Witches

I read Fair, Brown, and Trembling, The Cinder Maid, and Baba Yaga for the topic of witches. I also started reading Akata Witch. I found it interesting that the first two stories were really similar, and thet they were similar to other tales that I have read from other countries, like Germany. They both featured a benevolent ‘fairy godmother’ character as the witch that would help the young girl with her chores and to go to a special event. However, in the Cinder Maid the witch figure is her mother, who has died. It is her spirit that helps the girl get to the ball. The witches magic in these stories is very material based, as in one thing transforms into another. That is true of the magic in Baba Yaga too. In Baba Yaga the witch is a malevolent character that seeks to eat her niece. It was interesting that in this story the girl herself actually seems to perform magic by turning the towel and the comb into a river and forest, respectivelly. In the other two tales the magic is performed by someone else, and not by the girl. These three stories represent the traditional way of viewing a witch as either evil or good. In more contemporary representations of witches, like in Akata Witch and Kiki’s Delivery Service, the witch character is a young girl who finds her independence and power through her magic. It is no longer a story of good or evil but of growth as an individual and finding a place in the world, or multiple worlds. The short stories also model the women in the stories after a patriarchal society and world view, and the witch characters don’t really try to go against these views. The contemporary witches in Akata Witch don’t have much to do with a patriarchal view of women and the world, and with this freedom the story really becomes about Sunny growing into her role as someone who straddles the divide between the magical world and non magical world, as well as being both Nigerian and American born and albino in Nigeria. This constant struggle and the balance that comes from that struggle makes contemporary witches like Sunny complex and interesting.