The Caribbean Oral Tradition

The Caribbean Oral Tradition Hanétha Vété-Congolo Editor The Caribbean Oral Tradition Literature, Performance, and Practice Editor Hanétha Vété-Congolo Bowdoin College Brunswick , USA ISBN 978-3-319-32087-8 ISBN 978-3-319-32088-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32088-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956109 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © Palimpseste, images-matières» by Valérie John, technique mixte, papiers tissés, feuille d›or, pigment indigo, images en mouvement (300cmx250cm) Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland FOREWORD In his landmark fi lm, Sankofa , acclaimed Ethiopian-American fi lmmaker, Haile Gerima provides a vivid visual representation of the power of storytelling and memory in the traumatic experience of millions of African- descended people who suffered Atlantic slavery. Gerima’s jarring fi lm opens with a declaration: “spirit of the dead, rise up and claim your story.” Beyond the graphic depiction of enslavement, Gerima skillfully deployed various storytelling sessions by the matriarch, Nunu, to illustrate the essence of African oral tradition by traveling back in time to recover the moral authority of the enslaved, despite dehumanization and brutality. Evoking the spirits of the ancestors, Nunu claims in one of her stories that “we could fl y anywhere and this fl esh is only what is stopping us.” Similarly, in many West African communities, storytelling has remained a daily routine of relating the past to the present, encoding universal moral truths for specifi c local contexts. In my own childhood experience in the great Yoruba city of Ibadan in the 1960s and 1970s, the moment of itan (story-telling session) was a time when children are acculturated in the deep values of their communities through the medium of tales. Itan encompasses dynamic narratives, oral histories, and mythologies on the notion of good and evil, sacred and profane, local and global, gender and generation. As a well-established tradition in many African descended communities across the Atlantic world, Nunu’s vivid stories in Sankofa , as in the Yoruba’s age-old cultural practice of itan , are instructive remind- ers of the power of an oral tradition that continues to defy conventional methods of writing and literacy in recording their history. v vi FOREWORD In keeping with Nunu’s layered storytelling and the Yoruba tradition of itan , I see in Hanétha Vété-Congolo ’s erudite volume, The Caribbean Oral Tradition , a complicated journey of African diasporic encounters that encompasses intersections of slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism and illuminates the creative agency of Caribbean and African diaspora history and culture. In her call for papers that ulti- mately led to the publication of this volume, Vété-Congolo concludes: “Interorality is the systematic transposition of storytales composed in specifi c cultural and geographic zones into new and distinct tales [in] which intrinsic specifi city is to be found. Essentially dialogical and dia- lectical, interorality is the fi rst distinctive marker of the Caribbean epistemological foundation.” Drawing from broad disciplinary perspectives in the humanities and the social sciences, the impressive chapters contained in this volume dia- logues with a rich tradition in Africana literary thought that have imagi- natively transcribed African oral tradition into written form. Indeed, in Africana thought, the commonality in Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone diasporic worlds lies in the interfacial-intertextual-interoral relationships between the spoken and the written word. Like the prover- bial broken egg, in the ritual enactment of the spoken word, the word, once spoken—because of its intricate complexity—cannot be retrieved in its original form. Furthermore, the volume extends the dialogue on how enduring Africana orality engages other dynamic cultural experiences— Western, Asian, indigenous—as well as multiple social relations that shape local political and economic conditions. Acknowledging complicated Caribbean and African diaspora identities, the volume shares varied perspectives on the signifi cance of interorality to the hitherto fi xating discourse on Caribbeanness. From aesthetics to eth- ics , speech to morality, theatricality to communality, dislocated binaries to Afro-Caribbean philosophy , gender and sexual discourse to the slave sublime , ethnomusicology to local “episteme,” the diversity of the chapters in their thematic concerns and spatial geographies—Brazil, Colombia, Caribbean—remind us that, although slavery and colonialism were dehu- manizing, a crucial legacy of African descended peoples in the Americas is vividly expressed in the re-telling of their stories. Their history is not only told in the way it is remembered by the lettered, but also from the mouths of everyday folk such as Gerima ’s matriarch, Nunu, and millions of Yoruba mothers who are masters of the itan tradition. Through the chapters in this book, Vété-Congolo and her colleagues have effectively responded to FOREWORD vii important theoretical, cultural, epistemological, and artistic questions that are at the core of “interorality.” These scholars are worthy conduits for the transmission of the intersecting, layered, transnational, and migrating words and world that center the Caribbean and African diaspora in the globe, despite their political and economic marginalization. In addition to their deep intellectual perspectives, Professor Hanétha Vété-Congolo and her colleagues ask their readers to contemplate the complex tapestries of Caribbean and African diaspora orality in national, transnational, and global contexts. Because of its wide range of disciplinary fi elds, spanning literary, sociological, artistic, cultural, and epistemological themes, this volume will certainly enrich a distinctive interdisciplinary pedagogy in Africana humanities. The volume is impressive in scope and depth—a must-read for all those interested African diaspora orality. Olufemi Vaughan Geoffrey Canada Professor Africana Studies and History Bowdoin College Brunswick Maine PREF ACE CONNECTED BY NARRATIVES: THINKING AS CREATION AND RESISTANCE The new millennium began with a racket: exhausted by wars, threats, and the proliferation of images distorted by mirrors, people were still weak- ened by job shortages, nuclear and food risks, anguishes about unknown plagues, the growing misery in some parts of the world, the upheaval of insurrections which threatened the grand-scale sharing of powers, and the money speculation which went along with the pressing need of military- industrial complexes. Within this racket, geopolitical frontiers were redefi ned, memories were reconstituted, imaginary worlds were revitalized, and philosophies were commited to speaking and asking, with more or less honesty, questions related to the formation of subjectivity (individuals’ and communities’ identities), the encounter with otherness , and the shaping and display of institutions. As for philosophies, not only do they address epistemological problems concerning the conditions of possibility of notions and institutions, but in addition, they redefi ne the contours of blurred memories, reconstituted fantasies and all sorts of lies that the violence of war supports: deportations, mass crimes, forgetfulness, and contempt. First, to speak is to focus on this hold (in terms of conquest) in the question of historicity. By “hold”, we mean the ways in which subjects and communities position themselves in relation to crises. That is to say, how to measure the gap between reality and representation, the distance between symbolic creation and economic-politico-scientifi c creation, and above all, the relation between reality and possibility ? Second, to speak is to rethink the places ix x PREFACE of diction in policies and philosophies; from where do we speak? Third, to speak is to refer to experience, it is to have the experience of foundations, establishments, and actions. This book, The Caribbean Oral tradition is a speech that actuates the concept of interorality , which is, in fact, a practice of foundation. By retaking Emmanuel Kant ’s distinction and opposition between what is constitutive and what is simply regulatory , we would say, according to Hanétha

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