Essay for Week 6: The Tricksters

(The Tricky Tortoise: Web Source: Wikipedia)

The week I read The Filipino Popular Tales and found a very common theme of trickery. In the tale of The Iguana and the Turtle, the iguana was continuously envious of the position that the turtle was in purely because the turtle made each position seem valuable. The turtle used the Iguana's quickness to greed to remove himself from bad situations. Another story that included a form of trickery was The Hummingbird and the Caraboa. In this story the hummingbird exploited and testing the caraboas pride by challenging him to a water drinking contest. The hummingbird knew when the tided would rise and fall and used that knowledge to trick the caraboa into thinking that he could drink more water than a giant water-buffalo! The third story that included trickery was the Hawk and the Coiling. This was very similar to the story of the humming bird and the caraboa in that a challenge was involved. The coiling knew that when the hawk challenged him to a flying contest, that his best chance of winning was to carry something on his back. The hawk fell for this and chose cotton to carry thinking that it would be light and easy, whereas, the coiling chose salt knowing that it would rain. When it did rain, the cotton became very heavy and the salt dissolved allowing the coiling to fly higher than the hawk and be victorious. I thought that this weeks reading was the most enjoyable because of the short mini stories that got straight to the point about their plots. It was also fun to see the physical underdog utilize their brain to be the intellectual victor by tricking their competitors. I think that the stories would have been even better if these underdogs had more of a reason for their trickery though. It seemed like many of them only did it because they knew that they could.