LEVELLING THE ORAL-LITERATE PLAYING FIELD:

Transcription

LEVELLING THE ORAL-LITERATE PLAYING FIELD:
MARCEL JOUSSE’S LABORATORY OF AWARENESS1
Oral, oral.
Ecrit, écrit.
Marcel Jousse2
Introduction
Good afternoon.
Like life, this talk is a work in progress.
I arrived two nights ago, with a sheaf of notes and a sketch in mind of their organization into a not too
incoherent presentable whole. This too is rather like life. It is not as if I was not properly prepared but
rather that I did not want to merely read a paper.
If I had been in South Africa and if the audience had been mainly African, I might have started by greeting
this audience with the Zulu greeting: ‘Sanibonani’ and the entire audience would spontaneously have
answered: ‘Sawubona’.
And with this I enter straight into the oral-literate playing field.
‘Sanibonani’, plural, and ‘Sawubona’ singular are the equivalent of ‘How do you do?’ or ‘Good
afternoon’. They mean: ‘I see you’. Well, if I talk to you, I do indeed see you and you see me; if I read a
paper, that paper shields me from you, it mediates between you and me. ‘Sanibonani’ and ‘Sawubona’ put
me in immediate contact with you – they are interpersonal: they tell us what we can only communicate as
we do when we are both present.
I have met with a number of oral composers. One of them was a bertsolari, a Basque performer of bertsos.
Bertsos are a most intricate example of verbal improvisation with truly acrobatic rhythmic and semantic
rules. Bertsos are a popular art form, its practitioners used to be mostly farmhands and herders. This
particular bertsolari had been a priest and he had spent seven years in Francisco Franco’s prisons. He was
a multiple bertsolaritzo champion, having won the national competition three times. As is customary, he
had been given the theme of the improvisation and a minute to prepare. When I asked him afterwards why
at the start he had made his right hand into a fist which he put behind his back – a number of bertsolari do
this - he said it was because he needed to work out the last proposition of his improvisation and that he
then during the improvisation worked his way from the beginning towards that last benchmark utterance.
The fist gave him his rhythmic schema, his rhyme and his final punch line: his fist acts as a mnemonic
tool.
1
Presentation done at the Centre for Comparative Literature of the University of Toronto in February 2006 where I
was Northrop Frye Visiting Professor
2
This is Jousse’s caveat against changing modes of expression: he distinguishes between spoken style, which is
conversational, oral-style, which is orally traditioned style, and written style. The quotation refers to Jousse’s oral
lectures that were taken down in stenography and later typographed: such written-down verbal texts need to be read
‘with the ear’ – re-sounded
D:\Marcel Jousse\Thèses et commentaires\SienaertToronto060208.docC:\Documents and Settings\joan\My
Documents\ERS\Toronto\TORONTO Address 8 Feb.doc
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This geste3 of the fist reminds me of the literate, but fundamentally peasant – paysan: from the pays twentieth century playwright Paul Claudel. Claudel coined the expression: ‘Pétrir sa pensée’: to knead
one’s thought.
When, in 1928, Marcel Jousse met two young Basque improvisers and asked them why the old bertsolari
Matxin Mirabola had beaten them in a bertsolaritzo championship, they told him that it was because they
were literate and he was not, thereby very aptly illustrating that all evolution means gains and losses.
Well, I am literate, and I am far removed from the memory, composing and performance skills of even a
literate oral composer. But I do hope that some ‘Sawubona’ contact will be saved and that the dough that I
knead will not entirely have gone off in the process of writing.
I will deal first with the ‘oralate-literate playing field’ and I will use my own journey for that purpose. I
will then briefly sketch what Marcel Jousse’s ‘Laboratory of Awareness’ is about. In a third movement, I
will try to link both the first and second part when dealing with the ‘Levelling’. Throughout I will try to
work with only what I truly know, by which I mean, with that which I have experienced, directly or, if that
is not the case, with what I have read and been able to verify, and not with what has been written about it
and for which I can find no personal confirmation.
I am fully aware that this is a Northrop Frye lecture and I know about the 2005 Northrop Frye
international literary festival4. I am not setting out to be controversial – I will be merely stating my
conviction. I also think that it is useful to re-examine from time to time even one’s most cherished
premises. And times change.
I
The oralate-literate playing-field
In 1985, the University of Natal where I was then employed celebrated its 75th anniversary. I took
advantage of the occasion to organize a conference on the topic: Oral Tradition and Innovation: Old Wine
in New Bottles? I invited Walter Ong as key-note speaker, and he accepted but later felt that it would be
inappropriate for him to attend in view of the political situation in South Africa5. That notwithstanding, we
stayed in correspondence for some time. For the conference I invited Albert Lord instead, who gladly
accepted6. After the conference I gathered a few interested colleagues and with their support I founded the
Centre for Oral Studies. Four years later I introduced a Post-Graduate course in Orality-Literacy Studies7.
3
Gestes: ‘… all the movements executed by the human composite’ – Jousse only conceives of the anthropos as an
inseparable body-soul, psycho-physiological unit: there is only a human compound or composite. A ‘geste’ is gist
expressed in gesture. All expression, in whatever form - corporeal, manual, laryngo-buccal, thought too - is macroor micro-movement
4
This remark stems from statements made on the Festival website, statements such as: ‘Literacy. Simply put, it is
the ability to read and write. Once a rare talent, today it's an essential survival tool. It's the means of accessing the
printed and written information that enables us to function in society, to achieve our goals, and to develop our
knowledge and potential’7his presentation refutes this statement both as a whole and in its parts
5
A year later a state of emergency was declared in South Africa
6
This presentation disputes both Water Ong’s ‘great divide’ between orality and literacy and Albert Lord’s defence
of the expression ‘oral literature’
7
The unifying project of oral studies is the study of the socio-cultural archive of human expression, memory,
knowledge, learning and understanding of oral society. Oral studies are seamlessly multidisciplinary in training and
multicultural in experience
2
With hindsight it seems to me quite unbelievable that I would have founded a Centre for Oral Studies for
which I devised a teaching and research programme in Orality-Literacy Studies from an exclusively
literate perspective. If it seems unbelievable now, it also seems just as inevitable in view of my
background. The problem was literacy: I was literate. Highly so. It would take some ten years of training
and experience – from 1985 to 1995 – for me to become, at least, semi-oralate. The training and
experience are ongoing.
I was born oralate, of course, as we all are. My parents were villagers in Flanders, straddling the FrenchBelgian border, living in a rural environment that they were the first generation to leave first for a small
town and then later for a big city. These were transitions fraught with the problems and pain of adaptation
and alienation. Because of the war and its aftermath, I spent much time with my grand-parents. It was an
environment where reading, if it happened at all, was limited to the weekly local parish news bulletin that
mostly confirmed what everyone knew already, namely who had died, who had married, who was born
and to whom. Reading in that milieu was an occupation for the day of rest, when one could really not do
much that would not be frowned upon. To this rule, my father was the exception. He read – voraciously
and most widely – books that he purchased, much to my mother’s alarm, from his modest salary as a
customs officer with a large family. He must have been the best read Belgian customs officer by a long
stretch.
My literacy career followed the usual line: after the alphabet had been drilled into us by the fierce sister
Bertranda, she-with-the-ruler, there followed the primary school with corporal punishment as a prime tool
of education and the years of high school in what must have been one of the last schools of Jansenist
obedience. Latin and Greek held sway, although of the swaying there was none: whatever rhythm the
large number of texts we went through may once have had, it had long since been reduced to little dots
and inverted caps on top of inert and soundless syllables.
I was the first of both sides of my family to go to University with the ambition to become a language
teacher and a better teacher than those I had experienced bar two. Thus I did four years of the most
written-bound studies possible: philology. The texts that we studied were mostly ancient and medieval and
rarely went beyond the 17th century. Oral tradition was, in my memory, mentioned once, in a rather offhanded way as yet another theory explaining the origin of the early Romance epics. I had intussuscepted
the message well, because for my master’s research I chose one of the foremost Rhétoriqueurs, that most
formulaically stilted and dry school of poetasters that ever graced French literature. None of this of course
was of any practical use during the four years I spent subsequently teaching in a high school. It was
morgue country.
I was awarded my doctorate at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1976. Somehow
Life stirred. My research was on the work of the first known woman author of French Literature, Marie de
France, who towards the end of the 12th century, chose to put-into-writing twelve traditional tales, stories
purportedly from Lesser Brittany. Towards the end of my research on these texts, I started to understand
that to appreciate these tales properly one had to study them on their own terms, which means that one had
to abandon one’s modern literary perspective and put them in their own traditional oral context. In this
case, it meant that these stories had to be read not as modern short stories, but as traditional popular fairy
3
tales obeying a clearly definable set of rules of composition, narrative devices and characterization. It
looked so simple, yet it had never been done before. This I see now as the beginning of my wonderment:
‘it’ – namely the understanding of texts on their own terms – was a matter of learning to change one’s
point of view. It was a matter of mental flexibility. It would take me another move, in 1978, to the
University of Natal – of KwaZulu-Natal now – and my students in the Orality-Literacy Studies course,
and several years to fully understand the process of change and to carry it through in practice. In other
words: to apply it to the course I had devised. A clear case of ‘Physician Heal Thyself!’
Old academic habits die hard. The course in Orality-Literacy Studies did work, as a conventional
academic course. As an Oral Studies course it was no more than a variation on Literary Studies, and it
could have continued that way. But it jarred. It jarred especially with the increasing number of rural and
semi-urban students who joined the course because they were feeling uneasy at being caught between
tradition and modernity and who did not find the conventional academic post-graduate offering appealing.
So I started making changes, shifting the meetings to Saturdays, providing the students with food – which
became a breaking of bread together – changing the reading list, favouring field work, collecting data by
observation, adopting an insider perspective …: slowly a bookish oriented academic course became more
of a laboratory of personal, ethnic, and anthropological observation. An awareness grew, in the students
and in me. An awareness of what? What was and is it that we had to become aware of?
We had and have to become aware of the variety and complexity, and of the complexity of all varieties of
human expression and communication.
That is why Marcel Jousse’s shadow was lengthening over the course.
When I was appointed at the University of Natal, I was asked to deliver an inaugural lecture. I chose to
explain to the general public that a scholar in medieval French literature was not an entirely incongruous
presence at an institution of higher learning in that corner of the world. This is how for the first time in
twenty years I linked a formal bookish study in medieval literary texts with the vibrant oral tradition of the
context in which I found myself. In this process of linking written-down European orally traditioned texts
with the performed African tradition, the insights of Marcel Jousse proved invaluable.
Jousse was born in 1886 in the Sarthe region, South West of Paris – a region, then, rural, oral, and poor.
He would first study mathematics and physics as he wanted to become an astronomer, but later changed
direction. As he put it: instead of studying the heights of the skies and the depths of the seas he chose to
study the inner realities of the human being. This brought him to psychology, pedagogy, ethnology, and
anthropology. As the science of Man, thelast lays the foundation of all other human sciences: it is Jousse’s
point of departure.
I will now briefly sketch the understanding of Marcel Jousse of the process of human communication and
expression and more precisely the role of self-awareness in this process.
II
Marcel Jousse’s Laboratory of Awareness
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Jousse’s Anthropology is dynamic, it concerns the living human being8. This is why he calls it the
Anthropology of Geste, i.e. of human expression and communication. This Anthropology of Geste lays
the foundation of a theoretical approach to, and a practical study of oral society and of its ex-pression in
oral performance and in oral-style texts.
Jousse’s Anthropology is in its essence relational because for as long as the human being IS, thus from
conception to death, this human being is engaged in action with, and in reaction to, his or her
environment. Following this premise, Jousse sets out the laws that govern this incessant interaction
between the Anthropos and the Cosmos. He identifies one fundamental law and three consequent laws9.
The fundamental law is the Law of Mimism: it is the law of the Cosmos im-pressing itself on the
Anthropos and the Anthropos’ reception of these impressions. The subsequent laws concern the way that
the Anthropos ex-presses these impressions through his psycho-physiological being.
The Law of Im-pression: Mimism.
The Cosmos is an energy field in which everything acts upon everything else and is acted upon by
everything else. This constant cosmic interaction is unconscious. This interaction becomes conscious with
the appearance in this universe of the Human, of the Anthropos. The Human being has the unique capacity
among all beings to stop the flow of interactions, to store them and to replay them. The Anthropos takes in
the interactions of the Universe and stores them as Mimemes, the sum total of which constitutes his or her
Memory. A Memory is a data bank of Mimemes that can voluntarily or involuntarily be called up and
replayed. In sum, the Cosmos plays the Anthropos, and the Anthropos replays the Cosmos. As Aristotle
said, in Jousse’s translation: ‘Man is the greatest Mimer of all beings and it is from Mimism that he
derives all his knowledge’.
The Laws of Ex-pression.
Mimism is that force in us that compels us to express ourselves. We cannot not express ourselves. This expression of our stored and intussuscepted im-pressions is governed by the nature of our human composite:
we are a psycho-physiological compound that is situated in time and in space and that is therefore
ephemeral. The three secondary laws of ex-pression and communication are therefore: one, the law of
Rhythmism : the Anthropos expresses himself rhythmically, meaning: in time; two, the law of
Bilateralism: the Anthropos expresses herself in space, meaning: bilaterally, because we are corporeally
two-sided in three ways: side to side, back to front, and up and down; three, the law of Formulism: in
order to perpetuate the information, the Anthropos needs to put it in a form that is easy to store, easy to
conserve, and easy to call up and to transmit.
Thus we have a dancer or whirler – the Cosmos, the Universe – and an Anthropos who mimismically,
rhythmically, bilaterally and formulaically ex-presses the dancer’s dance in a multitude of forms –
personal and ethnic. These ex-pressions are first ex-pressed through the entire body, they are corporeal;
they later concentrate through the hands, they are manual; still later they become verbal; ultimately the
expression becomes graphic. This progressive reduction of movement to increasing stillness continues into
our age and we have today all over the world human expression on a wide gestual scale, from ritual dance
to oral performance, to gestual language and to writing in its multiple forms, from pictography and
ideography to alphabetic writing.
8
Traditional static anthropology he referred to as ‘squelettology’
These laws are dissociated here for pedagogical reasons only
9
5
To the latter – alphabetic writing – Jousse attaches a health warning. All forms of expression are abstract
as all take out something from the ambient Real in order to re-present it in some form or other. But
alphabetic writing is algebraic and the danger is for it to become algebrosed. Algebrosis is necrosis of expression. It is language no longer turned outwards but inwards. Words are labels in-dic-ating (pointing a
finger – Latin: digitum) - at reality. Algebrosis sets in when the label takes over. Academic discourse is
quite often guilty of such necrosis of language.
All human expression is vibration and performance, but calibrated from spontaneity to algebrosis.
Spontaneity is compulsive expression of visceral memory: it is automatic and requires no mediating
thought, because it is biological. The ‘rhythm’ and ‘balance’ set the compulsive expression from the
visceral memory of the gestes in motion which in-form the text that is ex-pressed, in ‘formulas’.
Spontaneous people vibrate and adjust immediately with the real that confronts them and with which they
are in direct contact. These are the people – children and people closely attuned to their environment –
whom Jousse calls ‘verbo-motor’: they are moved, they set themselves in motion as a spontaneous
response to the stimulating impressions of the cosmos, when verbalising. It is these verbo-motors that I
call here, in the orality-literacy context, oralates.
This Dynamic Anthropology of Jousse forms the basis of the oral style theory expounded in his 1924
study10.
I define each term of the compound ‘Oral-style theory’.
‘Oral’ is in fact a misnomer as it stands not just for ‘mouth’ or ‘face’ (Latin os, oris) but for the global
corporeal or full-body expression. Thus ‘global’ style – an expression Jousse does use - would be more
correct but it is ambiguous and could be misunderstood.
‘Style’ is an ensemble of rules governing a mode of expression, whence the already mentioned ‘spoken’
style, oral style, written style.
‘Theory’ must be understood in its basic etymological sense of ‘observation’. A theory is a way of looking
at something. Now, oral-style theory is not a ‘theory’ as is commonly understood but a worldview
founded on anthropological fundamentals. Oral style texts expound that worldview in mimismic,
rhythmic, bilateral and formulaic performance. Such texts are first and foremost functional, their function
being to instruct. They are pedagogic. They bring the past into the present and the present into the future.
The result of such performance is pleasing, aesthetic, and beautiful because it is the result of alignment of
the Anthropos with the Cosmos: it balances because it is in balance. To quote Jousse: ‘Succeeding
generations have worked daily to fashion “verbal tools” that were simultaneously essential and obligatory,
usable and practical, for the dual purposes of the social expression of their own personal knowledge, and
the traditional portage of all the knowledge of their ethnic milieus.’
A prime example of such ‘verbal tools’ are the oral-style parallelisms that we call proverbs. They are, as
Solomon said, the handles of the basket making the carrying of wisdom parallel balancing easier.
Everyone in oral-style milieus improvises/d more or less ingeniously, with these propositional formulas,
10
The full title of Jousse’s first publication, in 1924, is Le Style oral rythmique et mnémotechnique des Verbomoteurs –The rhythmic and mnemotechnical oral style of the verbo- motors (Translated in English in 1990 and
published by Garland Publishing as The Oral Style)
6
just as with us literates everyone writes, more or less inventively, with the same words. I found the
following corroboration in Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times: A Life in the Twentieth
Century (the passage refers to a visit of British scholars to the Soviet Union in 1954, after Stalin’s death in
1953): having stated that the visit taught the delegation little, Hobsbawm continues:
Still there was something. (…) There was the basic difference between the Russians who
took decisions and the ones who did not – as we joked among ourselves, they could be
recognized by their hair. The ones who took action had hair that stood up on their heads,
or had fallen out with the effort, the ones who didn’t could be recognized by the lankness
above their foreheads. There was the extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society
barely a generation from the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year’s Party at the
Scientists’ Club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone
suggested a contest remembering proverbs – not just any old saws, but proverbs or phrases
about sharp things, such as “a stitch in time saves nine” (needles) or “burying the
hatchet”. The joint resources of Britain were soon exhausted, but the Russian contestants,
all of them established research scientists, went on confronting each other with village
wisdom about knives, axes, sickles, and sharp or cutting implements until the contest had
to be stopped. That, after all, was what they brought with them from the illiterate villages
in which so many of them had been born.
The following is Jousse’s comment on the Mary’s Magnificat in response to the Angel Gabriel’s
Annunciation – a very different context, but one equally oral and telling:
It is rare to find among us one who is able to improvise an immortal masterpiece on a
public speaking platform. To achieve and manage a dynamic expertise in oral utterance, it
must be struck and retained in the human metal through regular and disciplined
memorization and practice. In the ethnic milieus where daily memorization and practice
are the norm, these utterances have achieved such a perfection that our literary critics of
Written Style have, right up to the present time, confused and equated them with our
poetry. Our poetry is a horse of a very different colour from the utterances of the Oral
Style, in that poetry is merely an artificial, graphic residue bearing no evidence of the
spontaneous, immediate and concrete expertise which is characteristic of the Oral Style
(…). The knowledge held in memory and shared in the performance of oral-style texts
addressed history, law, cosmogony, ethics, philosophy, theology, and medicine. In sum, the
entire science of a particular ethnic oral milieu. This science will, no doubt, not be as
advanced as ours, not will it be expressed in our algebraic terminology. But to the
individual members of this ethnic milieu, it is science and not poetry as we are all too often
wont to say.
What Jousse makes us aware of, is of the existence, of the nature and of the operation of the Oral Style.
This Oral Style is based on anthropological laws and is performed in a multitude of variations by each
ethnic milieu in all times and all over the world. It is up to us, belonging as individuals to a particular
civilization, to become aware of the tenets and values of other civilizations. And in this we have in the
main failed. Fifty years ago Jousse opened the Synthèse that was to be his magnum opus but which illhealth prevented him from continuing, with the words:
7
The original and capital sin of our written-style civilization is that it considers itself
singularly superior and unique, and believes, moreover, that everything not recorded in
writing, does not exist (…) It seems that our Western science is afraid of life. When the
human being and his expression is the subject of study, our Western civilization is not
interested in the living gestes of men, but only in their dead remains.
These are harsh words, yet, fifty years later, the playing field is as uneven as ever.
III
Leveling the oral-literate playing field through Awareness
The oral-literate playing field is not level. I will illustrate this through three anecdotes, all three South
African, but examples can be found anywhere aplenty and in many guises.
A gardener at the University applies for promotion. All reports concur that he does more than gardening:
he has a natural affinity for landscaping and does an excellent job. The reports also mention that he is
‘illiterate’. The Support Staff Promotions Committee recommends that he join an adult literacy
programme before re-applying for promotion.
In 1994, there were an estimated 2000 speakers of all eleven official languages of the Republic of South
Africa. Nearly all had no formal training. It was suggested that they be trained so that they could be
‘upgraded’.
The owner of a carpet and tapestry shop-cum-workshop at the Cape Town Waterfront tells me his weavers
are women, ‘they arrive here from the bundu, barefoot, they know nothing’11. ‘Yet, he adds proudly, after
a mere three to four weeks of training, this is what they are able to produce’.
All these people are perfectly capable, skilled, adapted to their milieu and yet are made to feel incapable,
unskilled and unadapted – in fact, deficient and deficit, and this is their own land. They are oralates whom
literacy has turned into illiterates.
How to create awareness? Jousse says: Cleanse the vocabulary, Pasteurize the terminology:
The greatest difficulty for a discoverer often is to find an adapted terminology and one that
makes itself understood. The social milieu wants to preserve all of its old vocabulary. Now,
this old vocabulary needs to be broken up and inflected towards a new terminology,
discovering new things.
Elsewhere he is more lapidary:
Science begins with precise language
Again, let us look at three instances of appropriating and colonizing terminology.
11
This is Jousse’s Sarthe triad all over: ‘From the bundu’ (rural), ‘barefoot’ (poor), ‘know nothing’ (oral)
8
The first instance concerns the text of an oral performance by a young Zulu student, Zikephi Yvonne
Cele12. Our literary terminology proves to be wholly inadequate for the analysis of such a text which is
neither our poetry nor our prose, is not in our verse or stanzas, is in none of our rhythmic schemas, and has
not words as units. To use the word ‘poem’ for example, creates expectations that may not be fulfilled, but
worse, it prevents us from seeing and appreciating what is really there. Jousse again:
In order to avoid wanton confusion in ethnic milieus so very different from ours, I have
called this the “Oral Style”, and not poetry. I have called it “Parallel Balancing”, and not
verse. I have called it “Recitative”, and not “stanza”.
One could add: ‘proposition’, and not ‘word’ – ‘word’ being a literate notion.
The second instance of colonizing terminology concerns translation. There is a Zulu saying : Umuntu
Ngubuntu Ngabantu. Often translated as: I am (a person) because you are (a person). This is an excellent
example of cultural appropriation, of ethnic mistranslation. From the literate perspective, we have: Cogito
ergo sum – ‘I think, therefore I am’. This is an inference, mediated by reasoning; it is deductive reasoning,
and broadly speaking, syl-logical. Umuntu Ngubuntu Ngabantu on the other hand is ana-logical: it is an
inductive or immediate inference; it is inference by observation. A more correct and respectful translation
would be: ‘A person is a person in the context of other persons’ or ‘A person is a person when with other
persons’ or ‘through other persons’. The very sound of the original expression conveys the inclusivity, the
encirclement.
The third instance of colonizing terminology concerns the term ‘illiterate’. The Lausanne Committee for
World Evangelisation estimates that 70% of the world population by ignorance or choice does not use
writing as a tool of communication13. Unhappy with the negative connotations of the term ‘illiterate’, the
Committee opts in its glossary for ‘non-literate’. Their misgivings about the term ‘illiterate’ are fully
justified as it creates an amorphous mass of deficit people devoid of identity. But South Africa’s history of
‘identifying’ people by denying and annulling their identity, by turning them into non-people is well
known, so just as non-whites, non-Europeans, the suggested alternative of non-literates does not do as a
replacement for ‘illiterates’.
These are not ‘merely semantics’: they are telling signs of a profound malaise, or indeed of a malady.
The imposition by others of outside information, skills and thought processes does not empower oralate
people. In fact, it disempowers them in an already debilitating literate environment. What empowers
people is the discovery within themselves of identity, knowledge and understanding. What empowers
people is the access to their inner capacity. The first step towards such self realization is awareness. Such
awareness works both ways: literates have to learn that oralateness is an anthropological capacity which
we all develop and exercise to a greater or lesser degree by virtue of being human. Literates must not
12
Zikephi Cele is a sixteen year-old pupil at the Mthusi High School in Southern KwaZulu-Natal. She discovered
her talent and need to ‘bonga’ or compose first privately as a means of expressing very strong emotion – in 2000,
shortly after her parents’ death when she found herself entirely on her own. She only writes a composition down
when asked to do so. Once a text is composed ‘in her head’, it doesn’t change. Composing, she says, and performing
provides her with ‘relief’ and ‘release’: she feels ‘light’ after a performance
13
www.lausanne.org
9
eradicate illiteracy: they must embrace orality. By uprooting orality, they uproot themselves. Oralates
have to learn that there are things they know and they have to dignify this knowledge. All too often they
do not see their own tradition as knowledge and as culture. Aspiring to become what others expect one to
become is but self-colonisation.
Times and tides are changing. Louis Liebenberg has conclusively shown that the eye and the ear system of
oral people is a scientific method that has all the components of the three grades of scientific research,
namely, simple, systematic and speculative. Shraranjeet Shan and Helen Verran have begun to throw light
on the intricacies and sophistication of ‘other’ than ‘Western’ Mathematics14. Marcel Jousse has shown
that there is a way of ‘observing’ that examines critically and analyses oral-style texts on their own terms,
in other words, that literary criticism of oral style texts has to make way for oral criticism, a tool fit for the
purpose, because there is an oral theory, a way of observing and analyzing oral style texts on their own
terms15.
Conclusion
Awareness. The late medieval and literary critic, Eugene Vinaver wrote a brilliant study of the plays of the
17th century French playwright, Jean Racine16. Vinaver ends his preface to this study on a cautionary note:
It is attempting the impossible to try to see him in the plenitude of his nature, to hold in one
and the same view the sheer approaches to his work, the towering heights which it shares
with its period, and the privileged retreats that shelter the creative energy of the poet. Not,
indeed, to enter it, but to descry them from afar, point them out with a respectful finger,
and take no further liberty than to contemplate them with humble awareness.
We should approach the complexities and genius of people with no less ‘humble awareness’, and realize
that the history of human expression and communication is a continuum, that, in our differences we are all
the same and equal, that there is only one playing field17. Or, to switch metaphors, we should be humbly
14
Louis Liebenberg, The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, 1990; Sharanjeet Shan and Peter Bailey, Multiple
Factors: Classroom Mathematics for Equality and Justice, 1991; Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic,,
2001. It would be useful to have a full bibliography of studies of this kind
15
Jousse’s main works in translation are: ‘The Oral Style’ (Garland Publishing 1990) and ‘The Anthropology of
Geste and Rhythm’ (Mantis Publishing 2000)
16
Eugene Vinaver, Racine and poetic Tragedy, 1955
17
Since this talk, I have come again across the following corroborating extracts regarding this continuum: (1) From
the Assyriologist Jean Bottéro (Babylone et la Bible. Entretiens avec Hélène Monsacré, 1994): ‘La véritable
humanité, comme la véritable anthropologie, c’est le respect essentiel et total de l’autre. Non seulement il a droit
autant que moi à l’existence et au respect, mais ce qu’il m’apprend de lui, ce qu’il m’apporte d’inattendu, de loin de
ce à quoi je suis accoutumé, c’est quelque chose d’humainement nouveau, intéressant, précieux: irremplaçable; une
nouvelle manière, toujours ingénieuse, de résoudre un problème que je me pose mais que, vu mes habitudes de
pensée et de vie, mes ancêtres et moi résolvons autrement.’ (2) From the linguistic anthropologist Hoyt Alverson
(Semantics and experience. Universal metaphors of time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho,1994): ‘In the
course of these several years’ research in Africa, I came to the view that the human sciences have greatly
exaggerated the ecological, institutional, and ideological differences among cultures of the world and hence the
ways in which people experience their daily lives, including time. In my view, despite significant discontinuities and
differences, the interlanguage and intercultural translation of experience (like that of time) is possible for two
reasons: (1) we as humans share much fundamental experience in common to begin with, irrespective of cultural
differences, and (2) the most important meaning-bearing aspects of all human languages gear into and express that
experience in the same way.’ Indeed: Jousse’s Anthropology of Geste and Rhythm provides evidence that ‘forms’ of
10
aware that the history of human expression and communication is Velut arbor aevo, that is grows like a
tree through the ages. Which happens to be the emblem of this University and its motto.
human communication are all ‘informed’ by ‘balance’ and ‘rhythm’ … it is only at the level of superficial
appearance that the differences override.
11

LEVELLING THE ORAL-LITERATE PLAYING FIELD:

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