Configuring Audiences in Yor�b� Novels, Print and Media Poetry

Abstract

Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa's popularly-read novel Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (The brave hunter in the forest of 400 deities) begins with narrator imagining his audience, f iguring his reading audience proverbially as the dancing audience responding to the drummed words of the narratordrummer, as the wise audience who will interpret the performance. This article is, in nutshell, about imagining, convening, and addressing audiences in Yoruba literary creation. In following selected examples of early and more recent Yoruba print and media (radio/cassette) poems as well as Yoruba novels, the article seeks to explore the encounter between cultural practitioners (poets and writers) and their audiences through studying how audience address is constituted in literary texts. The issue of turning towards, giving shape to, and addressing audiences was particularly pertinent at those pivotal historic trajectories, when the introduction of writing, print technology and the electronic mass media enabled verbal artists to go beyond the local towards conceptualizing and addressing potentially unlimited, unknown audiences through print expression and through new kind of mass-mediated secondary orality. Thus in the Yoruba context, the availability of print did not engender hegemony of the written word, did not displace the oral as an obsolete mode of literary expression, but opened up ways for numerous creative forms of co-existence and interfaces of the oral and the written. The appropriation and use of writing and print technology for creative literary expression involved, according to Walter Ong, the task of setting up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves (102). Verbal artists needed to figure position for the self and the other, i.e. for the poet/writer and the audiences, as well as relation between them (Dillon 15).