A Fable About Overcoming The Odds

A Fable About Overcoming the Odds

A review of Rati Mehrotra’s “The Half Courage Hare” in Over The Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the Margins (Exile Editions, 2018).

By Derek Newman-Stille

Animals offer a fascinating element to folklore and fairy tales, often grouped into their own category of “animal tales”. These tales often use animals as symbolic representations of human characteristics, hyper-accentuating these characteristics. The animals are anthropomorphised (given human characteristics like speech, human cultural customs, and human behaviours) as part of this rendering of animals into the symbolic realm to speak about human experience. From Aesop’s fables to medieval bestiaries to the plethora of cartoon animal stories, we have been fascinated by our relationship with the animal world and with our belief that animals can reveal something about us and our experiences.

Fables are a form of folk tales that uses animals to convey lessons to people about how to operate in the world. One of the most popular fables is the Tortoise and the Hare, a tale that originated in Aesop’s Fables and conveys the lesson “slow and steady wins the race”. It is a common type of folk tale that explores power structures by illustrating two opponents of differing power (one who is believed to be much more suited to the task at hand, and one who seems underpowered) and by reversing the audience’s expectations about who will succeed and who fail at the task.

Rati Mehrotra’s “The Half Courage Hare” tells a tale many generations of rabbits after the initial contest, exploring a family of rabbits who have lost everything. Mehrotra mixes otherworldly entities into this classic fable who have stakes in the race, providing a potential sanctuary for the all-to-vulnerable animals who are trying to live out their lives close to a farm with a human farmer who likes to hunt.

“The Half Courage Hare” is a tale of the vulnerability of rabbits and the potential of the vulnerable to resist oppression and find new ways of rallying through community.

To find out more about Rati Mehrotra, visit https://ratiwrites.com

To discover more about Over The Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales From The Margins, visit https://overtherainbowfairytale.wordpress.com and visit Exile’s website at https://www.exileeditions.com