The Sacred Door has all the trappings of a scholarly folktale collection. It is published by a university press; it has a place in a series on African Studies; and Isidore Okpewho, in his introduction, tries earnestly to tell scholars that they should be interested. But peek beneath its outermost layers and it soon becomes obvious that this is all a bit misleading--that The Sacred Door is not primarily for scholars, and that those who come to it expecting a rigorously constructed, fastidiously annotated collection of Cameroon folktales will almost certainly be disappointed.
The fault, however, is not in the book but in ourselves. Taken on its own terms, The Sacred Door is elegant, sometimes moving, and well worth the read. But as Makuchi indicates in her preface to the collection, it is also a book that is meant to answer a different kind of need for a different kind of audience. In discussing its genesis, she describes the mixture of excitement and ignorance that she, as an African immigrant, has encountered about African life in her years living in the United States. Her students, she writes, have asked her such questions as “where is your grass skirt?”, “how often do you play with lions?”, and whether Africans have schools (xix). Misinformation about Africa is pervasive in American popular culture, she says, and this book is meant as a redress. Its first purpose is not to further academic inquiry, but in Okpewho’s terms, to provide a lay audience with a kind of cultural education.
This is an exciting premise. There is certainly an appeal to the notion that misconceptions about African life are a product of ignorance rather than prejudice, and that if only they were given the chance, Americans like Makuchi’s students would be eager--excited--to expand their knowledge of the continent. There is even a scholarly appeal--an all-too-rare affirmation of what is perhaps the most important unspoken tenet of academia: that knowledge should be transformative. But The Sacred Door is more than just its premise, and through a scholar’s lens, it is difficult not to see what else this book could have been.
Most troubling from this vantage point is that the narratives of The Sacred Door are retold. Over the course of more than thirty stories, Makuchi provides an impressive variety of animal tales and fairy tales and tales of cleverness and wit. She includes narratives with analogues in the Grimms and Perrault, tales that mirror Joel Chandler Harris’ African American collections, and tales like the brilliantly bawdy “Penis, Testicles, and Vagina,” which seem to be uniquely from Cameroon. But through all of this, we never hear her informants in their own words. Instead, she transforms and shapes the narratives with a poetic pen to produce a literary result that is different in aesthetic, yet just as re-touched as the nineteenth-century buchmärchen of Kinder- und Hausmärchen and Uncle Remus.
Further, Makuchi’s contextual information leaves a great deal to be desired. In a particularly useful afterword, she provides a good overview of some of the broader context of her narratives--of the history and geography of Cameroon and of the social position of the Beba--the group from which both she and her narratives come. And in her self-reflective preface, she talks about having encountered these stories, either as a child or as part of her fieldwork as a university student. She is not specific, however, about which narratives come from when, or from whom she collected them. Nor does she tell us in more than general terms about the immediate contexts in which they might be used. From one perspective, this is understandable, for as she writes, many of her field notes and recordings were lost when she migrated to Canada, and then to the United States. Yet this is the sort of information that has become compulsory in contemporary folk narrative collections if they are to be of scholarly use, and the sort that seems fundamental in demonstrating a respect both for folk materials and for the individuals who perform them.
In a sense, The Sacred Door bears its strongest resemblance to Italo Calvino’s mammoth Fiabe Italiane. With a mere thirty-four narratives rather than hundreds, it lacks Calvino’s breadth; and with an emphasis on the Beba rather than Cameroon national unity, it is more intimate in its scope. But like Calvino’s collection, Makuchi’s is a solid literary endeavor and a well-conceived pedagogical one that leaves itself open to criticism not for what it is, but for what it is not. It is not a collection that provides notes and references to tale-types and narrative analogues. Nor is it one that itself seems particularly well-suited to further folkloristic analysis. However, it admirably accomplishes the task that Makuchi sets out in her preface: it is a collection that draws readers into the world of African everyday life and then keeps us there, maintaining a level of excitement while seamlessly providing an enchanting cultural education.
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[Review length: 823 words • Review posted on June 12, 2008]