WANTED: Tricksteresses in Development

Rusty Ott
Ed 6
Nyamesheke District
Western Province

Last Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, which means the day before was Fat Tuesday, and the season of Mardi Gras and Carnival has just ended. I love this season, and have spent too many years in places where it is not a big deal. Next year, after I have finished Peace Corps and left Rwanda, I am determined to be someplace where it is celebrated with gusto--maybe New Orleans; Cologne; Venice; Mohacs, Hungary; or Rio de Janeiro. What draws me to Carnival is not merely a desire to party and go crazy, but a fascination with a much deeper and complex phenomenon. You see, Carnival is the time of tricksters, and the tricksters are regenerative and creative cultural forces. A society without tricksters is stagnant and dying.

This is the argument of Lewis Hyde's book "Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art." The Carnival season which just ended brought the book to mind, so I opened it up, and while perusing it got some ideas for tricksters related to both gender and development. Before delving into those ideas, I want to give the author a lot of credit for devoting a great deal of the book to gender questions. Interestingly enough, there are very few female tricksters out there in the world of mythology and folklore. Hyde devotes a very in-depth thirteen page appendix to the question of why, and doesn't arrive at any conclusion. He poses some logical explanations, but one by one destroys each of those arguments, which include that trickster is actually androgynous, that male tricksters simply reflect patriarchal mythologies, that female tricksters are simply ignored, or that trickster stories are about masculinity, that "the trickster stories articulate some distinction between men and women, so that even in a matriarchal setting this figure would be male." But none of these explanations add up. After reading the book, you are left scratching your head as to why mythical tricksters like Coyote, Manabozho Jack, the Monkey King, Krishna, Loki, Hermes, Prometheus, and Eshu are all men.

However, while that is very interesting, and I would be very curious to read another book that presents a hypothesis that does add up, what holds true in the mythic world does not have to be the case in the real world. While I believe that mythology holds great wisdom and tells us a lot about who we are, reality is much more complicated than any myth. Just because mythological tricksters are all men doesn't mean the real world can't have female tricksters. Well, actually it can't, but it can't have any male tricksters either. As Hyde points out, a trickster is simply an archetype. It is a very interesting archetype, but no individual can be contained within an archetype. We are all too complicated, contradictory, capricious, dynamic, and complete to fit into any neat mythological category. There are, however, certain people whose careers and actions correspond to mythological tricksters for significant periods of time. Hyde writes mostly about artists, one of whom is a woman: the Chinese-American writer Maxine Hong Kingston. Actually, when I decided to write on this topic, I intended to list several real-life tricksteresses in Hyde's book, but when I sat down and paged through the book, I realized that Kingston is the only woman Hyde talks about. This is very curious, and I wonder if Hyde himself was aware of that. It's not because he's sexist; as I said, he devoted a very thoughtful appendix to the question of why there aren't female tricksters, which was not really necessary to the main thrust of the book. Plus, throughout the book, he writes very sensitively about some women's issues (i.e. the shame of female sexuality). There may be a better explanation, but for now, since I like the book so much, I will give Hyde the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to coincidence. He did write about one woman, and I can think of others he could have written about (artists like Frida Kahlo, comedians like Tina Fey and the comedic singers Garfunkel and Oates, the Russian band Pussy Riot). The bottom line is: Ladies, here in the real world there is no reason for you to leave the trickery to us men. Come join the fun.

Before leaving it at that, I want to briefly dwell on the questions: "What is a trickster?" "Why do we want or need tricksters?" and "What may a trickster do for gender issues?" These will all be very curt answers; if you find what I write lacking or have further questions, read Lewis Hyde's book.

I'll start by saying what a trickster is not. Not just anybody who lies or cheats is a trickster. First, one act of trickery does not make a trickster (which is why China's Fa Mu Lan and Rachel from the Bible's Book of Genesis are not tricksters). A true trickster has a lifetime career of trickery. Second, a trickster is not a mere psychopath, or someone who deceives simply for personal gain. A trickster is a cultural hero whose work is enriching their culture, solving problems, or inventing new pathways when the old ways, the traditional methods, have failed. Third, a trickster is not a dishonest politician or anyone else who operates in the center. Tricksters operate on the periphery. They are never the main heroes of mythical cycle, and trickster stories are often reserved for special times--often told only in the winter, secretly.

Tricksters are the people who steal fire and water from the gods, invent fish traps, are adaptable, have multiple identities, rule the marketplaces and roads, see through others' disguises while they put on their own. They are the spirits of chance and lucky finds, lull their enemies to sleep with music rather than fight them openly. They are the masters of speech, not merely lying but blurring the line between true and false, and charming the socks off of us all while they do it. They do not merely cross boundaries, but move them. They play with the joints of the structure the collective human consciousness has created to understand the world so that that very understanding may be flexible. They are the ones willing to play with society's "dirt" (defined as matter out of place) when nobody else will so that society does not become so sterile that it is lifeless. They speak shamelessly when the rest of us are shamed into silent paralysis, or sing the watchful eyes of control to sleep before embarking on mischief.

The real-life tricksters Lewis Hyde writes about are mostly artists, although he also includes Frederick Douglass. These real-life tricksters are valuable because they can be the most powerful agents of change. I believe their most important role is being agents of change and invention when the conventional methods are powerless. When you cannot capture Troy with brute force, Odysseus saves the day with a trick. John Cage made everyone reconsider what the difference is between music and noise, thereby bettering our understanding of music. Frederick Douglass jarred an old social system based on race by taking people's ideas of what black and white should be and turned them upside down, contributing to a more just social order. In his image Piss Christ, the artist Andres Serrano challenged a sterile view of Christ, a view in which Christ's humanity is forgotten and he therefore becomes lifeless; by playing with "dirt," Serrano revived a dying god. If you really want to know the value of tricksters, try to imagine a society without any. Hyde imagines ancient Sparta, the Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 20th century, and George Orwell's 1984. Not only are these examples cruel and terrifying places to live in, but they all have (or had) a lot of trouble creating anything new.

This is why I believe Rwanda particularly needs real life tricksters. The country's future is uncertain, but it is changing rapidly. There are many exciting and inspiring things that have happened and are happening. However, this is a place where there is a strong pressure on conventionalism. The mindset of many people is that there is one and only one correct way to do any given task (this is not entirely unique to Rwanda. According to Hyde, the Yoruba culture of Nigeria may have been even more extreme--and yet their pantheon of gods included the great trickster Eshu). I am genuinely impressed by the strength and unity of Rwanda's will, but someday there may be a lack of creativity and open-mindedness pushing that will. I stand in awe of my students' savvy in mathematics and the sciences, but wonder why they aren't being taught art, music, philosophy, drama. Do they understand why they are studying things and what the underlying assumptions and values of math and science are? (If you don't think math and science--and economics--have assumptions or values, read The Economics of Good and Evil by Tomáš Sedláček). Development isn't just about building infrastructure, bringing in technology, and getting people better jobs and more money. Development is nothing more or less than trying to build a bright future. Material wealth is only one aspect of what makes a life high-quality (some schools of thought that go back centuries argue that wealth detracts from a high quality life--although I would never argue Rwanda should aspire to be poor). For Rwanda's future to be truly bright, it needs tricksters who don't play by the rules. And perhaps, that is a great role for women in development. If men have monopolized physical strength and the traditional avenues of power, then perhaps women can jump into the niche of the trickster, those who use cleverness instead of brute strength, travel on new roads, and operate on the periphery of power.

Furthermore, in my opinion, if gender equality is to be achieved, it will not happen through official channels (at least not solely). It is the trickster's job (in the real world, often through art) to move boundaries, to challenge our assumptions, to make us reconsider truth, to outwit practitioners of the old ways but also charm us into loving the new ways. And so, I hope in fifty years, when I am an old man, I can write a sequel to Lewis Hyde's book with a chapter about how tricksters made Rwanda a wonderful place with empowered women.

Full bibliographic information:
Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 1998.