Succouring an Ixtabai: Zee Edgell’s Deployment of Belizean Folklore in The Festival of San Joaquin (1997)

Abstract

While folklore is often used in Belizean literature, it is generally treated there in one of two ways: infantilized as ghost story - told expressly for fascinating children - or in novel retellings - for the preservation of tradition. The Festival of San Joaquin, by celebrated Belizean author Zee Edgell, treats her recurring thematic and social concerns while deploying folkloric figures as an organizing motif in a novel way for Belizean literature; she offers a reworking of folklore that aspires toward recuperative ‘active myth.’ Exploration of her work might reveal it as amenable to an indigenous archetypal criticism, but such a criticism can only contribute to efforts at decolonization should it interrogate its own problematic adoption of folkloric figures whose indigenous origins have been obscured in the post-colonial era.