The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman

The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman is an interactive visualization of one of the most widespread stories in the world. This is a tale of desire, deception, and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The story tells of a defiant young woman who refuses all suitors only to fall in love with a handsome stranger. But when that stranger turns out to be an evil creature in disguise – sometimes with a human body assembled for himself out of rented parts – the young woman must find a way to escape.

This platform traces the travels and transformations of the defiant girl story across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Visitors can explore over 456 transcriptions and 100 literary adaptations of the story; or follow the movements of sixteen key individuals who told, transcribed, or adapted this tale.

Stories

These interactive visualizations convey the geographic scale of the defiant girl story as a worldwide phenomenon. They are based on data sourced from 456 versions that were transcribed in over 120 languages (including creoles) between 1870 and 2020. In this series of maps visitors can explore “big picture” views of global patterns in the collection and publication of these stories, or browse information on individual transcriptions.

Overview

This interactive visualization allows visitors to explore 456 transcriptions of the defiant girl story (1870-2020). These stories were told by people of all ages and walks of life and written down by anthropologists, creative writers, linguists, priests, folklorists, colonial administrators, and politicians.

Stories Heatmap - Collection

This heatmap illustrates the geographic range of the defiant girl story as an oral narrative.

Collected Stories Heatmap

Stories Heatmap - Publication

This heatmap shows where the 456 versions collected in the previous map were copyrighted or published. The transformation is striking: with few exceptions, when these stories were transcribed and printed as folktales they tended to be copyrighted elsewhere – usually in the North Atlantic – and translated into just a handful of languages. This pattern suggests that world literature often served as an extractive economy for oral narratives collected in Africa and its diasporas.

Copyrighted Stories Heatmap

Publication Trajectories

The large-scale movement of oral narratives into printed texts can also be viewed linearly. This visualization shows the publication trajectories of all versions of the story that were printed in French. Arrows depart from the site of transcription of the story and end where the story was published, showing an accumulation in Europe, especially in Paris.

Publication Trajectories map

But viewing stories as trajectories can also draw out the activities of individual researchers who did not conform to larger patterns. Here are the versions collected by the Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, who in published in French but worked between the Caribbean and the African continent.

Publications Trajectories: Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain

Adaptations

These interactive visualizations present an overview of over 100 adaptations and translations of the defiant girl story produced over the last century by creative writers who worked in a variety of media. The tale was reworked in literary forms such as novels, poems, and short stories, as well as in more popular media such as newspapers, market literature, traveling theater, and comics. Visitors can browse individual adaptations or explore how certain influential versions spread networks of the story across dozens of languages through translation.

Overview

If the collection of the story as a folktale reveals a pattern of extraction, the many adaptations of the tale by creative writers present a more dynamic picture of circulation and reinvention. Some of these adaptations are by renowned writers, including Maryse Condé, Ngũgĩ Wa’Thiongo, Patrick Chamoiseau, Ama Ata Aidoo, Taban Lo Liyong, Efua Sutherland, Sofia Samatar, and Ahmadou Kourouma. Some are reprintings important anthologies by notable editors including Langston Hughes, Richard Rive, and Raphaël Confiant. Also included are several philosophical responses to the story’s motifs by theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Francis Nyamnjoh.

Networks of Adaptations

Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952)

The Palm-Wine Drinkard Adaptation map
Palm Wine Drinkard book cover
Palm Wine Drinkard book cover

Some adaptations spread more widely than others. The most famous version to circulate in print in the twentieth century is the story of the “beautiful complete gentleman” that Amos Tutuola includes in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Tutuola adapted Yoruba folklore into his own otherworldly adventure stories when he was a clerk in the Department of Labor in Lagos. His manuscript found its way to Faber & Faber in London who published it to great acclaim and some controversy in 1952 and has captivated audiences ever since. Tutuola’s tale of a “curious creature from the market” who assembles a body for himself out of rented parts has been translated into 25 languages, adapted for the stage and the comics page, and inspired numerous elaborations by other writers and thinkers. The colored arrows indicate diffusion through translations (orange) and anthologies (green).

Efua Sutherland and Langston Hughes: “New Life at Kyerefaso” (1956)

New Life at Kyerefaso Adaption Map

The Ghanaian playwright and poet Efua Sutherland wrote one of the most widely reprinted literary versions of the defiant girl story. “New Life at Kyerefaso” was first performed on the radio in the 1950s in what was then the Gold Coast. Sutherland next sent the story to Langston Hughes for inclusion in a 1961 collection of African writing. Sutherland’s version subtracts the terrifying creature from the equation and makes the young woman’s defiance of her community into an allegory of progress and modernization. “Kyerefaso” proved wildly popular and went on to be reprinted dozens of times across the bifurcated literary landscape of the Cold War, appearing in collections published by Heinemann as well as the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau. The different colored arrows correspond to the movement of Sutherland’s original story (orange) vs the many reprintings based on Hughes’ anthology (green).

David Diop: Frère d’âme (2018)

Frère d’âme Adaption Map

The Senegalese novelist David Diop constructed his prizewinning 2018 novel Frère d’âme around the defiant girl story. Set amongst Senegalese soldiers fighting in the trenches of World War I, Diop’s novel takes one of the tale’s common motifs – an impossible desire for a body without scars – and turns it into a probing meditation on the limits of identity and storytelling. Translated into English as At Night All Blood is Black, Diop’s book won the Man Booker Prize and has since been translated into fifteen more languages.

People

These visualizations trace the movements and intersections of individuals who interacted with the defiant girl story in significant ways. Some are creative agents: writers or artists who incorporated the story into their work. Some are researchers: anthropologists or folklorists who recorded the story. Below are ten of their trajectories. Green squares represent a key interaction with the story. For each individual in this map, the blue markers represent their activities in particular geographical locations at particular points in time. Each red marker represents a key interaction with the defiant girl story – a moment of performance, transcription, collection, adaptation, or translation. Clicking on a name in the left hand menu will reveal only that individual’s trajectories.

Ama Ata Aidoo
Ama Ata Aidoo

Ama Ata Aidoo

The Ghanaian novelist, poet, and playwright Ama Ata Aidoo first published a version of the defiant girl story in the literary magazine Okyeame in 1968. Two years later, she expanded it into her second play, Anowa. The work tells the story of a young woman who rejects all the suitors proposed by her parents and marries a stranger instead. The work is set in the 1870s in the Gold Coast, where Anowa’s ‘complete gentleman’ turns out to be a slave trader.

Image source: Wikicommons

Charles Baissac
Charles Baissac

Charles Baissac

Born into a French family in Mauritius, Charles Baissac was sent back to France to become a doctor only to end up studying literature instead. Upon his return to Mauritius, Baissac worked as a teacher while publishing early studies of Mauritian Kreol linguistics and folklore. Three versions of the defiant girl story are among the many texts he sent from Mauritius to Paris for publication.

Image source: www.potomitan.info

Lydia Cabrera
Lydia Cabrera

Lydia Cabrera (1899-1991)

The queer Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera wrote a gender-bending version of the tale in 1934 for her partner, the Venezuelan novelist Teresa de la Parra, as the latter was dying of tuberculosis in a Madrid sanitorium. Based on half-remembered tales from Cabrera’s childhood as well as versions she had recently collected from her informants back in Cuba, Cabrera’s surrealist adaptation went on to become an avant-garde sensation in interwar Paris and appear in the important Caribbean surrealist journal Tropiques with a preface by the negritude poet Aimé Césaire.

Image source: University of Miami Libraries

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain
Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain (1898-1975)

The first Haitian woman anthropologist, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain first heard the defiant girl story as a young girl during a bout of severe illness. In her brief, astonishing, and continent-spanning career, she made the narrative into her own practice of diaspora by collecting or co-creating versions of the tale in Haiti, London, and Kinshasa. Comhaire-Sylvain devoted half of her Sorbonne PhD thesis to the story and transcribed a version from Jomo Kenyatta, the future first president of Kenya, when they were both students of Bronisław Malinowski at the University of London in the 1930s. She also collaborated on versions of the story with school children in colonial Kinshasa in the 1940s.

Image source: Stanford University Libraries

Maryse Condé
Maryse Condé

Maryse Condé (1937-2024)

The Guadeloupean novelist Maryse Condé knew the defiant girl story well, incorporating it into her fictions and analyzing it in her academic research. Condé’s first novel, Heremakhonon, uses the plot of the tale to fictionalize her own experiences as a young Caribbean woman living in Ghana, Guinea, and Senegal in the first decade of their independence. After an unsuccessful first draft involving a love triangle, Condé rewrote her book, making her heroine into a defiant girl who falls for a government minister who is not what he seems.

Image source: Getty Images

Ousmane Socé Diop
Ousmane Socé Diop

Ousmane Socé Diop

Ousmane Socé Diop was a writer, newspaper editor, and politician who leveraged the success of his novels into a career as a public intellectual in what was then French West Africa. Socé serialized a version of the defiant girl story in the newspaper Paris-Dakar in 1936 and again in 1953 in the glossy, pan-African magazine Bingo. Socé’s version of the tale also appears in his 1937 novel Mirages de Paris, which is set in the Black Parisian community of the interwar period and in the shadow of the Colonial Exposition of 1931.

Image source: Wikicommons

Leo Frobenius
Leo Frobenius

Leo Frobenius (1873-1938)

The German anthropologist Leo Frobenius believed that the ruins of the lost civilization of Atlantis were to be found somewhere in Africa. On more than a dozen expeditions, Frobenius gathered evidence for his racialized ideas about human prehistory, returning to Europe with troves of artifacts, copies of rock art, and many stories – including 22 versions of the defiant girl story collected across West, Central, and Southern Africa. Frobenius’ copies of prehistoric rock art were the subject of major exhibits in Paris and New York and helped spark a craze for “primitive” forms among modernists. These touring exhibits also included the texts of African folktales that Frobenius had collected – including the defiant girl story – which were supposed to help visitors understand the cultural context of the paintings, despite texts and images being produced many thousands of years apart. Frobenius’ theories about the African cultural past would have a major influence on the Negritude writers.

Image source: Wikicommons

Melville Herskovits
Melville Herskovits

Frances (1897-1970) and Melville Herskovits (1895-1963)

Frances and Melville Herskovits (Melville shown) helped define the discipline of African Studies in the United States. They collected the defiant girl story in both South America and West Africa as part of an effort to document African cultural survivals in the New World. The Herskovits envisioned their version of the anthropology of the African diaspora as a project of cultural comparison in which an objective researcher would carefully catalog sameness and difference, even producing a chart of how different populations had retained ‘Africanisms’ (such as the telling of certain stories) in their cultural behavior.

Image source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Bessie Jones
Bessie Jones

Bessie Jones (1902-1982) and Alan Lomax

In 1963, the Blues performer Bessie Jones (shown) appeared at the doorstep of the musicologist Alan Lomax, whose Greenwich village apartment was the nerve center of the American folk scene – a spot where Bob Dylan also hung out as he developed his performing persona. Jones lived with Lomax and his new wife for a month with a tape recorder running almost constantly. Jones knew Lomax could help her career as a performer, while Lomax was keen to record Jones’ repertoire as part of a project on the universal patterns of human folk song. In between songs, Jones told Lomax the story of a proud young girl who ends up marrying the devil in disguise – one of many tales she had learned living in the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast.

Image source: Folkalley.com

Ahmadou Kourouma
Ahmadou Kourouma

Ahmadou Kourouma (1927-2003)

The Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma made the defiant girl story the basis of Le Diseur de vérité [The Truth Teller], a pointed critique of neocolonial elites sabotaging African independence. The play premiered in Abidjan in 1972 only to be swiftly censored by Houphouët-Boigny’s regime, sending Kourouma into exile. Kourouma found revising his only play to be irresistible, yet impossible to finish. He kept revising the script for decades without ever settling on a final version of the story of decolonization that he wanted to tell.

Image source: Getty Images

Taban Lo Liyong
Taban Lo Liyong

Taban Lo Liyong (1938- )

The South Sudanese writer Taban Lo Liyong was the first African graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he adapted the defiant girl tale into a series of experimental short stories. At the University of Nairobi in 1968, Lo Liyong was one of the signatories of the famous manifesto on the abolition of the English Department. Liyong was then asked to help design a new curriculum centered around African language literatures but found no suitable textbook. His response was to send his students out into their own communities to collect oral traditions and have the class make their own course materials. Among the many texts his students returned with were several versions of the defiant girl story.

Image source: tabanloliyong.com

Okot p’Bitek
Okot p’Bitek

Okot p’Bitek (1931-1982)

Okot p’Bitek arrived in England with the Ugandan national soccer team in 1956 and stayed on to study law and later anthropology. Back in Acholiland in Uganda in the 1960s, he conducted research for his thesis and began writing down folktales, including the defiant girl story. Dissatisfied with the static view of literature and culture that European anthropology had offered him, Okot turned instead to poetry, eventually producing “Wer pa Lawino” (Song of Lawino), one of the most influential poems of twentieth-century African literature.

Image source: Wikicommons

Elsie Clews Parsons
Elsie Clews Parsons

Elsie Clews Parsons (1874-1941)

Pioneering feminist and folklorist Elsie Parsons collected more versions of the defiant girl story than any other researcher. Parsons first heard the story among Cape Verdean immigrants in New England, then among the Gullah in the Sea Islands off South Carolina, and finally dozens more times as she crisscrossed the lower Antilles in a motorboat with a phonograph. In Martinique, Parsons collaborated extensively with a local storyteller named Félix Modock, who had lost one leg to snakebite. Modock helped guide Parson’s research on Caribbean folklore. To thank him for his services, Parsons later sent Modock a wooden leg, which did not fit.

Image source: Wikicommons

Efua Sutherland
Efua Sutherland

Efua Sutherland

The Ghanaian playwright and poet Efua Sutherland wrote “New Life at Kyerefaso” for the radio in the 1950s in what was then the Gold Coast. Sutherland next sent the story to Langston Hughes for inclusion in a 1961 collection of African writing. Her version subtracts the terrifying creature from the equation and makes the young woman’s defiance of her community into an allegory of progress and modernization. “Kyerefaso” proved wildly popular and went on to be reprinted dozens of times across the bifurcated literary landscape of the Cold War, appearing in collections published by Heinemann as well as the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau.

Image source: Wikicommons

Amos Tutuola
Amos Tutuola

Amos Tutuola

The most famous version of the story to circulate in print in the twentieth century is the tale of the “beautiful complete gentleman” that Amos Tutuola includes in The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Tutuola adapted Yoruba folklore into his own otherworldly adventure stories when he was a clerk in the Department of Labor in Lagos. His manuscript found its way to Faber & Faber in London who published it to great acclaim and some controversy in 1952 and has captivated audiences ever since.

Image source: Wikicommons

About

Over the last two hundred years, the story of the defiant girl and her incomplete gentleman has been written down at least 456 times in over 120 languages, from Ghana to Madagascar, Martinique to Mauritius, Brazil to the Southern United States. The story’s motifs of desire, difference, incompleteness, and fugitivity have attracted dozens of writers and thinkers who have adapted the tale into literary texts and used it as inspiration for theoretical reflection.

The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman is a work of multimodal scholarship by Tobias Warner that explores the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that have emerged across this narrative constellation.

On this site, visitors can explore 456 transcriptions and 100 literary adaptations of the story; and follow the movements of sixteen key individuals who told, transcribed, or adapted this tale. Like the complete gentleman character himself, these maps are incomplete: they do not claim to include all possible variations. Instead, these visualizations are intended to convey the vast geographic scale of this cultural phenomenon and allow visitors to consider patterns and connections among seemingly far-flung versions.

These interactive maps are one half of a larger research project that will trace a global cultural history of the defiant girl story through a combination of digital storytelling, archival research, and close reading. An expanded version of this digital platform will eventually accompany a scholarly book, an excerpt of which is forthcoming in Print Cultures and African Literature (Cambridge), edited by Stephanie Newell and Karin Barber.

Together, the book and this website will aim to show how this multi-continental creative phenomenon challenges humanists to rethink the globalization of narrative. In response to cultural upheavals of various kinds, these stories have mutated to encode strategic lessons, generate utopian visions, and gesture toward new ways of imagining freedom. Across their many travels and transformations, the defiant girl stories also invite a reimagining of the practice of cultural comparison itself.

Credits

Project Lead | Tobias Warner, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, UC Davis
Geospatial Coding | Michelle Tobias, UC Davis DataLab
Web Design and Visualizations | Bill Kennedy, Agile Humanities
Research Assistants | Evan Martens (German)
Contact | tdwarner@ucdavis.edu

The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman has received generous support from a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities; a Research Revitalization Grant from the UC Davis Deans of Letters & Sciences; and a Start-Up Collaboration Award from the UC Davis DataLab.