Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar
SynopsisPlot
Gifted travel writer, poet, professor of English, and insightful observer of human nature, Colleen McElroy journeyed to Madagascar to undertake a Fulbright research project exploring Malagasy oral traditions and myths. In Over the Lip of the World she depicts with equal verve the various storytelling traditions of the island and her own adventures in trying to find and record them.
Story
About this book
Colleen McElroy, an American poet and professor of English, traveled to Madagascar on a Fulbright research project to study the island's oral traditions and myths. Over the Lip of the World records both her fieldwork and her personal experiences moving through the country as she sought out storytellers and tried to document their craft. McElroy writes as an African American woman navigating a place whose cultures blend Southeast Asian, African, and Arab influences, and the book tracks the practical difficulties and unexpected encounters that shaped her research.
The narrative weaves in English translations of Malagasy stories covering subjects such as royalty and commoners, tricksters and shapechangers, love and revenge, and questions of morality and heroism. These traditional tales sit alongside McElroy's own account of daily life on the island, creating a structure that moves between the collected stories and the circumstances of collecting them. Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest island, sits in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa, and its relative isolation has produced distinctive ecosystems and cultural traditions that differ markedly from those of the African mainland.
