5. Notes on Riddles
Summaries of the small numbers of riddles and tales published up to 1926 have been made by the Penard brothers.1 They notice twenty-three examples of riddles, to which they add sixty-seven, while of tales they give a bibliography of ten titles containing twenty-one stories, in addition to the four tales they contribute and the thirty-nine stories given in Van Cappelle's contribution.2 It is not surprising that so few riddles have been collected and published, for this form is not as popular in Suriname as it is elsewhere. Here its use seems to be restricted, as the Penards remark, ‘to the children and occasionally to the mourners at... wakes.’3 Indeed, it was our experience that except for the wakes, where the riddle is not used ‘occasionally’ but practically without exception, and repeatedly in the course of the night to amuse the people who are present, riddling is not indulged in by the Suriname Negroes to any appreciable extent. Again and again, when we asked for riddles, we were told that unless a person frequented the ceremonies for the dead, he rarely heard them, and that they were, therefore, not so well known. When we pressed for them, we found that a small number were given to us by different informants, and that the greater number of these were the same riddles.
In Suriname, as elsewhere among African peoples, the riddle depends upon double entendre for much of its effect, and it may be that this is the reason why more riddles have not found their way into print, for it is possible that informants hesitated to give riddles of this type through fear of offending the collectors. After coming to know our informants, we ourselves found no such inhibition, but rather a decided relish for the obscene elements. The absence of a large number of riddles in Suriname may then be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that it has here come to have a specialised function of serving at funerary rites, and has ceased to play a part in the folk expression of everyday life; whatever the cause, its restricted use is especially interesting in view of the prevalence of riddling found in most New World Negro cultures, where the riddle is as important, if not more important, than the proverb.4 The stylistic device of introducing the speaker's mother or father as the person involved in the action stated in the riddle has been remarked
