Slippers, Combs, and walnut bowls: Decolonising the fairy tale through Elizabeth Lim’s Six Crimson Cranes (2021)

Within contemporary fairy tale literature, two distinct approaches for decolonising the fairy tale emerge. The first takes a familiar Euro-American tale and recasts it in the guise of another culture – such as: Radiya Hafiza’s Rumaysa (2021); Jessie Burton’s The Restless Girls (2018); and Elizabeth Lim’s Six Crimson Cranes (2021) – permitting western readers to mark any deviation as evidence of another culture’s presence. Such texts broach decolonisation through the very mechanisms of colonial fairy tale collation and appropriation, a potentially fraught pursuit. By virtue of redressing the European tale, they risk affirming its priority above the cultures and storytelling traditions of its new trappings. Contrastingly, the second approach adapts a non-European narrative for an anglophone, primarily Euro-American audience, exemplified by Sue Lynn Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess (2022); Jordan Ifueko’s Raybearer (2020); and Angela Hur’s Folklorn (2021). As the sources of these texts are not part of Euro-American readers’ immediate, inherited fairy tale web, they are unlikely to instinctively understand the text’s allusions or points of reference. This complicates their ability to read and accept such texts as fairy tale literature – for, as Christy Williams suggests, ‘when novels retell lesser-known stories, the connection [to the fairy tale genre and intertextual web] can be dismissed by readers.’ However, this connection is essential for decolonising and decentring the European ‘fairy tale’. As such, in order to engage the text with the fairy tale web, texts adapting non-European fairy tales and story traditions must account for, and address, their reader’s assumed lack. Centring Six Crimson Cranes, an East-Asian Fantasy adaptation of ATU 451 — ‘The Maiden who seeks her brothers’ — this paper will examine the former of these approaches, with a focus upon the strategies generated by Lim’s navigation of an unknowing, but needing-to-know, reader — the generalised, but necessary recipient of decolonial fairy tale texts.