Suriname folk-lore

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5. Notes on Riddles

Summaries of the small numbers of riddles and tales published up to 1926 have been made by the Penard brothers.¹ They notice twenty-three examples of riddles, to which they add sixty-seven, while of tales they give a bibliography of ten titles containing twenty-one stories, in addition to the four tales they contribute and the thirty-nine stories given in Van Cappelle's contribution.² It is not surprising that so few riddles have been collected and published, for this form is not as popular in Suriname as it is elsewhere. Here its use seems to be restricted, as the Penards remark, ‘to the children and occasionally to the mourners at... wakes.’³ Indeed, it was our experience that except for the wakes, where the riddle is not used ‘occasionally’ but practically without exception, and repeatedly in the course of the night to amuse the people who are present, riddling is not indulged in by the Suriname Negroes to any appreciable extent. Again and again, when we asked for riddles, we were told that unless a person frequented the ceremonies for the dead, he rarely heard them, and that they were, therefore, not so well known. When we pressed for them, we found that a small number were given to us by different informants, and that the greater number of these were the same riddles.

In Suriname, as elsewhere among African peoples, the riddle depends upon double entendre for much of its effect, and it may be that this is the reason why more riddles have not found their way into print, for it is possible that informants hesitated to give riddles of this type through fear of offending the collectors. After coming to know our informants, we ourselves found no such inhibition, but rather a decided relish for the obscene elements. The absence of a large number of riddles in Suriname may then be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that it has here come to have a specialised function of serving at funerary rites, and has ceased to play a part in the folk expression of everyday life; whatever the cause, its restricted use is especially interesting in view of the prevalence of riddling found in most New World Negro cultures, where the riddle is as important, if not more important, than the proverb.⁴ The stylistic device of introducing the speaker's mother or father as the person involved in the action stated in the riddle has been remarked

1 Penard, (II), pp. 239-40, and (III), p. 411. See also Van Panhuys, passim.

2 The Penard brothers state that they had collected more than eighty tales, and mention their intention to publish them (II, p. 243), but to our knowledge they have not done so.

3 (III), p. 412.

4 Practically all large collections of New World Negro folk-tales, such as those of Andrade, Beckwith, Parsons, and others, contain examples of riddles in numbers. We ourselves found that some White children we met in South Carolina delighted in riddling, and, on inquiry, were informed it was their Negro nurse who had taught them this form of amusement.

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by the Penards.¹ This again follows the African pattern of riddling, and is met with elsewhere in the New World. In the bush, riddles are at times used for the opening of Anansi stories.²

1 (III), p. 412.

2 See, for example, the tale given by Schuchardt, pp. 41-2. We were present at a story-telling session in Abeokuta, Nigeria, and there each narrator was asked a series of riddles as a prelude to his story. These riddles were spoken rapidly, one after another, while the children in a chorus shouted the answers. In Dahomey, riddles are the opening formulae for stories, and as in Nigeria, the riddles need have no bearing upon the content of the story. In Dahomey, too, the children organise into story-telling groups, with a ‘head-man’ who is chosen among themselves to act for the group, and this ‘head-man’ opens the story-telling session at dusk by riddling with his group. Those who, when called upon, cannot give the answer, are ‘assessed’ a certain number of stories which they must tell.