This book is about storytellers and their oral performances of folktales in Mayotte, an island lying in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles east of the African coast. The book is built on a constraint: I have not witnessed the performances I discuss; in fact I have never been to Mayotte. Within that constraint, I indulge a whim. I use books by three French ethnographers of the 1970s–80s to imagine the oral performances. My whim follows the ‘law’ devised by the Oulipo group in Paris: ‘A text written according to a constraint describes the constraint’.1 I ask, what can we comprehend about an oral art without witnessing it in person? Numerous critics of Homer and succeeding classical authors have answered: quite a lot. Imagining a performance — which I practice and recommend — does not replace the physical presence of a storyteller, but like reading the script of a play, it urges us to see the performance of oral literature as a kind of theater. Storytellers in Mayotte are skillful at blending different traditions and using the past to deal with the present. The books celebrate their skills. I invite you to try this relatively polite kind of eavesdropping with me.