Folk Literature and Cultural Heritage: The Igbo Example

Abstract

The paper presents literature as a mirror of a people in a given speech community. This implies that a particular human society has its literature which exists in preliterate times; we call it folk literature or orature, for short. Folk literature encapsulates the actions and reactions of any social group. The paper argues that literature represents the essence of a people as literature is language at work, language being the arrowhead of culture. In avers that if you want to understand a people, a good place to inquire into is their literature. Besides, it contends that language exists basically in literature. The literary form we recognize as orature showcases the people’s world view, which, inter alia, captures their interaction with one another as social group; it reveals their idiolect, value system and folkways. Thus, orature unveils their social and cultural frontiers from the synergy that is implicit in traditional community life from nativity. Indeed, folk literature of a people encases diverse cultural information that portray the totality of their cultural treasures, namely, the technological, the sociological and the ideological facets. This essay insists that we need to excavate and internalize the utilitarian bounties of orature, for these bounties acquaint us with where the rain began to beat us, where we are coming from and where we are going in the stream of time. To ignore cultural bounties of our heritage will amount to throwing a baby away with the bathwater. The paper explores New Historicism as literary and critical bases in its speculations, which, in the opinion of the essayists, will better present the corpus of folk literature as it is presented in this paper than in any previous work that may have been done on the subject matter.