In these settings, a set of stories is told, about the Monkey, the Lion, and the Elephant. Gates identifies Esu in the African-American cultural figure of the “Signifying Monkey.” This figure originates in the language-play of male-dominated social environments: bars, social clubs, pool halls. Did Esu survive the Middle Passage? Gates’s answer is yes, although he admits that the exact historical lineage is lost-unsurprisingly, given the trauma and dislocation through which any transmission must have taken place. For Gates, Esu embodies a sophisticated and specifically West African approach to interpretation and textuality. Gates links this concept also to the traditional understanding of Esu as genderless and sexually ambiguous.

the capacity of written texts to support multiple interpretations. He is traditionally described as “double-voiced,” which Gates links to the Western theoretical idea of indeterminacy, i.e. In their arrangement-obscure to humans-Esu reads the revealed wisdom of Ifa.

His tools are a set of 16 marked palm nuts, shaken on a wooden tray. He is the interpreter of the Yoruba’s canon of sacred knowledge, called Ifa. The Yoruba portray him carrying a calabash which contains ase, a concept which Gates identifies with the Ancient Greek logos, the divine Word which embodies reason and truth.Ībove all, Esu is associated with interpretation and its challenges. The Fon hail him as a “divine linguist” who knows all languages. Esu is closely associated with language and its powers: rhetoric and persuasion, slipperiness and metaphor. A central figure in this cultural tradition is Esu-Elegbara, a “divine trickster,” whose attributes are described in the prose and poetry of West Africa. Gates begins his search for the “black tradition’s” theory of itself in the Fon and Yoruba cultures of Benin and Nigeria, and among the remnants of those cultures that survived the Middle Passage to thrive in the Americas. Often regarded as a foundational text of black literary theory, the book’s stated intention is “if not exactly to invent a black theory…to locate and identify how the 'black tradition' had theorized about itself.” Gates achieves this by focusing on the Black cultural practice of “signifyin(g),” a sophisticated form of wordplay, which Gates traces back to a figure of Yoruba myth, and forward through the novels of Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and other major African-American authors. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism is a groundbreaking work of literary theory by revered African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Gates the signifying monkey