<p>UNESCO</p><p>A Case of Written Oral Tradition By Argeliers León (Taken from Oralidad magazine, 1/1988, pp. 29-35)</p><p>In the Caribbean region, with very singular cultural expressions, the elements brought over from Africa contributed to a process of integration that in a generalized way we could call American culture—and we could even observe some variations, depending on their roots and the degree to which these parallel elements participated in America’s development. We shall use Cuba as the basis for this work, since it is an important island in the Caribbean area, and we shall be using a specific case where African oral traditions have survived.</p><p>A synthesis emerged from multiple and complex cultural contributions, and many of its literary elements took the oral road of transmission. Very subtle variations differentiate one region from the other, depending on which African nation sent most people to the American settlements, and on the relations of production ruling over the economic organization present throughout America’s colonization process. Within these regional variations we find different nuances caused by the presence of Africans on the American continent.</p><p>In today’s New World, the cultural panorama has evident proof of specific regions where European, African, and Indigenous elements have become interwoven. In this American synthesis, some cultural manifestations, such as dance, beliefs, and traditional oral literature, reflect their African past. In other aspects, however, African roots are more diluted as they have become absorbed in more general customs, such as food, clothing, hairdos, gestures, the use of color, and even in social behavior.</p><p>African mores originating in the different lands from which slaves were brought over in shipments that went on for practically all of four centuries—that is, while slavery existed in America—confronted those imported by the colonialist metropolis and the European influences present in this continent, at times openly paralyzed and even outmoded in relation to the cultural events developing in the Old Continent.</p><p>The Caribbean islands received these multiple contributions, as a result of the colonialists’ economic interests, that required an exploitable labor force, thus intensifying slave trade during the 1800s, when capitalist exploitation began to grow. The transcultural process began to change according to the evolution in the economic development of the region and to the contradictions emerging in the colonies’ social relations. African cultural traditions, intensely disrupted throughout this process, became intertwined with the European cultural elements then available to the new popular masses emerging in these islands. As a consequence of this syncretic integration, African beliefs and their orders, groups, or rules were remodeled in the Caribbean, with the survival of those elements which adapted better to the social relations imposed on colonial societies, and which represented the most numerous African groups from whatever region they came from and the timing of their introduction in the region—an important element that defined their social standing in the Caribbean economy.</p><p>For all these reasons, the Yorubas and the Bantus have prevailed in Cuba, followed by Africans of carabalí and arara origin. It is very difficult to find other African elements today, since the original people are no longer there or they have been assimilated by other more powerful African traditions. And we must not forget the elements—now quite weak —brought over as a result of the Haitian Revolution organized in mutual-benefit or recreational societies known in Cuba as tumbas francesas and some voodoo practices brought by Haitian emigrants during the 1920s.</p><p>Yoruba cultural elements, mixed with some practices of the Catholic religion that came down to the masses, have produced a syncretic complex known as santería or Regla Ocha. Bantu cultural elements behave in the same manner, with Catholic aspects and some from santería itself, and this is known as palo, palomonte, or more generally as brujería (witchcraft), but some more orthodox officiants make a distinction between the rules biyumba, quimbisa, or mayombe. The arara rule is now practiced by very few groups, and they are very influenced by santería, though they do preserve their drums and some rites that reflect their now distant Dahomean origin. Cultural aspects known in Cuba as carabalí have now disappeared, and they are practiced only in mutual-benefit societies or groups known as abakúa o ñáñigos. </p><p>Oral expression has preserved these traditions as magic formulas, prayers, incantations, passages from the life of their gods, and the mysteries of the integration of magical powers, as well as the explanation of many of the facts related to nature with which Africans brought over through the slave trade were more familiar. These were then orally transmitted down to the following American generations, which integrated into local ways of life together these elements from their original cultures.</p><p>In the African oral culture preserved in santería—the subject of this paper—we can find:</p><p> a) The rezo (prayer), or formula for calling the oricha; they talk to him about the most outstanding events of their lives, trying to establish communication with the officiant evoking him. Many of these prayers are sung, but they can also be a rather insistent threat, known as puya. b) The letras (letters), or formulas for prophecies, either through the use of coconuts or the diloggún, or using the oddun of the cadena de Ifé (chain of Ife) and the letras that appear on the tablero de Orula (the Orula board). c) The historias (stories) that intertwine with the letras and the odduns to retell the most outstanding passages of the life of the orichas, as each instant of the prophecy is related with another exact instant in the life of a santo or an oricha used as a reference point when the soothsayer prepares a prophecy. Sometimes, these historias become separate elements from the prophecy and they constitute paradigms for the behavior to be followed by the believer. d) The paremiología; though it has interrelated with the rich heritage of Spanish refrains and fairy tales, it has saved many of its original characteristics, detailing the ethical and philosophical beliefs emanating from Yoruba traditions, where these forms of popular expression are very common. e) The narrativa (narrative), related to the orichas’ stories but with a rich world of animal and botanical relationships, where a ceiba tree can talk to a palm tree, or a yagruma tree is condemned because of the double standard of its two-colored leaves, or a snake can talk about old times, when he had paws. These are stories told all the time by old women officiants, and they make their characters come before Olofi, the supreme god, who dictates wise decisions. f) The daily practice of preparing food, medicine, the songs themselves and rituals all make up the elements that oral transmission has preserved for several generations.</p><p>Together with the oral transmission of all this African popular culture, in Cuba there are libretas de santería, where all this is written down, and though they do not substitute the original oral method of transmission, they help the believer remember what he has to say.</p><p>The libretas de santería are usually blank pages of some old book where things are written down—they can be pages from the old Spanish trade code for book keeping, or from legal books where proceedings were registered, all of them with hard covers and legally numbered pages. They could also be school notebooks.</p><p>The libretas de santería were written in the best handwriting possible, either with ink or pencil, and the spelling managed by the writers reflects certain alterations that appear in spoken language as well as some expressions used only by common people.</p><p>Around these libretas de santería there was a whole socio-economic complex resulting from a line of prestige that came with some of these libretas and it represented an important sales-value that depended on whichever renowned santero had written them. There are still some people around who swear they own a libreta written by Taita Gaitán, or by Luis Erice, the old man from the Matanzas province, or by Papá Silvestre. The padrino--the person who initiated a new believer—proposed to sell him one of these libretas, or the believer himself was able to get some free ones from other people, or paid some money or some other kind of present for the right to copy them. There were also people who copied them and then sold them.</p><p>In these libretas you can find a varied list of the ritual aspects that every santero must know. They also include information on the oral transmission already mentioned, but they are not supposed to be an encyclopedic collection, not even of general knowledge— in some libretas their authors have touched on only one aspect, or they have stressed just one of the contents of oral transmission, so in general people try to collect different libretas to get the most information possible, it being a recognized fact that each libreta covers only specific aspects--which will then be compared to discover the natural contradictions that come up between different libretas, as a result of the personal criteria of each author. Before becoming an important element for sale, these libretas were also written by the believers themselves, with the oral information they were able to get from old officiants who lived with them or were their personal friends. According to the work of some of our informants, we can say that these libretas were the result of some of the young believers’ wish to be close to these old and prestigious officiants who still had these ancient African traditions very much alive in their minds. When a santero’s prestige began to grow, he was surrounded by a group of ahijados (godchildren), and some members of his own family, who tried to acquire his knowledge.</p><p>The differences between generations created suspicion between younger people and the older ones, who began to keep their knowledge to themselves and doubt the young people’s formality to prolong an orthodox ritual surrounded by many personal tensions, as these younger believers tried to appropriate for themselves the older ones’ knowledge.</p><p>Many of these libretas were then the result of this social contradiction in which old santeros were surrounded by their ahijados, who fought among themselves to conquer the favor of their padrino. It’s possible that the very first libretas were the result of patient work of an ahijado interested in getting everything he could extract from his padrino. All older informants coincide today in describing how jealous the old men were, and said nothing at all; but the ahijados who lived in close relationship with one of those old men were able occasionally to get some fragmented information, some of the aspects of what they knew, in particular if they helped them in something and won their trust. It is easy to understand that before the practice of writing down in these libretas, the information was transmitted partly in an oral way, and its conservation was entrusted only to the memory of the person who listened and who saw—hiding away, at times, as youngsters were always interested in such mysteries. Even today, it is a general practice for old santeros to refuse the participation of young people when they carry out their rituals.</p><p>We can then state that the presence of these libretas represents the social relations created by these beliefs, it is a contemporary phenomenon that would not go beyond the 1920s— that is, the period that we propose provisionally on the basis of the data given us by old informants.</p><p>If we study the social conditions of black people at the beginning of the 1900s, and the economic circumstances in which the common classes lived, we will find enough data to explain how some sectors of the population descending from those Africans quickly put a distance between themselves and what they remembered of colonial slavery, while others —particularly in the cities—were able to read and write better than during the Spanish colonial regime. As a sector of the population became alienated by a new dominating culture, another sector looked for the protection offered by their ancestral beliefs, easy to understand and close at hand. The libretas preserved these old traditions among the generations born on local soil, now called criollos--traditions that ran the risk of disappearing as contradictions increased between old mores and the pressure to do away with these African rites. This is possibly the cause why older or more personal libretas became a mere compilation made up by files, separated by sections according to different aspects, isolating what could be the normative aspects of the rites: prophetic formulas—the letras used by the coconut and the Diloggún to express themselves--; the formulas for incantations; rezos; orders according to the orichas; what they really called formulas, consisting in prescriptions for magical preparos (concoctions) prepared to attract, to kill nature, to win over a woman, or to be successful in different activities, be they commercial or business, as the exercise of prostitution was euphemistically defined. </p><p>These libretas aren’t liturgical books, or reference or consultation works; nor are they texts for a very elementary catechism. Transmission is still oral and the libretas are only a guide to recall some aspect at any given moment, but not when the office is being celebrated. Their use, therefore, doesn’t require a perfect knowledge of the art of reading, since it is enough to be able to identify an element to then remember something learned through oral transmission. That explains our initial argument that the libretas are there only to help believers remember something.</p><p>These libretas are specialized, the most outstanding of all being the libretas de Ifá, true summaries of the whole process followed by this oricha’s oracle to make his prophecies, and they contain different oddun or prophetical orders. These specific libretas are not widely disseminated; they are kept under close surveillance by their owners, who disclose them only among babalawos, or Ifá officiants. Other libretas are drafted exclusively to preserve what is still alive in Cuba of the Yoruba language, which like the rest of the whole cultural complex is called lucumí. This is the qualification given a libreta that “has a lot to do with language,” or one “for drum players”—tamboleros, as they call themselves, instead of tamboreros--, and they contain everything an olú-batá must know for his presentation to the drum.</p><p>These libretas have been sold and they have even been mimeographed, incorporating words from the Oxford University Press Yoruba-English dictionary. Havana’s known santero Nicolás Valentín Angarica has also published some, which became very well known even before he had them professionally printed, because of the knowledge they register of ritual language and practices. In these cases, the libretas are like true notebooks, and their contents are distributed according to their subject matter, the vocabulary part being one of the basic aspects of these libretas. Sometimes it is just a minimum vocabulary with Spanish equivalents. . .</p><p>A libreta of an old santero includes extensive lucumí vocabulary, which follows very peculiar categories. It begins with Names of Some Animals, then Names of Some Things, and it concludes with two sections which he calls Other Words and Main Herbs to Become Santo. The vocabulary section of this libreta closes with Phrases and Refrains, a very important aspect of Yoruba culture: Here are some examples:</p><p>Ayeura kuata bondiyé: There is always something to wash. Molé mole yakoya ochukúa weikoko: When the moon comes out you can’t turn it off. Ocha towi ni-ni la ase: You must help he who helps you. Boyuri enu sodlake: Look, listen, and shut up. Ebbi bikán ague acgé ebbó: Just one stick does not make a jungle. Eny osi aná así: One hand washes the other and both wash the face. Leyé laguá layé la fisi: Everything we know will stay down here. Kamó nasée maguá: We must first decide what path to follow. </p><p>In that same libreta, so rich in vocabulary, there is a separate section with the description of a ceremony to consecrate some drums built by the same person who wrote all this information in the libreta. It reads: “On September 9, 1943, we inaugurated the drums that I, Trinidad, made after the wood was bought by Goyo, who paid Paulo Hoche 124 pesos so he could give it his sound and recognition./ And the name that came out was Acobì Añá./ And Goyo, Vicente, and Trinidad sprayed it. On the 9th of the same year, the same day of the chapter, before the Priest came out of the Virgen de Regla Church, he baptized it in front of the Holy Spirit.” And a few pages later, in “Old Tamboleros,” there is a list of some of their names: “Antandé, Aya bayu-Sufruan, Oya dina Matías, Ño Juan Pata de Palo, Yfarola Marcos, Andre Sublime, Utoquio, Simeón, Plasido, Alejandro Adolfo, Bicente, Paulo Roche, Luis Preguete, Emilio, Natividad-Changó Lari, Miguel Lomo de Villa, Trinidad-Omi Sainde, Quintín.”</p><p>One more example of how knowledge handed down through different generations was transmitted by writing it down, is a libreta written in an old accounting mercantile book, where you can read on the first page: “The inheritors of the ‘Lucu-/mi’ cult Our Lady of Regla/ reorganized on March 5/, 1927/ General book for incomes and expenses of the society.” In the libreta there are different kinds of handwriting and ink, so we can come to the conclusion that it was written by different people at different times.</p><p>Several pages have been ripped from the libreta, but in my opinion, starting on page 14 we have the oddun or letters that guide predictions made through the diloggún or the shells, and we find the following letras: “Ocanazorde,” “Ellioco,” “Orgunda,” “Elliolosun,” “Oche,” “Obara,” “Ordi,” “Ellionle,” “Osa,” “Ofún.” There is another note in relation to the first oddun, “Ocanazorde,” followed by “Ojuani,” “Ellilachebora,” all followed by what is titled “Relations and Fragments,” which are really the complements of the “Ordi”—oddun--. The oddun are then completed by what seems to be a later handwriting, and they are even written down—sometimes with pencil--in the first pages remaining in the libreta. For example, the oddun on page 9, “Osa,” says: “Osa sue iguarighó etemipó nicú. Oguo eguoriguo bati elella Olonbo nilé.” But if we take the same oddun in another libreta we will find that it says: “Osa osaguó iguoriquó aferikú oguó loddo.”</p><p>In this libreta that we are now describing, under the letter “Osa” it says: habla Ollá (Ollá is speaking). In other libretas this letter is assigned to Ollá and Aggayú, or to Ollá, Agallú, Obatalá, Ogún, Ochún, and Oba. Circumstances combining in this case are thus described: “Llansa maferefún says you are the daughter of Ollá or that he helps you a lot so you or someone from your family has to become santo, you have to have a mass said for someone who has died in your family, because this dead person is going around, Osanicó Jecua Jey Ilansa, if she is sick she’s got the dead person all over her so you have to do that and Ogún will go away and leave her alone, you dream with the dead or with food you can’t wear any colors nor put any on the bed you sleep in, if you are beautiful be careful with treason, you are under many curses, you have a very big problem, be careful with fire or with bad air, since you have death in your nose, if someone gives you something to keep for them respect them because that person might bring you something and say it is something else, the person who brings it may have stolen it and then accuse you, you have the stone magnet, you have to look carefully at home to see if there are some knives or plaid cloth since you have to use them to make some prayers.” To avoid all these prophecies the person must give all these offerings: “Ervo—or ebbó--, 1 cock, fresh fish, 9 coconuts, 9 yards of blue cloth, 9 needles, 9 cotton buds, 1 goat, 9 bags of red soil from different places, 9 wood splinters, 9 ecó, 9 candles, and $9.40.”</p><p>After a brief explanation of how to register facts through shells, the libreta has a long list of words under the title “Words and Meanings,” with new words added later on. Then comes a section called “Greetings to the Saints,” and some recipes for trabajos (special actions) like “How to Prepare Bad Powders for the Revolution or to Destroy”: “You take a small mouse, you toast a bit of peony and a bit of Chinese and Guinea pepper, and you take some untoasted Guinea pepper. You grind all these ingredients when they are dry.”</p><p>The last pages of the libreta describe different relaciones (relations) or historias (stories) about incidents in the lives of the orichas, and they are supposed to advise the person registered and whose life coincides with some of these narrations. </p><p>From a libreta de Ifá comes this historia: “Once Orula went looking for a land where he could find something different from the other things here on earth. After walking for a long time Orula came to the land of the Monkey, and he met a monkey. Orula asked him --What’s your name?--, --Monkey, the other one answered.—And your brother?— Monkey-- So Orula thought to himself: Ah, I don’t like this very much, and he went on walking until he came to the land of the Elephant. He met an elephant and he asked him his name, so this one answered –Elephant—And your father?—Elephant—And your mother? –Elephant—I don’t like it here either. Orula kept on walking and he came to the land of the Dogs. There too they all had the same name and he didn’t stay either, he went on his journey. He went through other lands until he came to the land of the Cocks. When he arrived he found a chicken. Orula asked his name and that one answered his name was Chicken, that his father was called Cock, that his mother was called Hen, his sister Breeding Hen, and his little brother Breeding Chicken. Orula really liked this and he asked Chicken to take him home with him. When they got there Orula greeted mother Hen in due respect. She answered and asked who he was. –I am Orula, he answered. –Ok, answered mother Hen, but you can’t stay here because my husband Cock isn’t here.</p><p>“When Orula went back on the road he met the Cock, who was going home. When the Cock saw Orula he greeting him nicely:</p><p>Oh, Orula, aboru aboyá abichiché! “The Cock forced Orula to go home with him. When the Hen saw Orula once again she got very mad and told her husband the Cock that if he allowed Orula to stay she would leave, and that’s what she did. </p><p>“After a few days the Hen was throwing some powder at her husband the Cock so he would throw Orula out of the house. But Orula’s power prevented the powder from working, and nothing happened to the Cock.</p><p>“In view of the friendship the Cock showed him, Orula told him he would always be his friend and that he would never eat a cock, or a chicken, or a breeding hen or a breeding chicken, because he felt sorry for them, but that he would eat hen. That’s why Orula does eat hen.”</p><p>Another story from the libretas says: “The tiger went to see the goat to see if he could sleep over at his house. The goat let him sleep by the door. The following day the tiger went to sleep in the living room. And finally he wanted to take the whole house over and looked at the goat with a wicked expression. The goat saw what was going on and began to distrust the tiger, and thinking that perhaps the tiger wanted to hurt him he went to see Orula, who told him to make himself an apron with two pockets: he was to put corn in one and stones in the other and he was supposed to always wear that apron. One day the tiger invited the coat for a walk: --Come my friend, let’s go out--” The goat accepted and they went out together. On the way the goat ate some of the corn he had in his pocket, so the tiger asked what he was eating and the goat answered that he was eating stones, showing him those he had in the other pocket. When he heard this, the tiger thought to himself: --If this guy eats stones he could easily eat me.-- So the tiger left and never came back, and the goat escaped from being eaten by him.” </p><p>Besides these libretas de santería, other groups of African origin have written their own, though not as extensive as the santeros’. These are called libretas of the abakuá, of the paleros, of the old tumberos from the tumba francesa in Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo. Though this practice of writing information down in libretas has become more extended, the paleros’ have limited circulation, they are carefully hidden because they have more influence on the magic formulas for the different trabajos than on the merely ritual aspects or narration of events. The abakuá libretas, on the other hand, are practically limited to the parla (words), not in vocabulary form but rather as complete paragraphs with a general transcription into Spanish. Since these paragraphs correspond to very concrete phases of their ritual and some specific words symbolizing those instants, the abakuá libretas have graphic information on this (anaforuana and gandó).</p><p>Though the circulation of the libretas de santería has been limited to believers only—and not all of them have one--, the fact that the population that does not follow these religious beliefs is ignorant of their contents does not diminish their importance in written oral tradition, and in this specific case they constitute one of Africa’s contributions to the broad panorama of Afro-American literature. Because popular slang has included many words from African languages, our people know and use numerous elements from the African oral traditions written down in the libretas, and these represent specific social situations that have taken place throughout the historic development of our people, and they circulate according to the social relations existing in some sectors of our population. So we can say the libretas preserve elements from oral tradition, they are its instruments, and in American literature, they contribute to popular culture of African origin.</p><p>Published in Islas magazine, of the Universidad Central de Las Villas, Santa Clara (Cuba), No. 39-40, May/December 1971.</p><p>RESUME</p><p>In Cuba, African oral expression is preserved through prayers, prophetic formulas, incantations, passages from the life of deities, magical explanations for facts taking place in nature, and formulas for ritual practices. This paper touches mainly on ancient oral traditions of African Yoruba ethnic groups, which in Cuba are known as lucumí. Together with these oral transmissions they have also preserved the instrument to write them down--it does not substitute original orality, but it is used to help people remember when they read what are known as libretas de santería, where they write what a religious practitioner must know, as well as their own personal experiences during their participation in cults.</p><p>We give several examples taken from these libretas, about their specific spelling, and we also analyze the role they play in social relations and as depositories of African oral traditions.</p><p>ARGELIERS LEON, Havana, 1918. He studied music in the old Conservatorio Municipal and graduated with a Ph.D. in Pedagogy from the Universidad de La Habana. He later held a professorship in both centers, and has been teaching for more than forty years. He is Doctor in Artistic Sciences and has been given the title of Professor Emeritus at the Higher Institute for the Arts. He followed some courses at the University of Chile and studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He is now director of the Casa de las Américas’ Music Department in Havana. He has participated in scientific events, given courses and conferences in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Africa, and in Europe. He has published numerous articles, brochures, and books on musical pedagogy, musicology, and ethnology. </p>