When Orature Becomes Literature: Somali Oral Poetry and Folktales in Somali Novels

Abstract

The concern of this essay is with the transformations which occur when what is variously termed, “orality”, the “oral tradition”, “oral literature” or “orature” is incorporated into literature in the context of Somali culture. While most sources use these terms interchangeably, Ngugi wa Thiongo, the Kenyan novelist, in a lecture titled “Oral Power and Europhone Glory”, stresses a subtle distinction of meaning between “orature” and “oral literature”. Ngugi notes that: “The term ‘orature’ was coined in the Sixties by Pio Zirimu, the late Ugandan linguist”.1 Ngugi observes that while Zirimu initially used the two terms interchangeably, he later identified “orature” as the more accurate term which indexed orality as a total system of performance linked to a very specific idea of space and time. The term “oral literature”, by contrast, incorporates and subordinates orality to the literary and masks the nature of orality as a complete system of its own. For this reason, “orature” is the preferred term in this essay.