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CoCo Harris
From Ear To Page:
Oral and Aural Qualities of Black Literatures
Every culture in the world creates stories as a way of making sense of the world. Many artists consciously or unconsciously draw upon their heritage for the power and style of their narratives. Orature embodies a spoken culture encompassing the oral traditional forms listed below. With respect to this discussion, the oral qualities are concerned with how the information is delivered, and aural qualities relate to how the information is "heard" and "perceived."
African Storytellers & Griots
- folktales
- folksongs
- folk poems
- News singer
- Oral historian
Folklore includes folktales, folk songs and poems explaining a cause, origin or reason. As an example, fairy tales and folktales orient the listener (often children) to the world, enrich the spiritual life, and ground the listener as a participant. They focus mainly on the moral and pedagogical values of orality as well as utilizing the entertaining values of the tradition. Etiological tales, which are largely represented in children’s stories, explain the meaning or existence of life and various cosmologies; furthermore, these tales explore the origins and characteristics of various animals, plants and landscapes.
From Africa to African America
The African Diasporic cultural context includes traditional African forms such as music, storytelling, and other oral modalities. Contemporary African American literary artists use these historically familiar African art forms in ways that are particularly appealing to the African American readership. Of particular note, with regard to African American literature, is the fact that Africans learned the language of the land and had to do so under duress. It is important to specify that not only were African Americans forced to learn English, but they were also forbidden to learn to read it or write it, thus first adapting a solely oral relationship with the language.
Songs to Assist
Africans in America had a unique purpose for language. A work song is a typically rhythmic a cappella song sung by people doing arduous tasks such as picking cotton or farming tobacco. Work songs, the root of the blues, were employed by slaves to placate the mind during extremely physically demanding labor. Work songs helped synchronize the rhythm of group tasks, with one person calling out a line that was then responded to by the group of laborers, typically in time with their work motion. The slaves and indentured servants carried the beat of the ancentral land in their hearts, transfiguring it for the accomplishments of their duties. Field hollers, on the other hand, are vocal performances by an individual as opposed to a group. Generally slower and less rigid than work songs, they combined known lyrical phrases with improvisational laments to express a sorrowful reality. Both of these oral forms are clearly considered an important antecedent to the blues form.
Songs from the Soul
- Laments
- Praise
- Hope
- Spirituals
- Gospels
- Sermons
The work songs and slave songs took on many shapes and meanings in various aspects of African American culture. Slave songs are spirituals of liberation; they include oratory speeches (such as poetic sermons), gospel and contemporary Rhythm and Blues music. Elements in slave songs are presented in the techniques used by such African American writers as James Baldwin in his masterful novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain. They reflect the African American experience through its encounter with Christianity, the retention of African religious practices, often originating as a means of salvation from the cruelty slaves experienced. The moral messages and themes present in black literatures is both healing and didactic, providing an understanding of the cultural, historical and political context underlying the writing. Sonia Sanchez is known as an artist that sets her poetry in the African Diasporic vernacular. A seminal theme in her body of work is one of racial solidarity. During the black power movement, she was a voice that forged a linguistic war with America. In the poem, "We a BaddDDD People," Sanchez produces a consciousness of victory. Her poetic voice is visionary as she finds freedom in being Black and expressing it.
We a BaddDDD People
i am a blk/wooOOOOMAN
my face.
my brown
bamboo/colored
blk/berry/face
will spread itself over
this western hemisphere and
be remembered.
be sunnnnnnnNNNGG.
for I will be called
QUEEN. &
walk/move in
blk/queenly/ways
The Supernatural
Contemporary African authors such as Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta infuse their works with the richness of the oral tradition, exploring the paranormal realities of their immediate social culture as inseparable from real life. The Joys of Motherhood by Emecheta is a story that starts with the death of the protagonist in a previous life and chronicles her next life while drawing a connection between her past life’s events and her current life’s consequences. This is a strong belief among many indigenous African cultures.
Of Spirit Guides & Ghosts
Contemporary African American authors such as southern writer Tina McElroy Ansa characteristically merge paranormal beliefs paralleling originating African customs in their writing. Ansa's You Know Better is a story about a troubled young woman befriended by a spirit who guides her back to the right path. In her novel, The Hand I Fan With, the protagonist has a love affair with a ghost. These narratives demostrate a link between contemporary writing and its roots in the metaphysical aspects of traditional African beliefs.
Speaking off the Page
Part of the success of many African American authors such as Terry McMillan is that their stories are cast in a very conversational manner. For example, the following quote from McMillan's A Day Late and A Dollar Short exemplifies her use of talking language:
Can’t nobody tell me nothing I don’t already know. At least not when it comes to my kids. They all grown, but in a whole lotta ways they still act like children. I know I get on their nerves—but they get on mine, too—and they always accusing me of meddling in their business, but, hell, I’m their mother. It’s my job to meddle. What I really do is worry.
This sit-down-on-the-sofa-and-listen type of language is a craft that is natural to the oral voice.
The Blues Aesthetic
Blues, having its roots in various forms of African American oral traditions, captures the suffering, anguish, and hopes of centuries of slavery and tenant farming. It was typically played by roaming solo musicians on the banjo, acoustic guitar, piano, or harmonica at social events such as weekend parties, picnics and juke joints. According to the 1997 edition of The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage:
Originated in Africa, the Banjo was brought to America in the 17th century by African slaves. It is the only Western stringed instrument with a vellum belly. African stringed instruments commonly include the musical bow, lute, lyre, harp, and zither. Professional musicians among the people of Gambia play the kora, a 21-string harp-lute. The xalam, a plucked lute, is a close relative of the African-American banjo. It is used in Senegal by Wolof praise singers, whose songs revere important people. From various historical references, however, it can be deduced that the banjar, or bangie, or banjer, or banza, or banjo was played in early 17th century America by Africans in slavery who constructed their instruments from gourds, wood, and tanned skins, using hemp or gut for strings. The Banjo was similar to instruments made by the Moors, north of the Sahara. It is a stringed instrument of the lute family, with an open-backed round body consisting of a circular wood hoop over which is stretched a vellum belly a long, narrow, fretted neck; and metal or metal-wound gut strings.
The Blues aesthetic presents itself in literature by way of techniques and qualities such as call and response, repetition (e.g., worrying a line), direct speech to the reader, and episodic patterns.
Lists and Repetition
Lists and Repetition produce a percussive quality to the written word. It weaves the sentences and amplifies the texture of the prose. There is a lyricism achieved in the storyteller’s voice through repetition, as found in Earnest Gaine’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman:
We didn’t know a thing.
We didn’t know where we was goin,
We didn’t know what we was go’n eat when the apples run out,
We didn’t know where we was go’n sleep that night.
In Dorothy West's short story, “Hannah Byde,” published in 1926, the protagonist manipulates her husband and others by playing a cruel death game. The prose in this section possesses a rhythm that West uses skillfully to inform the reader about setting and character.
Holiday crowds hurrying in the street . . . bits of gay banter floating up to her . . . George noisily reading his paper . . . Wreaths in the shop window across the street . . . a proud black family in a new red car . . . George uttering intermittent, expressive little grunts . . . A blind beggar finding a lost dollar bill . . . a bullying policeman running in a drunk . . . George, in reflective mood, beating a pencil against his teeth.
Worryin’
Authors such as J. California Cooper use several blues techniques in their fiction. Examples include "worrying" lines: a common blues technique of repeating a phrase threaded throughout a piece and carrying an embedded message. In the short story "Say What You Wilomay," this particular phrase is "worried" throughout to stress the point of people carrying one belief about a particular event or situation that actually has another unknown truth to it. In many of her works, Cooper also uses the blues technique of jumping ahead in the story to create dramatic tension.
The Jazz Aesthetic
Once Langston Hughes reached his destination in New York, he made his way to Harlem where his writing style evolved to become a musical expression of his ideas.
Hughes frequented various Jazz, Blues, and Be-Bop clubs in New York, becoming fascinated with the musical culture. In his poetry, he began to mimic and incorporate the rhythm and ideas expressed in the music he heard. His poem "Dream Boogie" challenges readers to think about what happens when dreams are deferred and what the seemingly joyous steps of the boogie actually meant to the Harlemites who danced the steps. It is implied that the steps that appear to be “happy steps” are indeed expressions of frustrations and disappointments with having to be subservient to white society.
Dream Boogie
Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and Beating out a –
You think
It's a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a –
What did I say?
Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
Oral Forms in Children’s Literature
One of the most common places to find all types of oral literature is in children’s stories. Acclaimed African American author Virginia Hamilton produces works replete with African American folkloric elements, incorporating various techniques stemming from the African oral storytelling tradition such as riddles. In stories such as "The Riddle Tale of Freedom," she places the riddle in the context of story, thus deftly relaying an ancient technique in contemporary children's fiction.
Dear Future Generations
In her oral memoir, To My Children’s Children, South African author Sindewe Magona strengthens the link between storyteller and audience by introducing the historian as a character. This first sentence of the epistolary-like novel underscores the tradition of the folk or oral historian validating the relationship between autobiography and history, which is integral to the African storytelling process:
Child of the Child of My Child
As ours is an oral tradition I would like you to hear it from my own lips what it was like living in the 1940s onward. What is was like in the times of your great-grandmother, me.
When talking to Magona at a writer’s conference, this writer inquired about her format and she simply said that she wrote down the story that she wanted to tell her daughters about her history.
Punctuation as Tools
Along with moral teachings, one of the most identifiable characteristics of prose by Black writers is the generous use of punctuation. For various Black writers, punctuation goes far beyond the use of marks in order to clarify meaning. The use of punctuation stresses meanings. Prose is filled with the use of all capped words, exclamation marks, ellipses, exaggerated spellings, italics and even strikeouts. This makes the function of punctuation more dramatic and dynamic as it sends visual cues to the reader to stress points intended by the author. As illustrated in the very first sentence of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, her strikeouts are used to stress one meaning over another. The strong use of punctuation not only serves as a function to personify the emotions and conditions of her characters, but also sets the tone for anecdotes.
The oral arts of Africa are rich and varied and they remain living traditions that continue to evolve and flourish, providing prose and poetry today that not only reads well, but “speaks” well, lending itself to the oral and aural nature of Black literatures. In an interview in 1977 with the New York Times Book Review, Toni Morrison said, “It always seemed to me that Black people’s grace has been what they do with language.”
Praise for the Word
Praise of the Word
The word is total:
It cuts, excoriates
Forms, modulates
Perturbs, maddens
Cures or directly kills
Amplifies or reduces
According to intention
It excites or calms souls.
— Praise song of the Bambara Komo society of Mali
Copyright © CoCo Harris
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