“Writing Orality”: Preserving Oral Tradition and Cultural Identity in the Select Writings of Easterine Kire

Abstract

Deconstructing the binary between orality/orature and literacy/literature, this essay discusses how Easterine Kire as an indigenous writer makes symbiosis of orality and writing, and uses the impression of orality, oral tradition, and orature in her select novels to transmit and preserve the cultural ethos of Naga people. Through oral tradition, the Angami Naga people acquire indigenous knowledge, get connected with their animistic world, and resurrect the primeval and symbolic realities latent in their culture. Orality is strongly connected to their land as oral traditions evolve out of their land and revolve around it to preserve their indigenous identity. Implementing the technique of “writing orality” and using orality and storytelling as tropes, this essay further discusses, by using the colonial master’s linguistic codes, how Kire projects the specificity of the Angami oral culture in her novels without being theoretically recolonized.