Orality in Writing: Its Cultural and Political Significance in Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman
In “New Trends In Modern African Poetry,” Tanure Ojaide observes that “poetry in Africa is [. . .] currently enjoying an unprecedented creative outburst and popularity” (4). This popularity, according to him, seems to arise from “some aesthetic strength hitherto unrealized in written African poetry which has successfully adapted oral poetry technique into the written form” (4). Though written in English, the poetry carries the African sensibility, culture, and worldview, as well as the rhythms, structures, and techniques of oral tradition, resulting in what Wole Soyinka calls “double writing,” or interweaving of various ethnic, geographic, personal, and peculiar African oral features into the European-derived written form (“Neo-Tarzanism” 319). Such oral features include ceremonial chants, tonal lyricism, poetry of the primal drum and flute, proverbs, riddles, myths, songs, folktales, the antiphonal call-and-response styles, and the rhythmic, repetitive, digressive, and formulaic modes of language use. This use of African oral tradition is abundantly evident in the works of major African writers. To the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, the artist’s vocation is a priestly office charged with maintaining the culture of his/her society as a whole. Heavensgate, Distances, and Limits, make this claim evident. Like Okigbo, Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor is preoccupied with African folk traditions, as well as the damaging effects of the European presence in Africa. As suggested by the title of his collection Rediscovery and Other Poems, the poetry is chiefly concerned with the plight of a contemporary Africa uprooted from its traditional past by contact with an uncomprehending Europe and the poet’s attempts to regain this past. Use of traditional African oral discourse is also discernible in the poetry of Southern Africa, especially poetry against apartheid. David B. Copland’s analysis of Basotho sefela (songs of the inveterate travelers) elucidates the oral content of this poetry, and it shows that sefela springs from traditional praise poems common throughout Southern Africa (qtd. in White 7). Nor is the oral emphasis restricted to Western and Southern Africa. In East Africa, the two major poets, Jared Angira and Okot p’Bitek, use oral textual features to reflect African culture. Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, for instance, relies heavily on traditional oral literature in its use of Acoli proverbs and songs. The most obvious markers of orality in the text are the acknowledged borrowings, indented quotations, that Lawino uses to illustrate kit Acoli in many respects. That a new literary orientation exists in contemporary African Literature cannot be doubted. Though the long list of African writers using and expanding features of oral discourse is enormous, I focus on Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman because not much work on orality in Soyinka’s poetry has been done. Moreover, Wole Soyinka has often been
Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition
Pretenders to the crown of Pontifex Maximus of African poetics must learn to mind the thorns. For a start, especially when their credentials are declared to be a love and espousal of the virtues of traditional African poetry, they must penetrate into what constitutes poetry in traditional art or be contradicted by their own limitations and superficial understanding of this activity of the imagination. Traditional African poetry is not merely those verses which, being easiest to translate, have found their way into anthologies and school texts; it is not merely those lyrics which, because they are favourites at Festivals of the Arts haunted by ethnologists with tape-recorders, supply the readiest source-material for uprooted academics; nor is it restricted solely to the praises of yams and gods, invocations of blessings and evocations of the pristine. Traditional poetry is all of this; it is however also to be found in the very technique of riddles, in the pharmacology of healers, in the utterance of the possessed medium, in the enigmas of diviners, in the liturgy of divine and cultic Mysteries (in addition to the language of their public address systems), in the unique temper of world comprehension that permeates language for the truly immersed-from the Ifa priest to the haggler in the market, inspired perhaps by economic frustration! The critic who would arrogate to himself the task of formulating an African poetics-a typical preoccupation of the European critical tradition by the way -had better understand this from the start or confine himself to extolling the virtues of European nursery rhymes-a field which appears more suited to the analytical capacity of our critical troika.
Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South Africa
For two decades of this century, the Afrikaans novel concerned itself almost exclusively with the farm and platteland (rural) society. Of the major English-language novelists of South Africa, on the other hand, only Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith have taken farming life as their subject. By themselves they cannot be said to have defined a "farm novel" genre in English to parallel the plaasroman in Afrikaans. One might even argue that neither is a true farm novelist, the farm in Schreiner being too little distinguishable from nature and in Smith too little distinguishable from the village. Nevertheless, Schreiner and Smith approach the farm with a literary tradition of their own behind them - an English tradition - and in the case of Smith with a myth as well of what the farm is capable of being. Thus at the very least they provide a valuable foil to the plaasroman, throwing into relief the preconceptions of their Afrikaans contemporaries.