From across the ocean: considering travelling literary figurations as part of Swahili intellectual history

Abstract

A history of knowledge production and transmission necessarily needs to take into account the cultural patterns of dissemination of ideas. While Swahili poetry has been recognized as an important domain of scholarly discourse on the East African coast, there has been little reflection on how ideas are shaped by poetic form and imagery. How do poetic figures interfere with thought? How can poetic imagery be considered to contribute to a Swahili intellectual history? In the context of this paper, I would like to concentrate on literary patterns, both texts and motifs, from the wider Indian Ocean world which were adopted into Swahili poetry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through being re-explored again and again, they turn into ritualized cultural patterns of writing and of experiencing coastal history: While the form remains largely constant, the meaning is mutable, which makes them particularly apt for re-explorations. My focus combines a perspective of continuity across time with a consideration of how the meaning of text patterns and motifs changes in new contexts.