“Hale!” “Halele!”
Once upon a time, in a village by the lagoon, there was a girl so beautiful that suitors came from far away to ask for her hand. But she turned them all down. This one was too short, that one too poor, another had crooked teeth. “I will only marry,” she said, “a man without a single flaw.”
One day a magnificent stranger arrived: tall, richly dressed, softly spoken, with rings on every finger. The beauty accepted him at once. The wedding was celebrated, and the stranger announced that he was taking his wife to his own country, very far away.
The bride's little brother, a sickly child whom everyone despised, wanted to follow them. His sister drove him away with stones, but he followed them at a distance, hidden in the bushes.
The further they went, the more the husband changed. His fine clothes fell into tatters, his rings disappeared one by one. Deep in the forest, he took back his true form: he was a man-eating djinn who had made himself handsome only to lure his prey. He shut the young woman up in his house until he was ready to eat her.
But the little brother had seen everything. When night came, while the djinn slept, he freed his sister, and the two of them fled. The djinn chased them; the child threw an egg behind them, which became a lake, then a needle, which became a forest of thorns. When at last they reached the village, the monster, exhausted, had to give up.
The beauty asked her little brother's forgiveness. And when, later, a simple and honest young man came to ask for her hand, she looked for no flaw in him.
A beautiful appearance can hide a monster; true worth is not always visible.
What we know about it
The theme of the girl who is too choosy and marries a monstrous being in disguise is one of the most widespread in East Africa and the Indian Ocean. In Mayotte, it is so common that the linguist Noël J. Gueunier gave a whole volume of tales collected from the storyteller Madjidhoubi Saïd the title La Belle ne se marie point (“The Beauty Does Not Marry”).
Our version follows the most common outline of this type of tale; the details (the nature of the monster, the magic objects, the rescuer) vary greatly from one storyteller to another. The despised little brother who saves his sister is a frequent character in these stories.
Further reading
- Voices of the archipelago Noël J. Gueunier, avec le conteur Madjidhoubi Saïd, Contes comoriens en dialecte malgache de l'île de Mayotte (4 volumes), 1990 – 2011. Peeters, then Karthala.
- Voices of the archipelago Marie-Françoise Rombi et Mohamed Ahmed-Chamanga, Contes comoriens, 1980. Conseil international de la langue française / Edicef.
- Voices of the archipelago Mohamed Ahmed-Chamanga (textes recueillis et traduits par), Rois, femmes et djinns : contes de l'île d'Anjouan, 1988. Centre de recherche Océan Indien (Paris).