When Orature Becomes Literature

The concern of this article is with the transformations that occur when what is variously termed "orality," the "oral tradition," "oral literature," or "orature" is incorporated into literature in the context of Somali culture. While most sources use these terms interchangeably, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan novelist, in a lecture titled "Oral Power and Europhone Glory," stresses a subtle distinction of meaning between "orature" and "oral literature." Ngũgĩ notes that "the term 'orature' was coined in the sixties by Pio Zirimu, the late Ugandan linguist."1 Ngũgĩ observes that although Zirimu initially used the two terms interchangeably, he later identified "orature" as the more accurate term, which indexed orality as a total system of performance linked to a very specific idea of space and time. The term "oral literature," by contrast, incorporates and subordinates orality to the literary and masks the nature of orality as a complete system in its own right. For this reason, "orature" is the preferred term in this article.What this article proposes is that the particular relationship of the spoken word and script in Somali culture points clearly to the need to reconsider and revise our understanding of the oral-literate "dichotomy." Other oral traditions likewise testify to the need to reexamine assumptions about orality and literacy, including the idea of a teleological progression from an oral to a literate world, but in a slightly more occluded form than in the case of Somali orature.The Somali experience suggests very strongly that the most profound transformation does not occur when orature encounters writing. The dominant assumption that writing represents a radical departure rests in part on the idea that an aligned worldview between artist and audience is required to understand an oral form but that this is not required to comprehend the written text. What I claim here is that insofar as shared meaning may be constituted in either a written or an oral form, a shared interpretive horizon is implied. This interpretive horizon, furthermore, implies a more profound shared understanding than a limited conception of language as textuality. The interpretive horizon embraces practices and codes, which derive ultimately from tradition and its engagement with the transcendent. This dimension of my argument is deeply informed by the insight of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor across the range of his work but most especially in Sources of the Self. 2 Although I do not cite Taylor repeatedly, my understanding of what constitutes the fundamental transformation in the transition from "oral" worlds to the world of print capitalism is influenced by Taylor's insight that the significant move defining modernity is the individual internalization of social codes that create meaning. Thus, the most significant social and cultural change is not associated with writing per se. The most profound transformation occurs instead when orature encounters the form of writing that claims that the apparent multivocality and plurality of writing and the written text itself constitute the highest virtues. The idea of the openness of writing inheres in the notion that script allows an irony and sophistication constitutively impossible in oral forms. In The Nature of Narrative, which considers the changes in narration over historical time, Robert Kellogg and Robert Scholes argue that it is only with the development of writing that the author, rather than the narrator who is the instrument of tradition, may emerge.3 What the case of Somali oral verse demonstrates is that authorship and the irony attendant on authorship is a constitutive possibility in orature also. What makes irony in the genres that develop with print capitalism different from irony in oral and script traditions is the fact that here irony itself and the polysemy to which it leads come to constitute the higher order. The novel is the cultural form in which this development takes its clearest form.I use Somalia and its orature as a case study in which misconceived assumptions about the oral-literate "dyad" can be most clearly identified. But in this respect Somalia is representative not only of North and Eastern Africa, where "oral" societies have coexisted with "script" societies over millennia, but also of cultures from around the globe. "Oral" Africa has existed from prehistory with written language. The script of the nomadic Touareg, which may be written from left to right, right to left, or in a circle is a case in point. And "Ges," the scripted liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, may be traced back to the fourth century CE.Somali literature falls into a number of genres, including drama, poetry and the short story. However, I consider the novel here, owing to the fact, as noted, that the novel embodies to the highest degree the features and trends associated with the development of writing in print capitalism. The focus of this exploration, unfortunately, is narrow in terms of the languages it engages. Somali literature, as an outcome of its particular historical experience, exists in Arabic, Somali, French, Italian and English. The object of study here is only Somali orature in English translation; reviews and critiques of English translations of Somali novels in Somali; and criticism that offers detailed and nuanced attention to Somali novels in English.The study of the inclusion of orature in the novel is burdened by assumptions of profound and mutually obstructive proportions. These are most clearly articulated by Eileen Julien in African Novels and the Question of Orality.4 Julien identifies two broad motivations in scholarship on the incorporation of orature in the novel. The first type of approach searches for an indigenous etiology of the novel as a culturally freighted index of the continuity between the oral and the literate. Implicit in this approach is an evolutionary model, which assumes a natural and teleological progression from an oral past to a literate future. Orality in this conception acts as a metonym for a society defined in terms of the communal and the collective. Literacy, by contrast, is identified with the emergence of the "I" from the unindividuated mass of the folk or the race, and the novel is the most significant cultural symbolic form of the development of individualism. This approach paradoxically reinforces precisely the evolutionary paradigm from which it seeks to escape. By locating the origins of the novel and its concomitant constitution of a particular form of subjectivity in the oral tradition and by assuming that orature must develop, apparently out of its own internal necessity into literature, this approach confirms a universalist evolutionary pattern, premised on the gradual effacement of orature. Refracted in a marginally different way, Marxist criticism identifies the entry into the novel via the conduit of the oral tradition as the entry into history.A somewhat more significant variation on this argument noted by Julien is the idea not of continuity between oral and literary forms but of the African novel that contains oral elements as symbol of the reconciliation of contradictory and clashing worldviews. Thus, for example, the "egocentrism" of the novel is tempered by the oral tradition, which represents the "collective outpouring of the communal spirit."The second major strand Julien identifies is the idea that it is orality itself that makes the African novel (continentally defined) authentically African (essentially defined). This view proceeds on the assumption that the novel is a European form but that the overlay of African orature imparts African indigeneity. This approach is underwritten by various other assumptions, such as the existence of a mythic African consciousness that is itself a response, necessary in some contexts, to a common modern colonial experience. It also assumes that orality is the defining mode of African experience. As Ali Mazrui suggests, the rallying cry for sub-Saharan Africa of "We are all African" is a response to modern colonialism.5 It is also an idea produced by the nineteenth-century science of race and an invention and reconstruction of identity shaped by the experiences that emerged out of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Orality and Africa become virtual synonyms. Depending on the cultural baggage of the scholar, oral literature is the index either of a closed, static, primitive society, on the one hand, or, on the other, a precious repository of an all but lost pastoral, prelapsarian past from the wellsprings of which a technologized, individualistic society must revive itself.What is fascinating about the case of Somali orature is the way in which it seems to unsettle many of the assumptions about the worldviews associated with orature, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. In terms of the evolutionary model that assumes a transition from the communal "we" of the oral tradition to the "I" of literate individualism, for example, Somali poetry violates expectations, because although wholly oral both in composition and performance, it nevertheless seems more "individualistic" than many literate modes.The paradigm of poetry in performance does not in any significant respect apply to Somali oral verse. A frequent assumption about orature in general is that it is composed on the spot, that it amounts to what Ruth Finnegan, drawing on the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, terms "composition-in-performance."6 Parry proposes in the context of ancient Greek epic poetry that repetition of stock epithets and episodes suggests the reliance of the epic poet on set formulae, commonly referred to as the "formulaic theory."7 In his research into Yugoslavian oral poetry, Lord arrives at the conclusion that formulaic style is universal to oral poetry.8 Although these theories offer a welcome corrective to the improvisational idea, they tend overly to emphasize the dependence of the oral poet on an "originary" script and a cumulative cultural tradition. Dominant understandings of the griot tradition of West Africa may be considered paradigmatic here. Orature here appears to rely on a "communal" text inherited from previous generations, extending back into the mists of time. The "collective" texts are apparently easy to memorize to the extent that they use repetition as a mnemonic device. Like Finnegan, Isidore Okpewho recognizes the relevance of the formulaic theory but qualifies it in certain respects. In the various traditions, repetition may take the form of prosody, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, parataxis, repeated formulae, and topoi.9 However, the oral poet inescapably manipulates the cultural "stock" in individually creative and context-sensitive ways. Both Finnegan and Okpewho argue very strongly that what is frequently considered a collective or communal text, in fact, constitutes the conventional framework, much like the often-submerged conventions of literate traditions, in which the griot infuses an individual aesthetic element that also reinterprets the text in a new context. Often this individual element is missed in written transcriptions of the oral texts, since the uniqueness of the performer's interpretation emerges only in performance. This is one element of the whole series of connections Ngũgĩ symbolizes by the circle, which is also the circle of performative space.In nomadic societies, where for practical reasons the volume of portable property is severely limited, greater importance has been attached to oral poetry than to the plastic arts. Although Somali oral poetry is the product of a nomadic pastoral society, it must not be confused, as Patricia Alden and Louis Tremaine remind us, with European pastoral poetry, which is the poetry of nostalgic longing for a natural life lost to the urban poet.10 While both the beauties and the rigors of the natural world are a significant feature of Somali verse, "nature" as a concept is not a theme. The composition of Somali oral poetry, furthermore, approximates more closely original composition in predominantly literary cultures; the poet is not, that is to say, a medium for tradition as frequently is taken to be the case. In this respect, Somali orature is quite similar to the oral poetry of the nomadic camel herders across the narrow expanse of the Red Sea. Classical oral poetry of the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula, like Somali oral poetry, is original in composition, but, unlike Somali verse, it is original within the constraints of a pronounced formula.11 The classical Arabic qasīdah, or ode, consists of a number of topoi that constitute an almost unvarying formula. The challenge for the poet is to compose verse that is memorable, given that it must employ the conventional "formula," which includes an opening description of the abandoned encampment and musings about the people who have left it, an exploration of the distractions of love, since the emotion of love is sure to capture the attention of the audience, a description of the desert journey, and finally self-praise and praise of the potential patron. The formulaic paradigm ensures mutual understanding, but in order for the poem to be arresting and compelling it must present a unique talent and vision. Thus both classical Arabic oral poetry and Somali oral verse foreground originality of composition in ways that are less easily identifiable in the oral traditions of other parts of the world. Within this context, Somali oral poetry nevertheless still stands out since it, unlike classical Arabic poetry, does not rely even on the type of compositional convention employed in the Arabic ode.The ways in which Somali oral verse eliminates the reliance even on "formula" as it is employed in Arabic oral verse can be uncovered through a consideration of the rules of composition of what is traditionally considered the highest poetic art, namely the gabay. The gabay shares with the other "noble" Somali verse forms the requirement of the use of a specific poetic diction and alliteration, which in Somali is referred to as "higgaad." Higgaad is a form of creative constraint that paradoxically is also liberatory. Perhaps the most complete account of Somali oral poetry is provided by B. W. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis in Somali Poetry: An Introduction. The authors note that the convention requires that "in every hemistich of a poem at least one word has to begin with a chosen consonant or with a vowel."12 The feature the "classic" gabay shares with other Somali verse forms is that the gabay is wholly individually albeit orally composed. The formulaic theory, even the qualified version of it advanced by Finnegan and Okpewho, does not apply. What distinguishes the gabay among the other genres, according to Andrzejewski and Lewis, is scansion and length: "The gabay usually consists of between 30 and 150 lines, though shorter ones and considerably longer ones are not unknown. The number of syllables in each line varies from 14 to 18, and in the majority of cases there is a caesura before the sixth syllable from the end."13 The rigid prosody that provides the limits within which the poet may find his voice, the requirement of alliteration, and the use of an archaic poetic diction that paradoxically, through constraint, challenges and liberates imaginative freedom in composition underlines again the fact that this is not an impromptu verse."Poet's Lament on the Death of his Wife," an elegy by Raage Ugaas (ca. eighteenth century) of the Ogaden clan, is remarkable for the depths of emotion it stirs through the skillful use of imagery: 1. Sida koorta yucub oo La suraykorommo buubaal ah2. Ama geel ka reeb ah oo nirgahaLaga kachaynaayo3. Ama beelo kaynaan ah ookor hayaamaaya4. Ama ceel karkaarrada jebshiyowebi karaar dhaafay5. Ama habar kurkii wadnahaLagaga kaw siiyay6. Ama kaal danley qaybsatiyokur iyo dhal yaabis7. Shinni kaaluf galay ama sidiikoronkorro oomi8. Chalay kololo'aygii ma ladinkaamil reeruhu e9. Kunbulkiyo ardaagii miyaaLaygu kaliyeeyay10. Wichii Laygu kuunyeeyay miyaaigu karaamoobay11. Kunbiskii miyaa Layga qubaykolayo ii buuchay?12. Maanta na kataantii miyaaLayga kala qaaday?13. Kob abaar ah oo dheche miyaakoore ila meeray?14. Kub miyaan ka jabay bliichiyaankabayo Loo haynin?(1. Like the yu'ub wood bell tied to gelded camels that are running away,2. Or like camels which are being separated from their young,3. Or like people journeying while moving camp,4. Or like a well which has broken its sides or a river which has overflowed its banks,5. Or like an old woman whose only son was killed,6. Or like the poor, dividing the scraps for their frugal meal,7. Or like the bees entering their hive, or food crackling in the frying,8. Yesterday my lamentations drove sleep from all the camps.9. Have I been left bereft in my house and shelter?10. Has the envy of others been miraculously fulfilled?11. Have I been deprived of the fried meat and reserves for lean times which were so plentiful for me?12. Have I today been taken from the chessboard (of life)?13. Have I been borne on a saddle to a distant and desolate place?14. Have I broken my shin, a bone which cannot be mended?)14 The rhetorical questions describe the poet's grief, and the internal split in the poem reflects the phases of mourning with the passing of the days. The similes in the first half of the poem suggest the husband's anguish and confusion as he tries tentatively to find a way to describe the sound of his lamentation on the day he loses his wife. The natural imagery conjures up a view of people dependent for survival on animals, the environment, and each other. The sound of the poet's despair is like the loss of hope at hearing that one's camels, upon which life itself depends, have disappeared. His cry is the cry of the human or animal mother at the loss of her child. The poem then moves to the present of its utterance. For the poet, the loss of his life's partner is like being deprived of home, food, and physical integrity. Perhaps the most striking image in the elegy is the idea that the poet's grief makes him feel like he has been removed "from the chessboard (of life)." What this poignantly expresses is the sense that the loss of his wife represents a rupture with everything that gives life its meaning, namely, the loss of all of the codes and practices that give form to relationships and individual pursuits.Clearly, in order to achieve these effects Somali oral poetry cannot be an unrehearsed, unplanned, spontaneous expression of ritual formulae. It is wholly individually composed, albeit following a rigid and rigorous metrical, alliterative and stylistic paradigm. Alden and Tremaine go so far as to suggest that poems are associated with individual poets "to an even greater extent than in the Western written tradition."15 Poems, as we have seen, are never composed on the spot. They are the product of exhaustive labor, usually mainly by those with poetic talent and an extensive knowledge of the Somali language since, in order to achieve the prescribed alliterative pattern, an often archaic "literary" vocabulary needs to be summoned. Said Samatar notes quite explicitly that "the concept of 'composition in performance' associated with the propounders of the 'formulaic theory' does not apply to Somali oral poetry, nor do Romantic/folklorist notions of oral poetry as a 'communal product ... an instinctive, artless outburst of feeling' which 'naturally' springs to life without prior deliberation."16 On every occasion that a poem is recited by someone other than the composer, not only must the original poet be acknowledged but in the exordium the circumstances of the composition need to be provided. Furthermore, every word of the text must be faithfully and accurately reproduced. Infringement leads to strict penalties. Individual property rights in intellectual capital thus are even more pronounced in the context of Somali oral artistic creation than they are in the context of the idea of private ownership that governs print capitalism.In this respect, Somali oral verse is similar again to classical Arabic poetry in that ownership in the poem vests in the original poet, and even the poet's rāwī, or professional "transmitter-cum-interpreter," is not allowed to alter the verse. Classical Arabic poetry is a phenomenon of the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Even when it has been anthologized in later centuries, as in Isfahani's tenth-century CE Book of Songs, for example, the author biography and context of composition are noted. But what makes Somali oral poetry stand out even against this backdrop of similarity is the fact that the Somali oral poem may be recited by anyone who has memorized it correctly, provided that the identity of the poet and the context that delimits the meaning be acknowledged on every occasion of recitation.As should be clear from the foregoing discussion of transmission, the concept of poetry-in-composition also reduces the role of individual memory, a factor of major importance in relation to Somali oral poetry. Lewis and Andrzejewski make special mention of the exceptional powers of recollection both of people who choose to recite the poems and, in particular, the poets themselves: "The reciters are not only capable of acquiring a wide repertoire but can store it in their memories for many years, sometimes for their lifetime. We have met poets who at a ripe age could still remember many poems which they learnt in their early youth."17 Thus in the context of Somali poetry, it is not formulae that are memorized. Poems are memorized verbatim.On the question of the formulaic theory in respect of Somali oral verse, it must be noted that the poetic tradition, culture, and social structures of the south of Somalia differ in various ways from those of the north. The south has suffered a lack of scholarly attention that recently has begun to be redressed. Academia has colluded in the frequent self-image of the ways of life and the cultural expressions of the patrician north as the "authentic" Somali nomadic pastoralist culture. "Canonical" versions of Somali oral poetry, emerging from anthropological and ethnological studies, posit the idea of a "golden age" of poetry that fixes all Somali culture within an unchanging paradigm and that also excludes the expression of many groups within Somali society. The male genres of the gabay, geerar, and jiifto emerge as the "high" art against which other genres are either judged or altogether excluded. Often this canonization and exclusion is promoted by those within Somali society with a vested interest in maintaining a particular vision of the society. The female forms of the buraambur, or work songs, in particular have been disregarded since they are considered to be nonprestigious.18 Similarly, the forms that have emerged in the period of Somali engagement with modernity that articulate the concerns especially of urbanized youth tend to be occluded from view in authoritative accounts both within and without Somali society. In an urban context, the longer genre of the heello originates in the short form of the belwo, which itself develops out of the established group of genres identified by John William Johnson as the "family of miniature genres."19 What the ongoing development of the oral genres suggests is an ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation by Somali poets in a period of rapidly changing social, historical, and economic contexts against a shared horizon.Not only are there tensions between the "high" genres and other genres but also within genres, such as the gabay, the oral form that enjoys the most prestige. The differences that emerge in relation to the features of this genre are mainly regional. Virginia Luling notes that the gabay of the people who live in the south around the area of Afgooye is "extemporized" in contrast to the gabay in the north: "The poet, known as laashin, is expected to compose on his feet, drawing on his remembered stock of phrases and alliterative links to help him."20 Thus, the qualified poetry-in-composition model proposed by Finnegan and Okpewho appears to apply in the case of some of the poetry of the south.Somali orature, furthermore, employs many techniques associated with more "literary" modes. There are examples of "inter-orality," in which one Somali oral poem alludes to another oral poem. Said Samatar's research on "the Hurgumo chain" of poems that originate in early 1978, for example, clearly indicates the complicated network of allusion and counterallusion to which Somali poetry lends itself.21 There are also examples of inter-orality in which a Somali oral poem refers to the oral tradition of another culture. In the poems collected by Andrzejewski and Lewis, an instance is noted of the allusion within a Somali poem to the oral tradition of pre-Islamic Arabia.22 There are also examples of, for want of a more elegant neologism, "inter-oralotextuality," wherein an oral poem alludes to a written tradition. "The Death of Richard Corfield," probably the most well-known Somali poem by the Sayyid, Muhammed Abdille Hassan, known as both the "father" of Somali nationalism and the Somali "Shakespeare," alludes to the textual tradition of the Qur'an in the repetition in the poem of the imperative "say" or "recite" or "read."Muhammed Abdille Hassan in the poem in question was roused to great rhetorical heights since he identified in some ways the mirror image of his own impetuous self in Richard Corfield. Corfield had been sent to restore order to the coastal areas after an ill-considered colonial policy had created a disturbance in the balance of power. Corfield's success on the coast led him, contrary to policy, to engage the Dervishes inland in the battle of Dul Madoba in August 1913. Corfield was shot in the head and died instantly. Perhaps recognizing in Corfield his own reckless determination, Muhammed Abdille Hassan composed possibly his most well-known poem after being informed of the death of his enemy and alter ego, and line 31 of the poem applies as aptly to the poet himself as it does to his subject. Muhammed Abdille Hassan inflates the ferocity of the death to calculated political effect. The poet presents Corfield's soul, hell-bound, being interrogated by the inhabitants of heaven. The poem puts the following words into Corfield's mouth using the technique of declarative utterance employed in a number of verses of the sacred book, the Qur'an: 23. Sida janannadii hore tashiguigu jaguugnaa dheh24. Taladii jinnigu ii hor marayjaasadeed helay dheh25. Jiidaha chanuunka leh markiiLa igu jeeraarshay26. Jibaadka iga soo bachay dadkiijiifka qaban waa dheh27. Kolkay rubaddu jow tiri or bayiga ag jiibsheen dheh28. Jiirkaygii na bahal baa cunoojiitay hilibkii dheh29. Jurmidiyo baruurtii dhurwaajuguch ka siiyaa dheh30. Jiiljiiladiyo seedahay tukuuigaga jaadeen dheh31. Haddaan Lays jikaarayn tolkayLaga jiilroonaa dheh32. Weligood wacha Lagu jaraajilibdhig duulaan dheh33. Daraawiishi waa jibin dhowga iyojowga soo bichi dheh.23. (Say: "Like the war leaders of old, I cherished great plans for victory."24. Say: "The schemes the djinns planted in me brought my ruin."25. Say: "When pain racked me everywhere26. Men lay sleepless at my shrieks."27. Say: "Great shouts acclaimed the departing of my soul."28. Say: "Beasts of prey have eaten my flesh and torn it apart for meat."29. Say: "The sound of swallowing the flesh and the fat comes from the hyena."30. Say: "The crows plucked out my veins and tendons."31. Say: "If stubborn denials are to be abandoned, then my clansmen were defeated."32. In the last stand of resistance there is always great slaughter.33. Say: "The Dervishes are like the advancing thunderbolts of a storm, rumbling and roaring.")23 The life and achievement of the man who has come to be known as the "Sayyid," or the "Master," cast an interesting light on the issues explored here. The Sayyid, born in 1856 into a family of religious scholars in a British-controlled area of Somalia, presented the most formidable resistance initially to Ethiopian but then also British and Italian colonial expansion into Somali territories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, as time has passed, it appears that of all Somali attempts at resistance to imperial ambitions, the Sayyid and his Dervishes offered the most significant opposition, even beyond that mounted in 1992 to the American attempt to establish a sphere of influence in the Horn of Africa, ironically called "Operation Restore Hope." In this case, virtually unarmed Somalis routed the world's biggest military power, but the difference between the resistance of Muhammed Abdille Hassan to British imperial ambitions and that of Somalis against recent American imperial designs is the fact that the Sayyid has a long cultural legacy. The history of the Sayyid is not, however, without contradictions. The Sayyid and the Saalihiyyah religious order that he represented alienated many Somalis, in particular, the more accommodationist Qadiriyyah order that dominated the Benaadir coast, especially around the city of Berbera. The Sayyid also lost many potential allies through his autocratic style and the raid-and-loot techniques he employed to feed his army. Before the revisionist historiography that conferred on him the honorific of "Sayyid" was fashioned, Muhammad Abdille Hassan was pejoratively known to the British as "the Mad Mullah." Both the fact that he presented a bulwark of resistance to British imperial ambition and the nature of that resistance appeared as the confrontation between colonial rationality and irredentist irrationality.What has made the Sayyid loom large in recent Somali consciousness, however, especially in the period of the civil war since the fall of the dictator, Mohammed Siyad Barre, is the fact that despite historical t

Oral literature · Oral poetry · Oral tradition · Orality · Somali · African history and culture analysis · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Translation Studies and Practices

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