Prof.
Olabiyi Babalola J.Gai,
Benin
ambassador at the UNESCO.
An unresolved tragedy is inherent in the task of translation. The
translator knows that translation is at once impossible and necessary. That
tragedy attains heroic proportions with anthropologists insofar as they are
translators of entire cultures. Thus, anthropologists, at least the most honest
and perceptive among them, are tragic heroes. This proposition became
crystallized in my mind as an aphorism as I read the last sentence of Melville
and Frances Herskovits's lengthy and challenging introduction to their Dahomean
Narrative: “As spoken forms, the stories should preferably be read aloud.”
It is not by chance that this sentence concludes 122 pages of substantial
analytical discourse in cultural anthropology. I see it as an impassioned call
upon readers to displace themselves, as an invitation to leave their own world
and inhabit the Fon cultural world. We are invited to read aloud, in English,
Fon texts of various genres that were supposed to have been performed orally,
then translated into French by Dahomean interpreters, and finally translated
into English by the anthropologist authors. Only a hero indeed could cross so
many borders.
But we do know that no such crossing is possible within the
epistemologies of anthropology as practiced then and, by large, now. The project
of anthropologists as cultural translators is essentially intransitive, even as
their intention is transitive. How could a discipline with a colonial pedigree
be transitive? Only naive scientism could expect anthropology to be transitive,
that is, to actually promote an encounter on equal terms with an “object of
study”--with the colonials--thereby renouncing the colonialist inspiration and
agenda. As we move into the third millennium and hope to lay at last the
foundations of a global human family, the foremost task confronting anthropology
is, it seems to me, to courageously recognize and endorse its colonial pedigree
in order to better exorcize it. In other words, it is by recognizing its
intrinsic limitations as originally a colonial--therefore, ultimately endogamous--discourse,
that anthropology, as translation of cultures, will create the optimal
conditions for a new, second breath, indeed global breath anthropology, with the
potential for effecting gradual and increasing transitivity and reciprocity
between cultures. I am borrowing the concept of “second breath anthropology”
from Michael Panoff's seminal work, Ethnologie: le second souffle, in which he
suggested a second breath agenda for anthropology, defining it as “a simple
way of enlightening our action hic et nunc with a view to changing the world.”
(Panoff 1977 : page) Melville Herskovits no doubt would have agreed with this
proposition, for 1959, one year after the publication of Dahomean Narrative, he
delivered the Lugard Memorial Lecture in London, with the significant title
“Anthropology and Africa: A Wider Perspective.” The works of Frances and
Melville Herskovits are an anticipation of the second breath anthropology
advocated above: in many respects, they constitute the highest degree of
transitivity anthropological discourse could reach. These coexisting and
contrary tendencies permeate the work and frame my discussions here.
The
Dahomean Narrative and its contradictions.
The distinctive feature of Dahomean Narrative, one that sets it apart
among contemporary works, is that it is the issue of two disciplines and two
sensibilities. It certainly would be simplistic to argue that Dahomean Narrative
is the product of Melville the anthropologist and Frances the literata. Both
Herskovitses possessed to various degrees the analytical tools of the
anthropologist and the sensibility of the literary critic, with the attendant
potential for harmony and tension. The ambition of anthropology in those days
was totalizing. In the tradition of early European travelers, anthropologists
sought to tell everything about a specific culture. In an effort, as it were, to
make up for coming late in an old world, they endeavored to encapsulate the
totality of a given culture in a “big book” for all to know and admire, as
Melville Herskovits put it in his celebrated 1959 Lugard Lecture. On the other
hand, the literatus, always by definition a hedonist, sought simultaneously to
exhibit exemplars of the gems encountered in Fon oral literature. Victims of the
reflectionist paradigm of literature, contemporary critics of Dahomean Narrative
paid little attention to the hedonist's impulse therein and consequently missed
an essential dimension of the work, even as they pointed to some of its
methodological flaws.2 In its encoding as a project, as well as in its decoding
by its contemporaries, the balance has not always been kept between anthropology
and oral literature, between “Dahomeanness” and narrative, with the first
terms of these pairs being privileged over the second. The fact is that dual
impulses traverse Dahomean Narrative, resulting in what could be likened to an
“unfinished symphony,” and therein lies its appeal to a variety of
constituencies and its pregnant modernity.
Because anthropology is a discourse on the colonial subject posited as
“the other” par excellence of the colonizer, a legitimate question of an
anthropological work and a measure of its success is whether it presents a fair
image of the ethnic group it set out to present to the Western gaze. Its firm
metaphoric pedigree, or its telos as a “donner à voir,” is an essential
criterion of its success. Forty years after its publication, it is pointless to
ask the question of the metaphoric correctness of Dahomean Narrative. Whether it
is an adequate microcosmic representation of the Fon world and world view is no
longer the pertinent issue. Works of this kind, by virtue of their very
approximate nature, call for a metonymic engagement. To an extent they could not
have envisaged, the Herskovitses were right to quote the Fon proverb “The path
is open.” Indeed. A better translation of the proverb, more faithful to the
Fon original, would have “paths” in the plural.
Dahomean Narrative opens paths that intersect at various levels and
realms, and bifurcate from one another, espousing Fon configurations inspired by
Legba, the Fon vodun (deity), Lord of the Roads and universal linguist and
hermeneut. This oeuvre should have been appealing to students of mythology,
folklore, religion, history, and oral literature. It is to be lamented that such
paths have, paradoxically, not been taken. Written in English, the international/imperial
language par excellence, Dahomean Narrative places Fon oral literature, and Fon
culture in general, in the international orbit, even as very few Fon
intellectuals have read it. In the absence of an imaginative literature in
English using the elements of the rich Fon cultural resource base, Dahomean
Narrative was, and arguably still is, the work that most projects Fon culture in
the international literary world. Its contradictory nature remains unexamined,
bur paradoxically its is these tensions that prevent it from seeming completely
date and offer an interesting challenge for the African literary scholar fo the
present.
First, the fundamental problems of method have to be faced.
Contemporary critics have identified some methodological flaws in
Dahomean Narrative. In his rather sympathetic review, W. R. G. Horton states:
“Dahomean Narrative is likely to attract considerable criticism from field
workers because of the conditions under which these stories were obtained and
recorded,” adding that, despite Melville and Frances Herskovits's brilliant
treatment of the subject matter of the stories, their methodology might have led
them to an “inevitable mauling of the style and idiom of the more original
versions” (311). His criticism is echoed in McCall's more caustic assessment:
“The weakest part is that entitled 'Notes on Methodology,' and we are told
nothing of whatever precautions may have been used to prevent that traducing of
meaning which proverbially accompanies translation: traduttore traditore (Mc
Call : 256).”
In fact, the Herskovitses' fieldwork methods in Dahomean Narrative
contrast sharply not only with contemporary practices in the domain, but also,
and perhaps significantly, with their own fieldwork tradition, particularly in
the New World. The Herskovitses are, of course, aware of the virtues of live
performance recording in anthropological fieldwork. Not only did they attend
storytelling sessions during their stay in Dahomey, but some of their
observations and intuitions in Dahomean Narrative anticipate theoretical
formulations on performance and improvization in the 1970s and 1980s. Their
methodological shortcomings in collecting and translating Dahomean Narrative are
therefore the more inexplicable. Their methodology is more akin to a
demonstration, in the parlance of oral literature criticism, i.e., a situation
at the antipodes of real live performance, whereby artists are summoned by the
anthropologist to show off in an artificial context. Perhaps we should allow the
practitioners of oral literature, for once, to opine on their Western critics.
For example, the quasi-demonstration situation in which Frances and Melville
Herskovits have recorded and translated Fon stories would have been
characterized by Brazilian popular critique of Western approaches to popular
oral performance as “para ingläs ver” (i.e., for the gaze of the English,
the English being the paradigm of the “other” in Brazilian popular
imagination of the nineteenth century, before the American took over this role).
Similarly, no doubt, the Herskovitses' informants were conscious that they were
telling “Yovo hwenuxo”, i.e., “stories for white man.”
“Our method of recording” say the Herskovitses relate: “to take the
directly on the typewriter as our interpreters translated the narrator's flow of
the story, given in Fon, the language of Dahomey. Except for native terms, or
some locutions phrased in Negro-French, which was set down as given in order not
to interrupt the flow of translation, we wrote in English.” This trinodal
process is comprised of the narrator speaking in Fon, the interpreter speaking
in a local variety of French, and the two anthropologist-literati, typing in
English. Transcription in the original language of the narrative, a crucial
though by no means unproblematic stage of African oral literature scholarship,
is skipped altogether in this process. Note also that the authors use the term
“interpreter,” not “translator,” when referring to French-speaking
Dahomeans. They therefore gave English translations of French interpretations of
narratives told in Fon. Under normal literary circumstances, “poetry is what
is lost in translation,” as the adage goes. In the case described here, the
pertinent question is the following: With so many filters and noises in the
process, what is the literary status of the end product? What is the nature of
the final text in English? How “Dahomean”--and more important--how
“literary” is the output product, judged against both local and universal
standards? Given the standards of folklore collection this omission of a
directly-recorded stage is mysterious, or perhaps bespeaks a lapse.
Besides
these legitimate and significant questions of a literary nature (literaturnost,
“literariness”), there are more fundamental issues pertaining to literary
competence, in the Chomskian sense of the term “competence”. Our authors
are, by their own confession, “students . . . of the spoken arts of
nonliterate peoples” (Herskovits 3). The key word here is “art.” By
implication, they are interested not in oral documents, but in oral monuments,
i.e., aesthetically marked discourses by nonliterate people, to use Zumthor's
pertinent distinction (39). It follows that not every “priest” or “cult
member” would qualify as a storyteller, for oral art is produced by oral
artists. It is therefore astonishing, if not ironic, to read the following from
the Herskovitses: “Another methodological point may be mentioned. In gathering
the narratives, we made no attempts to seek out men of reputation as
storytellers” (8; emphasis added). It is equally ironic that the female voice
is entirely silenced, in a country that boasts thousands of heroic poems
composed by the celebrated Dahomean Amazons about their wars and other exploits
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If the “priests of cult or cult
members of rank in the hierarchy of Dahomean worship,” the “heads of
families,” and “political chiefs” chosen by the Herskovitses on no
explicit literary criteria were not coincidentally endowed with poetic
competence based on Fon aesthetic standards, we would be faced with a massive
problem of literariness, as their stories would not pass the Fon test of
“spoken art.” The “Dahomeanness” of the translation of such discourses,
even in literary English, would thus become problematic. Most people can tell
stories, so one would no know where these particulars stores stood on the range
of literary expertise.
Equally questionable is the status of those the Herskovitses called
“Dahomean interpreters.” What was their literary pedigree in Fon and French?
Since they were supposed to render putatively aesthetic Fon texts in French, one
can legitimately ask the question of their familiarity with the French literary
register, canons, and styles. When, for example, in the divination stories
translated by them, we encounter such words as “writing,” “destiny,” “prophet,”
“line,” or “secretaries,” we can legitimately ask the question: Who is
speaking? Is it the Fon source of the text, or the Fon “interpreter,” or
could it be the anthropologist-translator? If one of the last two, how much of
the voice of the traduttore and how much of the traditore is audible in these
loaded words?
These are no idle interrogations, nor are they meant to “demolish” in
a facile manner a four-decades-old pioneering oeuvre. Beyond the Herskovitses,
the issues raised here challenge our current practices and critical imagination
as students of African oral literature at the end of the second millennium.
Regrettably,
few studies of African oral literature address issues of literariness and poetic
competence within individual African cultures. The questions raised above
suggest that, at least from the perspective of a student of African oral
literature, the issues transcend the realm of methodology. The issues are,
indeed, epistemological in nature. Insofar as the anthropologist's telos is most
often the description and analysis of the cultures of colonized peoples, critics
could simply fault the Herskovitses for not following well-established rules for
collecting and treating the materials needed for the attainment of the goals of
the discipline. But from the perspective of a cross-cultural analysis, which was
emphatically avowed in the subtitle of Dahomean Narrative (A Cross-Cultural
Analysis) and from the standpoint of the African student of African oral
literature, the queries are situated “upstream” of the issues of method, as
they seek to investigate the nature of the entity called “African oral
literature” as an intellectual category, as well as the conditions under which
that knowledge is produced.
Accepted African oral literature scholarship, under normal circumstances,
harbors a built-in mechanism to silence the African voice. By concomitantly
reducing African oral performance to writing, and their performers to the role
of “informant,” the collectors/editors, with the best of intentions, promote
themselves to the status of the heroic midwife of an exercise in literary
parturition for the international, mostly non-African, gaze. With the
methodology employed by the Herskovitses to produce Dahomean Narrative, the
anthropologists positioned themselves simultaneously as midwife and mother, for
the voice of the Fon is hardly heard here. The newborn literary baby cried
through his midwife-mother's typewriter. Clearly we are in the presence of an
unintentional, innocently violent, hence tragic, gesture of prise de parole, a
confiscation of the Fon voice. The tragedy is further reflected in the
unsurprisingly laconic section in which a discussion of style and structure is
attempted (50-54). In the absence of the original Fon text in transcription on
which they could have applied their acknowledged analytical acumen, the authors
uncharacteristically resorted to an escapist stratagem by artificially
incorporating examples into their essays that were not even of Fon, but rather
of Ewe onomatopoeic words culled from Diedrich Westermann's A Study of the Ewe
Language (Herskovits 51), or by invoking the “stylistic importance of . . .
the absence of the passive voice,” a strategy reminiscent of nineteenth-century
fin de siècle studies of African languages where absence of grammatical
features of European languages was lamented because they were thought to be
universals and sine qua non markers of civilization.
Despite these major lapses, Dahomean Narrative was “an important book”
and should be regarded, even today, as “a major contribution” (Horton 311).
It might be the case that what accounts for the most innovative insights in
Melville and Frances Herskovits's analysis of the Dahomean texts is from their
familiarity with Dahomean culture in nonrecorded, noncommissioned performance
situations. The authors themselves suggested this interpretation, in a passage
unnoticed, perhaps wrongly deemed unimportant by their critics: “Familiarity
with the total setting in which the tale is told was gained by attendance at
storytelling sessions held in the compounds at night. Here could be noted the
dynamics of voice change, the play of expression on the fact of the story-teller,
the use of gestures to vivify narration, the songs, the dance steps, in brief,
all elements that give the tale stylistic unity and amplitude.” (Herskovits :
9-10) Those crucial elements of African oral performance were identified by the
Herskovitses, even though they failes to give them the critical attention they
demand.
An exogenous classification of oral literature of a given culture
invariably presents a dilemma: How to classify entities and literary forms where
features are unknown? In my own
view, a typology of genres should ideally be a closing, not an opening,
operation, because a genre typology has little value as long as the features of
the various types have not been thoroughly identified, studied, and compared.
But anthropologists need a genre classification of the oral literatures of the
peoples they study, however crude and tentative it might be, at the initial
stage of their work. They often view their gesture as an inaugural venture, even
as they might occasionally use a few local terms, as was the case with the
Herskovitses. In the domain, standard practice by African and non-African
students of African oral literatures is to posit a tabula rasa.
With this kind of mindset, the analysts tends to impose a foreign grid,
the one with which they are more familiar, upon the African data, to work out a
typology. The Herskovitses were sufficiently familiar with Dahomean traditions
at home and in the diaspora, and their experience of other human cultures was
sufficiently diverse and deep. They were, therefore, sufficiently attentive to
local nomenclature in classifying Dahomean literature into types. Their binary
classification of Dahomean narratives into broad classes, namely, hwenoho (sic)
and heho, with subcategories distinguished within each class, was delicate when
compared with contemporary treatments of African oral literature.
There are two major problems in African oral literature classification of
which any analyst should be aware. The first has to do with the tension between
the respective natures of classification, as an exercise and as oral literature.
The latter, as a living tradition, is in permanent transformation, with features
migrating from one genre to another, thereby reshaping types. Like any oral
literature, African oral literature is protean. On the other hand, the urge to
classify is predicated on an assumption of genre immobilism and boundedness, at
least at the time of analysis. The implication of this tension is that analysts
should be aware that classifications are by necessity provisional. This is not
to say, of course, that they cannot or should not be ranked on a scale of
accuracy or delicacy. This simply and importantly means that the best
classification is perhaps the one that acknowledges the limitations imposed on
it by the very nature of the living tradition being classified.
The second problem has to do with further constraints imposed on the
literary accuracy of a classification by the language and metalanguage of the
analyst and the tradition(s) in which he inscribes his exercise. No human
language is an innocent instrument of investigation, especially when used to
apprehend phenomena beyond the boundaries of its birthplace. In this regard, the
use of European languages to analyze African oral literatures could produce
positive and negative results. It could challenge African notions and concepts
and force Africans to revisit and question them. It could also effect a transfer
of unnecessary and impertinent categories into the analyst's discourse, thereby
obscuring the issues and phenomena being investigated. When these two hurdles
have been removed, the crucial difficulty the student of African oral literature
now confronts is the following: how to articulate the conceptual tools of
European literary criticism, derived from the European experience in written
literature, and their African oral counterparts insofar as the investigator
thinks that such exist at all?
Realizing the complexity of the task, it would be prudent if such reputed
universals as “myth,” “poetry,” “fable,” and the like should not be
used in analyzing African oral literature without being problematized in the
sense of testing their relevance in specific African cultures. The difficulty
with the Herskovitses' classification in Dahomean Narrative is that while it
uses indigenous terminologies to distinguish broad categories, it retreats into
Aristotelian concepts for subcategorization, and does so gratuitously. Nowhere
did they take the precautionary step to establish the relevance and
acceptability of their categories in Fon culture. A plausible explanation for
this is that the Herskovitses did not believe the Fon could have anything to
offer but crude, binary classification needing further “refinement.” Hence
their decision to “go beyond the dual division of narrative which they [i.e.,
the Fon] have formulated.” In their view:
[I]t
is the essence of scholarly investigation that while one holds as closely as
possible to the lines drawn by the data, one also uses these as a frame within
which more refined levels of classification are to be reached. In the case of
the narratives, it is possible, in these terms, while accepting the categories
of the Dahomeans, to distinguish within each category types of stories that,
from the point of view of the materials, of which they treat and the point they
make, constitute valid classes. (17; emphasis added)
The
problem with this approach is that it is circular and literally literary--literally
literary in the sense that it privileges the litera, the text as translated by
the anthropologists in their own language. It is circular because the
anthropologists “constituted” and “validated” subcategories precisely on
the basis of the text they themselves produced, using criteria, we suspect, that
could only be drawn from their own culture, not from the Dahomean culture. The
Herskovitses were perspicacious in dwelling at length on Fon oral tradition as a
“living tradition,” but evidently the possibility of the existence of a
second-order discourse, a Fon living tradition of literary criticism, was beyond
their epistemic horizon.
The possible existence of indigenous African traditions of oral African
literary criticism, is still today beyond the epistemic horizon of the vast
majority of students of African oral literature. The fact, however, is that such
indigenous African traditions of literary criticism do exist. Absence of
evidence in the area is no evidence of absence, as the saying goes. It reflects
rather the poverty of our theoretical and methodological tools in addition to
exposing our intellectual laziness and exclusive dependence on colonized,
extroverted discourses and paradigms.
The
idea of an oral literary criticism tabula rasa in Africa is a colonial invention.
It is a fallacy that is perpetuated thanks to the cloning of specialists of
African oral literatures who are educated in institutions where scholars rely
exclusively on non-African paradigms of literary criticism. An urgent task for
students of African literatures is the investigation of indigenous criticisms of
African oral literatures, ideally in African languages, in order to avoid
unnecessary distortions, with a view to drawing inspiration from them for the
construction of new, more powerful explanatory models of literary criticism.
This is certainly a more promising direction than the current lazy
overdependence on paradigms concocted by folklorists, medievalists, or Homer
specialists. What is urgently needed is theoretical audacity, for many of our
current theoretical presuppositions rest on doxa, not on episteme.
In the special case of Dahomey, and on the issue of literary typology,
the Fon do have two orders, or levels, of classification. The first and
elementary level could be characterized as crude and is meant for ordinary,
uninitiated people. The second level is extremely sophisticated and occurs among
the initiated, the literati. It is also offered by Fon literati and/or oral
poets when pressed for elucidations in postperformance situations. Even the
crude level typology comprises three, not two, subcategories as postulated by
the Herskovitses. The three subcategories, subsumed under hwenuxo, are as
follows:
-xexo:
literally, “bird stories,” bird here being a metaphor for animal;
-yexo:
literally, “ghost stories,” i.e., something akin to fairy tales; and
-tan:
historical narratives; the word tan is a loanword from the Yoruba ítan (“history”).
At the second level of classification, specialists usually provide a
barrage of concepts and terms. Using ethnolinguistic criteria derived from the
Fon discursive practice of oral literature criticism, Georges Guedou, a Fon
linguist, identified no less than twenty narrative genres divided into two broad
classes he christened “didactic narratives” and “provocative narratives.”
Although the two broad classes are Guedou's invention, they were arrived at by
using Fon criteria, and in collaboration with Fon specialists. The genres and
their names are used in the metalanguage of Fon critics/poets, and their
grouping under subclasses, with Fon terms translated into French, are the
products of a lengthy interview with oral poets, in which the latter articulated
their views, contrasting genres and subcategories (Guedou 831-92).
The main function of the didactic narratives is to augment knowledge and
to help humans become what the Fon designate as “mexo,” that is, wise (sage).
The genres that constitute this broad class are invariably marked as “xo”
(“logos”) discourse. The essential function of the provocative narratives is
to serve the purpose designed by their author. They are therefore subject-oriented
and are likened, in Fon discourse, to “seeds of discourse” that are thrown
or planted (“do” in Fon) and must generate another discursive reaction from
their addressees. They are invariably marked by the word “gbe” (“voice”).
The Russian Formalists' concept of “dominant” could be evoked to
emphasize that each broad class shares features of the other class, while
foregrounding its particular social function. Social function is in fact an
important criterion for genre determination. The Herskovitses subcategorization
based on the content of the stories, in addition to allowing for overlapping
that is so massive as to be meaningless (almost half of each category could
qualify as a “why story,” for example), would be counterintuitive to Fon
literati. It is equally significant to add that the Fon insistently inscribed
their classification of narratives within a broader regime of social and
discursive practices that include weaving, painting, and dancing.
Yesi, a Fon sage, oral poet, and critic, suggested the following
classification of Fon narratives, which are reproduced here in their entirety
for two reasons. First, few--even among specialists of African oral literature--believe
that a sophisticated classification could exist in indigenous literary discourse.
Second, this is an opportunity to make available to specialists and
nonspecialists alike precious information that has hitherto remained and would
have otherwise remained hidden. Approximate equivalents in Western tradition,
when they are determined to exist, are offered within brackets:
1.
hwenuxo4 : literally, “time narrative” (involving people)
2.
xexo: literally, “bird narrative” (folktale)
3.
yexo: literally, “ghost narrative” (fairytale)
4.
tanxo: literally, “historical narrative”
5.
loxo: literally, “time-resisting narrative” (proverbs)
6.
nubasoxo: literally, “lost and found narratives” (riddles)
7.
ma xogbe: literally, “divisive narrative”
8.
jele xogbe: literally, “quarrel narrative”
9.
dodo xogbe: literally, “mock narrative” (satire)
10.
de xogbe: literally, “prayer narrative”
11.
nudome xogbe: literally, “curse narrative”
12.
nuxwelexwle xogbe: literally, “vow narrative”
13.
avi xogbe: literally, “cry narrative”
14.
alexuxo xogbe: literally, “lament narrative”
15.
bo xogbe: literally, “medicine narrative” (incantation)
16.
Me mlanmlan xogbe: literally, “peopld folding narrative” (dynastic poetry)
17.
Zun xogbe: literally, “abuse narrative”
18.
Gansise xogbe: literally, “rhythm understanding narrative”
19.Mesisi
xogbe: literally, “politeness narrative”
20.
Amuxoda xogbe: literally, “dew-on-hair narrative” (courtship poems: the
protagonists spend a whole night outdoors exchanging vows through love poems
chanted and sung and, consequently, gather dew on their hair--hence the name)
21.
Gbedome xogbe: literally, “salutation narrative”
To analyze this classification and its use un full detail would be a book-length
project. Suffice it here to indicate that sources exist to undertake such a
project and that it remains one of the still-open paths forward.
A metonymic engagement of Dahomean Narrative demands a reflection on the
fate of this pioneering work on the African continent. Reflecting on the entire
oeuvre of the Herskovitses, Jane I. Guyer and David L. Easterbrook pertinently
remarked:
As
the key themes of scholarship change, and as the communities depicted in the
research begin to take up the preservation, study and creative reworking of
their own recorded traditions, collections take on a completely new value and
valence than they had for their original architects. A verbal image can be
reworked into a song; a filmed sequence inspires choreography; a photograph
carries a clue to a family history; an object testifies to technology; and the
entire work provides grist for the critique through which scholarship examines
and reshapes itself. We want to make these remarkable collections available to
their new constituencies. (2)
Arguably, the Dahomeans form the most significant section of the
“communities depicted” in Melville and Frances Herskovits' research. Of
paramount importance is the reception of their oeuvre, especially Dahomean
Narrative, among the Dahomean intellectual community as a privileged
constituency. By Dahomean intellectual community is meant not only those
intellectuals who trace their ancestry to the ancient kingdom of Dahomey--namely,
the Fon--but also the elite of the French colony of Dahomey as well as
postcolonial Dahomeans, now Beninois. This new definition of “Dahomean
intellectual community” is not an endorsement of French colonialism. It
reflects the fact that the Fon elite, by and large, has been instrumental in the
birth of the new elites of other ethnic groups and has served as a role model in
colonial Dahomey as well as in postcolonial Dahomey and Benin. The Herskovitses,
for whom the concepts of “living tradition” and “dynamic potential of a
group” are constant leitmotifs, would certainly have endorsed our definition
of “Dahomean intellectual community.”
What then has been the impact of Dahomean Narrative on the Dahomean
intelligentsia? It is to be regretted that, pioneering and comprehensive as they
are, none of the Herskovitses' book has been translated into French, the
official language of Dahomey/Benin. Apparently the French colonial establishment
did not encourage the translation of these major works, just as they did not
encourage translation of Captain Burton's Mission to Gelele, with the wealth of
information it contains. Obviously, there is a conspiracy of silence, a
linguistic version of what one might call the “Fachoda syndrome,” at work in
this case. Given the importance of the Fon as a cultural group in France's
colonial possessions, one would normally have expected the translation into
French of a work of the scope and depth of the Herskovitses' on Dahomey. The
extent of the bias can be measured by contrasting this silence to the publicity
mounted around the works of Marcel Griaule and his team on the Dogon. As a
result of this conspiracy of silence, the Dahomean intellectual community has
been kept ignorant of the work of the Herskovitses: perhaps only a few dozen
Dahomean intellectuals have read Dahomean Narrative to this day
A recent book edited by the Beninois philosopher Paulin Hountondji,
entitled Endogenous Knowledge, with contributions by the Beninois intellectual
cream on traditional world views and orality, failed to include Dahomean
Narrative in its bibliography. In the last two decades, some major dissertations
and books have been written on the Dahomean thought system and orality by such
prominent Fon scholars as Adoukonou, Honorat Aguessy, Georges Guedou, and Basil
Kossou. Of those, only Aguessy and Guedou included Dahomean Narrative in their
bibliographies. Guedou's dissertation topic was the status of the spoken word in
Fon cutlure, with a chapter on the classification of Fon literary genres, yet he
did not discuss the Herskovitses' classification--the only one preceding his own,
to our knowledge. Aguessy is the only scholar who really engaged the
Herskovitses. He lamented the paucity of stories involving Legba, his main
interest, in Dahomean Narrative. His work also includes a good discussion of the
Herskovitses' analysis of the Oedipus theme in Fon culture, on which he bases
his own interpretation (4-23). As can be seen, Dahomean Narrative as a critical
work of African oral literature has not yet been seriously engaged by Dahomean/Beninois
intellectuals. More disturbing is that MA courses in African oral literatures
are being offered at the Université Nationale du Bénin without any reference
whatsoever to the works of the Herskovitses. These facts contribute to the
reinforcement of the sense of tragedy described at the beginning of this essay.
The Dahomean intellectual community fares no better in the realm of
creative writing. The “creative re-working of their own recorded traditions”
evoked by Guyer and Easterbrook is virtually nonexistent. The rich mythopoetic
tradition that is so vibrant as to inspire foreign admirers and lure them into
preying upon Dahomean history in their creative writings5 has surprisingly
produced no new Dahomean schools in literature among the local elite. Paul
Hazoumé's celebrated Doguicimi, rooted in the fertile soil of Fon history, myth,
and folklore, has left literary orphans. To be sure, there are a few Dahomean
writers in French. Their literary imagination does not draw inspiration from the
rich tradition the Herskovitses endeavor to record in Dahomean Narrative. While
they unexpectedly make occasional allusions to characters or situations of Fon
folklore,6 the style and narrative techniques of the Fon oral artists are seldom
visible in their writings. Their muse is French and their writings assume the
absence of a Dahomean poetics. They can therefore in no way be described as
heirs to the Fon literary tradition.
Reflecting upon a similar absence of an African poetics in the works of
Afro-Brazilian writers even when they engage an African theme, the Brazilian
poet and critic Antonio Risério coined the suggestive expression “black
out” to describe this unfortunate blindness to a rich tradition. It is
appropriate, in our case, to suggest a Fon poetics black out in the works of
Beninois writers. One can hardly resist a comparison with the situation in
cognate and neighboring Yoruba culture, in which modern literary artists, from
those in the traveling theater tradition to modern writers in both Yoruba and
English, are known to continue imaginatively the tradition of precolonial oral
artists. The fact remains that the Fon intellectual community has so far failed
to operate what Ato Quayson, writing on the Nigerian intellectual community,
aptly termed “strategic transformations” of their indigenous literary
resources. We have no Fon equivalents of Fagunwa, Soyinka, or Tutuola, or a
Beninois counterpart of Ben Okri, in a country so literate as to have held the
title “Latin Quarter of Africa” since colonial times.
No monocausal explanation can account for this situation of a desert in
creative writing in the middle of a luxuriant mythopoetic tradition. Differences
in colonial cultural policies constitute no sufficient excuse for the total
absence of a neo-Dahomean literary tradition.
The
very fact that a vibrant oral literature coexists with a virtual absence of its
criticism and an underdeveloped written literature in the cultural landscape of
modern Dahomey/Benin poses a challenge to literary criticism. Could it be that
the absence of a criticism of Fon oral literature is evidence of its irrelevance?
After all, who needs that kind of exercise, as long as Fon oral literature
asserts its vitality by absorbing new elements in its content and adopts new
technologies for its expression? What are the status and relevance, and who is
the public of a criticism written in French, of Fon oral literature?
If these are legitimate questions, Dahomean Narrative challenges us today,
as critics of oral literature, in a more profound way. Critics must be critiqued
and they must be asked to pass, in their domain of specialization, the test of
literariness (literaturnost) and literary competence to which we want to subject
oral artists and their works. Critics of oral literature, in other words, should
be questioned about their critical competence based on criteria that are
specific to oral literature, for our credentials, it is time to recognize, are
based on unexamined aesthetic universalism. As critics, we reduce oral
literature to writing and thereby restore it to the dignity of literature tout
court. The prize we tacitly demand for this “ennobling gesture” is the
submission of oral literature to the same kind of criticism as written
literature, with the assumption that the difference between the two is one of
degree, not of kind.
But are we right in that assumption? I doubt it. What cannot be doubted
is that a metonymic engagement with Melville and Frances Herskovits's Dahomean
Narrative opens our eyes to the natural limitations of our current approaches
and challenges us to envision a more empathetic criticism of African oral
literature.
Tests and Benchmarks for a Future Literary Criticism of
Oral Arts.
I would like
to ask a few questions in the hope that attempts to answer them will lead to a
programmatic redirection in the field toward the attainment of a more empathetic
theory of oral literature criticism: Aren't we writing obituaries when we reduce
African oral performance into writing and discourse on them? What is the nature
of our criticism? Should not the theory and criticism of oral literature be
answerable to a different, possibly divergent, episteme than those of written
literature? For our discourses on African oral literatures to legitimately claim
scientificity, they should be rigorously subjected to and pass a test of
reversibility. In other words, the central question is: Should our current
disquisitions on African oral literatures be translated into African languages,
how would African oral poets assess them? How would our discourses in European
languages--or indeed in African languages--on their performances be categorized
within their epistemic compass? Would African oral artists and their critics
regard a book of African oral literature criticism as criticism? More
specifically, did Fon informants regard them as critics? Would Fon oral critics
like Yesi establish a parallel between their work and status and Dahomean
Narrative and the Herskovitses, respectively? In a word, are we regarded as
critics by the African oral artists? In brief, are we regarded as critics by the
African oral artists? Under what circumstances in the future, and in what forms,
might written criticism become relevant for oral art? What
metamorphosis should critics and ther discipline undergo, and what new fora need
to be invented, in order for written criticism to begin to impact on composition
and innovation in African oral art. The
very fact that these fundamental questions are never asked by students of
African oral literatures betrays a methodological and epistemological blind spot
and an epistemic lapse comfortably shielded, I suggest, by the discursive and
attitudinal preconceptions and arrogance of empire.
These interrogations brings us to the issue of literary or poetic competence in African oral literatures. The notion of poetic competence first appeared in the writing of literary stylisticians in the middle of the 1960s. It unfortunately did not receive the critical attention it deserves and remained by and large unexplored by literary scholars, perhaps because they view competence in literary matters as a matter of course. This view is untenable, however, because it is based on a lay definition of competence and refuses to take cognizance of advances in the sciences of language. Poetic competence is obviously derived, by analogy, from the concept of competence elaborated by Noam Chomsky in the field of linguistics. Manfred Bierwisch defines poetic competence as “a recognition grammar” and a “differentiating algorithm which determines whether or not a given sentence is poetic” (105). He aptly establishes a link between poetic competence and the task of the literary critic: “The proper task of poetics is the reconstruction of the competence of maximal understanding, in Miller's words,'the cognitive concepts that are the necessary armentarium of a poet and that enable the critic to recognize a poem when he sees one.' “ For Jonathan Culler, another literary critic who engages the notion at some length, literary competence is an “implicit knowledge” (34). Like Bierwisch, he emphasizes that “every critic, whatever his persuasion, encounters the problems of literary competence as soon as he begins to speak or write about literary works, and . . . takes for granted notions of acceptability and common ways of reading” (35). For him, “ the question is not what actual readers happen to do, but what an ideal reader must know implicitly in order to read and interpret works in ways which we consider acceptable, in accordance with the institution of literature” (34). Although these two critics' views of literature rest exclusively on written literatures, perhaps even on European and American literatures, as evidenced in their use of such words as “see,” “write,” “reading” in the preceding quotations, the notion of poetic competence can be appropriated and reconceptualized by students of African oral literatures. Indeed, the notion should be even more appealing to students of oral literatures in general insofar as Noam Chomsky's original concept of competence stems from abilities of an “ideal speaker-hearer.” Literary competence in the context of African oral literatures is best viewed as a Janus-faced concept.
Passive literary or poetic competence is the ability to decode a literary
message, whatever the genre, within a specific African culture. This competence
is not a faculty, unlike linguistic competence. Rather, it is acquired by
training and through interactions in the numerous festivals and cultural
associations that punctuate the life of many Africans in villages and urban
areas. A person who not only understands heroic poems of his lineage, but also
those of other lineages in his cultural area, could be said to possess passive
literary competence. Indeed, this ability constitutes the basis for the
characterization of African oral literatures as “popular.”
Active literary or poetic competence, on the other hand, is not only the
ability to understand oral literary texts when performed, but in addition, the
ability to perform in a specific genre according to the conventional rules of
the genre. It is therefore more restrictive. Not every person who has
experienced a process of learning can boast of positive literary competence in a
given community. Unlike linguistic competence, which is said to be innate,
poetic competence is not only acquired, but it shows infinite gradation within a
community, from the impromptu poet who can only perform in a genre for five to
ten minutes in a particularly emotionally charged poetic atmosphere, to the
professional and not-so-professional poet who “could speak until tomorrow.”
Active poetic competence is therefore variable. It is on the basis of these
elucidations that we can begin to meaningfully envisage the parameters of a
theory of African oral criticism. Likewise, it is on the basis of these
conceptualizations of the foundational notion of poetic competence in African
oral literatures that we can begin to meaningfully engage the idea of a critical
competence, roughly defined as the ability of a person to be a critic of African
oral literatures--by necessity a derivative concept. What cannot be doubted is
that critical activity in African oral literatures is indissolubly associated
with active literary competence. To be sure, there is hardly any situation of
“pure orality” in contemporary Africa, if such ever existed. Contacts with
other literary traditions, especially the written traditions of the Middle East
and Europe, have triggered an intertextual waltz. Written texts are constantly
being oralized, as oral texts are being transcribed and standardized in
“textbooks” of . . . African oral literature! But the cohabitation of
orality and writing in Africa is very old and provoked in the African
consciousness and among African intellectuals neither a “great divide” nor a
confusion in genre or role. As we are catapulted into a “global village,” it
is clear that a consequence of globalization for students of African oral
literatures is the need for a commitment to clarify who is who and who does what
in the discipline, and not a new confusion of roles or a modern version of mélange
des genres and, shall we say, . . . des gens?
As can be seen, a metonymic engagement with Dahomean Narrative opens our
eyes to the natural limitations of our current approaches and challenges our
frantic, unproblematized Homerization of African oral literatures. It was Talal
Asad, I believe, who said in his famous critique of the concept of cultural
translation in British social anthropology that “in order for criticism to be
responsible, it must always be addressed to someone who can contest it.” His
profound words are perfectly applicable to the situation of African oral
literature criticism today, for in the domain today, as forty years ago when
Dahomean Narrative was published, the roads are still open.
Adouknou, Barthelemey, 1980 : Jalons pour une theology
africaine: Essa d’une Herméneutique chrétienne du Vodun dahoméen. Editions
Lethielleux, Paris.
Aguessy, Honorat, 1973 : Essay sur le Mythe de Legba.
Doctorat ès Lettres et Sciences Humaines. Université de Paris. Sorbonne.
Bierwisch, Mandred, 1969 : “Generative poetics and
style”. in Liguistics and Style. Donlad Freeman, ed.
Guedou, Geroges A. Gangbe, 1976 : Xo et Ge : Language
et Culture chez les Fon Dahomey. Thése de Doctorat de 3º cycle Université de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Kossou,
Basile, 1971 : Sè et Gbê ou la dynamique de l’existence. Thèse de 3º cycle.
Paris.
Hountondji, Paulin J., sous la direction de 1994 : Les
saviors endogens : Pistes pir une Recherce. CODESRIA.
Guyer, Jane I. And Easterbrook, David L. : Forward :
Re-issue of Dahomean Narrative.
Horton, W.R.G., 1959 : Review of Dahomean Narrative in
Africa, Vol. XXIX, Number 3, pages 311-313.
Mc Call, Daniel F., 1959 : Review of Dahomean Narrative
in Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 72, Number 285, pages 255-257.
Riserio, Antonio, 1994 : Texto e Tribo.