Oracy: The Genesis of African American Literature
In every culture and society, oracy precedes literacy. Thus, it should not be strange that African American literature traces its roots to oracy and oral forms of literature which are still traceable in the literature today.
Also of importance is the fact that in the era of slavery, slave owners did not permit their slaves access to books and writing materials (a measure to ensure that they stayed enslaved without the liberation that education/books will give them). This means that oracy and oral literature became the primary and persisting literature among African Americans. On the plantations, the slaves had various work songs to keep them going while they worked. These work songs mostly utilized the call-and-response pattern where the song leader called out and the workers responded. Stories also were shared among the slaves, and of course, humans are always in the business of telling stories and retelling their experiences to others in order to preserve memories or generate a body/library of shared experiences. These oral literatures – songs and stories – preserved the experiences and culture of the African American till they could put them down in writing. Even with the acquisition of literacy, the orality which has been engrained in the literature still persists.
J. Nandwa and A. Bukenya define oral literature as: “Those utterances whether spoken, recited or sung, whose composition and performance exhibit to an appreciable degree the artistic characteristics of accurate observation, vivid imagination and ingenious expression” (1983:1). Taban Lo Liyong describes it as: “The cultural information and values transmitted mainly by the spoken word and received by the ear and responded to by the whole organism in societies where writing was not yet the order of the day” (1975:vi). He gives their forms as: “folk tales, legends, myths, beliefs, songs, poems, proverbs, tongue twisters, puns, travelers’ tales, council discussions, traditions, ceremonial activities, and all other ways of imparting group knowledge to the young and new members” (1975:vi).
These definitions of oral literature seem not to take non-verbal attributes of oral literature like arts, costumes, craft, etc., into consideration. These also make up oral literature. Again, Lo Liyong’s inclusion of “council discussions” and “all other ways of imparting group knowledge to the young and new members” as parts of oral literature remains questionable. If these lack artistry and creativity, there is no basis for their being regarded as literature, but they are accommodated under oral traditions.
Worthy of note, and of equal importance as oral literature, is the African American English called the Black Folks’ English or Black English. This is the variation of English spoken amongst the blacks which evolved as a unifying second language to African slaves with different mother tongues from different parts of Africa. These slaves had to communicate with their owners and among themselves; hence the need for a new language which, as a result of their lack of formal education, was not standard American English.
The uniqueness of this variation is seen in the slangy expressions that enrich it, the racy speech, and the elliptical nature of the words. Magdaléna Hájková (2005) says this in her study on speech event patterns in Black English (African American English/AAE):
Call and response represents the basic model of interaction between many African Americans and therefore can be heard in streets as well as in churches. Almost all speech events in AAE follow the pattern. The exchanges may lead to a great amusement on one hand, on the other they can bring down a sensitive person who has no idea about their rules. Most visible in the dozens but characteristics of all mentioned types, the interaction between speaker and listener and the listener’s feedback are very important.
List Of The Most Frequent Speech Events
Here is a list of the most frequent speech events with a short explanation.
Playing the dozens
1. Playing the dozens can be simply described as a mean game. It is a set of exchanges where the speakers are trying to bear down each other by criticizing him but mostly his family. The statements are exaggerated which implies that they cannot be true and should not therefore hurt the person to whom they are delivered. Nevertheless, playing the dozens with somebody outside a group of ‘buddies’ can come to blows. Sometimes signifying is supposed to be a ‘lighter’ version of playing the dozens, because it presupposes the speakers themselves to be the only aim of verbal attacks, family and friends are excluded.
Rapping
2. Rapping is described as a stylized speech; examples are easy to find in popular songs, in particular in the ‘branches’ of music like rap, hip-hop and r&b.
Loud-talking
3. Loud-talking can be immensely rude if a partner does not know its rules. It is the situation, when someone says a line that was allotted to somebody else loud enough to be heard by people outside the original conversation.
Toasts
4. Toasts are performed when someone wants to render homage to somebody, they are usually narrated in the first person singular, and the lines are prepared beforehand and include a hero and his brave achievements. (11)
All these oral forms find their way into African American literature with the effect that reading this literature either reminds one of the pre-literate era or gives one the feeling of being caught in the middle of an oral exchange.
The Influence of Oral Traditions on African American Literature
If African American literature grew from oral tradition, it cannot be expected to have outgrown it to the point that oral tradition contributes nothing to the literature. From the discussion in 3.1, it is obvious that African American writers make concerted efforts to imbue their writings with oral effects. These writers are fully aware of the differences between spoken and written forms but insist on interjecting the written with the spoken form. At the heart of this practice are the preservation of culture and history, and identity construction.
By forcing the world to read the oral forms and orality embedded in African American literature, the writers are ensuring that their history is not wiped out, that their speech patterns are preserved, that what life as an African American means is retained in the experiences documented and that the African American has become a race unique and different from the American.
The orality present in African American literature distinguishes it from American literature and, in fact, all other world literatures. Many critics are of the opinion that African traditions are present in African American literature, having been transported into it through oracy. This has some weight, bearing in mind that the slaves were from different parts of Africa.
However, it has to be said that these traditions over time evolved to be something which can be identified as a separate entity. Also, going by the efforts made during the slave trade to ensure that slaves from the same location do not end up in the same household, it is difficult for a particular African tradition to have developed in a place. Instead, what happened is that different individuals with different backgrounds came together, rubbed off their differences on one another, and formed something entirely new – the African American culture.
In essence, what one sees are different shades of Africa transformed and adjusted to fit into a new environment. However, critics like Ken Warren believe that claims of the presence of African traditions in African American literature should be viewed as “symptoms of the breakdown of a former coherence” (8). This is because he sees African American literature as that which has been given birth by the “assumptions and practices of the segregation era” (8). One thing is clear: if Warren is right, he fails to recognize that the tool in African American literature for fighting segregation is the promotion and eulogizing of those qualities that made the African American different from the whites which are found in the traditions and practices that are not American (and are therefore African).
CONCLUSION
African American literature, to a great extent, has been enriched by oral traditions and oracy. Therefore, an understanding of what obtains in the people’s oral traditions goes a long way in the appreciation of the literature. A lot of the flavor and uniqueness attributed to African American literature is as a result of the oral presence it embraces.
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