The Scarecrow

Te Velde explains, “Because Seth repeatedly proved to have been collaborating in maintaining the cosmic order, though in a peculiar way, Seth could be worshipped.”³¹ Once the worship of Seth fell from favor, however, Seth became “exclusively a demonic murderer and chaotic power….”³² and “a dreadful demon of the black magicians”³³ and thus no longer “the ancient Egyptian god of the desert and divine foreigner….”³⁴

If E. O. Wilson and others are correct in ascribing to religion the role of reinforcing an innate human tendency toward tribalism by encouraging human groups that prefer the group’s members to outsiders,³⁵ then a religion’s demons should also serve this purpose. Even though he is a neo-Darwinian, Wilson embraces Jung’s archetypes and lists two “of the most frequently cited” as “The Trickster” who “disturbs established order” and “A monster” that “threatens humanity … (Satan writhing at the bottom of hell)….”³⁶

Jung claimed in “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” that these archetypes are “primordial types … universal images that have existed since the remotest times.”³⁷ If he is correct, the net must be cast over all of human experience, not simply Africa or Europe. In “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure” he pointed out that Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible exhibits

not a few reminders of the unpredictable behavior of the trickster, of his senseless orgies of destruction … together with the same gradual development into a savior and his simultaneous humanization. It is just this transformation of the meaningless into the meaningful that reveals the trickster’s compensatory relation to the “saint.”³⁸

One main theme of The Scarecrow is the humanization of the demonic protagonist. Does this transformation also help the meaningless become meaningful? If Jung was even partially correct about archetypes, then many other players can be introduced with questions like: Is Shiva’s role of constructive destruction in the Hindu Trimurti similar to that played by al-Koni’s demon?

WEST AFRICA

Robert D. Pelton, in his book The Trickster in West Africa, says that “the trickster pulls the most unyielding matter — disease, ugliness, greed, lust, lying, jealousy — into the orbit of life….”³⁹ He also says, earlier, that “His presence … represents a ceaseless informing of structure with rawness and formlessness and a boundless confidence that such a process is truly constructive.”⁴⁰ Roger D. Abrahams, in African Folktales, says of the trickster that he “represents primal creativity and pathological destructiveness, childish innocence, and self-absorption.” He “lives in the wilds, but makes regular incursions into the human community …” and “is sexually voracious.”⁴¹ Abrahams summarizes:

the vitality and the protean abilities of Trickster … are continually fascinating and … carry … the characteristic African message that life is celebrated most fully through the dramatizing of oppositions.⁴²

Viewed from a West African perspective, the scarecrow phenomenon in the final two novels of al-Koni’s Oasis trilogy (The Puppet and The Scarecrow) are masquerades, perhaps comparable to the Yoruba egungun, a returning ancestor. Moreover, the idea that a spirit or god may take possession of a worshiper or borrow random body parts to visit the market has a wealth of West African parallels.

ESHU

Eshu stands out among the 401 Yoruba orisha who either represent dimensions of Olorun, the sky god, or serve him, because Eshu acts as their messenger. Few of Africa’s traditional gods are portrayed in African art, but Eshu’s face is usually carved on the Ifa divination tray. God of the road, he may be worshiped at a crossroads. In the chapter called “The Scarecrow,” we learn that cunning strategists in Tuareg culture are cautious at crossroads. Eshu is also a trickster who deliberately starts fights, but these fights normally promote sacrifices to the orisha — he receives a commission — and therefore improve human conduct.

Noel Q. King, in African Cosmos, first warns Muslims and Christians against confusing Eshu with Satan and then cautions anthropologists against seeing him as the trickster. (King refers to him instead as the Prankster — a subtle distinction.) If Eshu deceives “people into wrong behavior,” that is primarily “so they may gain favor by their expiation and feed the divinities with their offerings.”⁴³ Similarly, in his book The Trickster in West Africa, Robert D. Pelton says that by starting a quarrel between two friends, Eshu demonstrates that their “friendship was held together by custom, not by mutual awareness” or by “a willingness to undergo modification together.”⁴⁴ Fixing a chair that was poorly repaired or a bone that was improperly set may require breaking it again first. In his excellent article about al-Koni, Sabry Hafez was, then, perhaps overly influenced by Semitic precedents when he identified the Tuareg Wantahet (wantahit) as “Beelzebub, the prince of the evil spirits.”⁴⁵ This is odd, because on the previous page he said, “the desert’s spiritual balance is maintained by an amalgam of African and ancient Egyptian tenets.”⁴⁶ His reference then was, admittedly, to the role of ancestors’ spirits, not to demons. A few pages later he identified Wantahet himself, specifically, as “the prince of evil spirits…”⁴⁷ and then after that said that one of the characters is “the personification of wantahit, Beelzebub.”⁴⁸ A more African Wantahet is, arguably, a more interesting (and more authentically Tuareg) literary demon. In the chapter called “Wantahet” in The Scarecrow, Wantahet is presented as the advocate of revenge or retribution. Thus, he plays a role parallel to that of Eshu as a trickster who rebalances the scales of justice in the novel by pulling a carpet out from under the feet of malefactors.

Pelton also says that Eshu’s “presence in the market is indeed a phallic presence, loaded with volatile, unstable energy.” He observes,

Eshu embodies sexuality as unleashed desire — not lust merely, nor even avarice, envy or greed, but that passion for what lies outside one’s grasp which the Greeks saw in some sense as the sovereign mover of human life.⁴⁹

Pelton summarizes: “Eshu does not only present riddles; he is one.”⁵⁰ Seth, in The Seven Veils of Seth, poses riddles as well and definitely is one.

Manning Marable in Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention at one point calls Malcolm X a North American version of a West African trickster, saying that Malcolm X:

presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister. Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world.⁵¹

These roles are precisely — albeit perhaps coincidentally — the two sides of Isan’s character in The Seven Veils of Seth, of the mythic Wantahet character in Tuareg folklore, and of al-Koni’s demons, as in The Scarecrow.

One other parallel to African American culture is the occasional use by al-Koni of call-and-response passages like the second section of the second chapter, “The Prophecy,” in The Scarecrow.

AL-KONI’S MYSTICAL, SUFI, AND EUROPEAN FORMATION