthy and happy, and he asks the poor man why this is. ‘Very simple’, answers the poor man, ‘I feed her meat of the tongue.’ The sultan immediately orders the butcher to buy the tongues of all the slaughtered animals of the town, and feeds them to his wife. The queen gets even more thin and poorly. The sultan then orders the poor man to exchange wives. Once in the palace, the poor man’s wife grows thin and pale. Eventually the sultan learns that ‘meat of the tongue’ is story – the poor man tells his wife of his daily experiences, sings her songs and tells her legends.
