Postcolonial Chaucer Fanfic? Reinterpretation in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales

Patience Agbabi’s 2014 poetry collection Telling Tales has a radical mission: to make Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reflect 21st-century Britain in all its multicultural and many art-formed glory. The General Prologue is turned into a slam poem (watch Agbabi perform it here); the notoriously anti-semitic Prioress’s Tale is now imagined as the rapped lament of a Black man from the London projects. Agbabi’s work asks what it means to refashion a beloved cultural artifact to suit the needs of a new and different audience—exactly what modern-day fandom does with fanfiction. Yet just because a piece of literature reinterprets an earlier text does not mean it is necessarily fanfiction. Is Telling Tales homage or fic? I’d like to consider this issue by looking at the way Agbabi’s retelling of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, a short poem called “What Do Women Like Bes’?”, uses Chaucer’s themes of sex, love, and marriage to reflect her project’s goal of turning old stories into new ones.

In “What Do Women Like Bes’?” the Wife of Bath has been recast as a Nigerian businesswoman, who introduces herself as Mrs. Alice Ebi Bafa. Like Chaucer’s Alisoun, she sells cloth, but unlike Alisoun, whose business is really marriage and its economic benefits, Alice is truly out to make a deal. The poem both opens and closes with her offers to sell cloth to the audience (Telling Tales imagines the pilgrims as performers on the southeast England slam-poetry circuit), and where Chaucer would’ve taken the opportunity to make a pun about prostitution, Agbabi pushes the notion that Alice wants her business to be taken seriously. This is not to say that Alice doesn’t enjoy sex (in marriage) as much as Alisoun does— she gleefully tells how her first three husbands “died of exhaustion!” and proudly proclaims that “I am not a feminax,/I do not believe women are equal to men,/women are better./Our chamber of Venus is for both birth and pleasure both” (Agbabi 31-32). This echoes Alisoun’s sentiment that

“I folwed ay myn inclinacioun
By veru of my constellcioun
That made me I koude not withdrawe
My chambre of Venus from a good felawe” (615-619).

There are other moments in Agbabi’s poem that directly call back to Chaucer’s writing: Alisoun’s red stockings, much commented upon in the General Prologue, are now Alice’s red fingernails; Jankyn’s book of “wikkid wyves,” which caused Alisoun so much consternation, is now the law student Aboniki Bafa’s Playboy magazine (685); the tales both women tell are nearly identical. Modern-day fandom values attention to canon (the source material) detail in fanworks, and these nods to canon could make any fan leave a “dkjhdgkdsjfdh THE NAILS!!!” comment had Agbabi’s work been posted to the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3), instead of being published by Canongate Books.

But detail alone does not a fanwork make. Some of the most excellent, “out there,” fanfictions work despite being so far removed from canon because they manage to follow the same storytelling patterns and incorporate the same themes as the original. One of the first things readers notice about Chaucer’s version is that the tale is actually very short— the prologue, at four times the length, is where the good stuff is, containing as it does innumerable sex jokes, reflections on a woman’s role in marriage, and a wonderful diatribe against male textual authority. The tale itself seems to confound Alisoun’s message of women’s power when the knight ends up married to a beautiful woman after raping another. In contrast, “What Do Women Like Bes’?” splits its time equally between prologue and tale, and acknowledges that the ending is a little weird: “So she married a rapist/But he learnt his lesson” (Agbabi 36). The line break there indicates a hesitation in the narrator’s mind; she’s not quite sure she believes that it’s all okay. It makes Alice’s cheerful restatement of Alisoun’s wish that “Jhesu Christ us sende/Housbondes meeke, young, and fresh abedde” fall a little flat (1258-59). Alice comes off as a bit less anti-male than Alisoun, and for such a joyfully misandrist source text, that interpretive choice feels odd.

By introducing this hesitance into the theme of women’s superiority, Agbabi changes the thrust of the tale’s message, and makes it inconsistent with the canon’s themes, which fanfiction generally avoids. After all, you want the reader to recognize the setting, characters, and themes of the fanwork. Agbabi’s main themes are less readily recognizable as Chaucer’s. She moves the focus away from gendered authority, which is what most people read into The Wife of Bath, and instead introduces ideas about Western hegemony. There’s tension between Nigerian values and Western ones in Agbabi’s poem, reflected in the language Alice uses: although she speaks mainly in a Nigerian English dialect, she uses a very proper grammatical English when she takes on the voice of the knight. Notice also Alice’s assertion about why she doesn’t have children. She explains that “some say I’m a witchcraft/’cause I did not bear dem children./They do not understand the Western medicine” (Agbabi 33). Alice considers herself a cosmopolitan woman of the world, which conflicts with the assumptions about women that exist in Lagos. Agbabi’s poem becomes less about gendered authority and more about colonial authority, but there is little outright critique in the way you’d expect to find had Chaucer known about Edward Said— an intersectional retelling, yes; Chaucerian, no. This decision reflects Agbabi’s multicultural Britain and her own experience as the child of Nigerian immigrants, as her book does overall, but it is not really a fannish way of approaching a source text. Fandom on the whole is feminist and sex-positive, so fanfiction of The Wife of Bath can (and does) have a field day with those themes, but introducing a postcolonial reinterpretation of the text when it’s not even a little bit there in the first place would be looked at askance by other fans.

Lastly, the change in character between Chaucer’s wife and Agbabi’s wife makes “What Do Women Like Bes’?” non-fannish. The outlandish settings of most fanfiction requires a consistency of character to make them readable, and fanwriters are often dragged through the mud for writing “OOC,” or out-of-character fics. However, Agbabi seems to make this mistake. Alice and Alisoun are of the same stock—flirty, fun, fierce—but one is attempting to convince the men she’s speaking to that she doesn’t care about them even as she longs for true love, and the other is firmly secure in her position, ready to sell her cloth (but not herself) to gain the life she wants. Agbabi gives no indication of anything being really wrong in Alice’s life, whereas we get frequent glimpses of Alisoun’s trauma at the hands of men, particularly in regard to Jankyn’s beating her. Where Alisoun is all about love masked as sex, Alice is all about her business masked as sex. She married five husbands simply because her father married four wives— it’s part of her non-"feminax" agenda to be a lady boss, not because she’s looking for true love. Changing what seems to be a fundamental trait of the canon character is not a typically fannish way to approach a retelling.

Ultimately, although Agbabi’s work explicitly takes its inspiration from Chaucer, by playing with the underlying themes and bringing new elements to the character, she changes the story too deeply. “What Do Women Like Bes’?” is a gorgeous homage to Chaucer—as is her whole book—but I hesitate to call it fanfiction. But that’s okay. The whole universe of English literature does not have to be explained by the AO3 tagging system, and I’m content to let Telling Tales escape the niche that modern fandom creates and occupies. It still does important work in helping readers rediscover the Canterbury Tales and broadens the possibilities of what our foundational texts can do for us. In the end, storytelling is mostly retelling anyway. It just doesn’t all have to be posted to AO3.

An video of Patience Agbabi performing an early version (not the version in Telling Tales) of “What Do Women Like Bes’?” can be seen here and her own analysis of that poem can be found here.

Works Cited

Agbabi, Patience. “What Do Women Like Bes’?”. In Telling Tales. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2014. Print.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, and Larry D. Benson. "The Wife of Bath's Prologue." In The Riverside Chaucer. Boston, Mass: 3rd Ed., Houghton Mifflin Co, 1987. Print.