The best way to describe Elenor Arnason’s Big Mama Stories is as a collection of over-intellectualized artificial folk tales. The stories aim for the tone of a breezy oral history, but there are always places where the author’s voice pokes through the thin veneer of the narrator’s.
The Big Mamas themselves are an interesting creation, hyper-evolved humans of unimaginable power and largely good sense and good humor. They travel through space and time, mostly minding their business, but when they stumble upon a problem that demands their attention - like, say, the unwelcome attentions of a Lovecraftian monstrosity, or a time traveling dinosaur poacher - they solve the issue in their own inimitable style. With the exception of Big Ugly Mama, they’re all identified by their skin color, and there is a veritable rainbow of Big Mamas (and Big Papas, except they rarely figure in any of the action) strolling across time and space.
The book consists of five stories and a brief afterword. The first, “Big Black Mama and the Tentacle Man” was the first written in the sequence, as a figure right out of a tall tale runs into a tentacled beastie with rape and murder on its mind. As in most tall tales, the protagonist is able to outwit the ravenous antagonist, eventually turning the tables. “Big Ugly Mama and the Zk” is an overly complicated story of what happens when a Big Mama accidentally interferes with an alien race’s destiny and comes into conflict with that species’ own form of Big Mama. “Big Green Mama Falls In Love” starts out riffing on an Aesopian-style fable, but then fades into an unsatisfying conclusion. “Big Red Mama in Time and Morris, Minnesota” shows what happens when Big Red Mama runs across a dino poacher with a time machine lurking in her favorite prehistoric vacation spot; it’s then up to her to repair any possible temporal damage. And the lengthy closer, “Big Brown Mama and Brer Rabbit”, is mostly a personal travelogue told by the titular rabbit, who’s long since been magicked into a human form and can’t get out.
All of which sounds like good fun, except that, as noted above, the author’s voice keeps on getting in the way of the narrator’s. Perhaps the insertion of detailed scientific footnotes or Aristotelian definitions into the rollicking storytelling is a deliberate attempt to update or subvert the tall tale form, but more often it feels intrusive and disruptive. The same goes for political commentary. The nods to labor politics and references to Obama feel forced. That’s not to say folk tales can’t or shouldn’t be political, but here the storytelling and the editorializing feel like the product of distinct approaches, and where they overlap, they’re dissonant.
That’s not to say there aren’t some fun moments scattered through the stories. But the Big Mama Stories are ultimately always self-conscious instead of being self-aware, and it’s that artificiality that renders them less than what they might have been.
(Aqueduct Press, 2013)
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