American Oral Traditions Research Articles

Review of Rap Music's Rising Influence on Young Indian Girls' Mental Health

This research paper investigates the consequences of rap music on young Indian girls, focusing on the growing community of female rappers. Originating from African American oral traditions, rap music has gained worldwide recognition and has been both admired and criticized for its impact. Previous studies have explored rap’s influence on youth behavior, attitudes, and mental health, addressing issues like drug use, risky sexual behavior, anxiety, and depression. The study examines the profound impact of rap music on Indian society through analysis of digital content from Indian female rappers such as Raja Kumari, Irfana Hameed, and others. The rise of artists like Agsy, Fenifina, DeeMC, and others represents a significant culture shift, with these artists challenging traditional societal norms and breaking stereotypes. This review assesses the dual nature of rap music’s influence, acknowledging its capacity to foster empowerment, self-expression, confidence building, and advocacy for social issues, while exposing young girls to cyberbullying, online harassment, controversial themes, and gender issues, which can adversely affect their mental health. Examining these aspects, the study seeks to offer a balanced comprehension of rap music’s impact on Indian female rappers and proposes strategies to optimize its beneficial effects while minimizing its obstacles. Ultimately, the purpose is to emphasize the transformative potential of rap music while ensuring that the growth of female rappers in India is both sustainable and constructive, benefiting individuals and the broader cultural context concurrently.

A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s “The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man”

Inspired by the tenets of postcolonial ecocriticism, theories of settler colonialism, and indigenous ecologies, this study examines the connection Mahmoud Darwish establishes between the colonized people and natural elements in his poem “The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man” while making reference to Native American oral traditions and Chief Seattle’s speech. This article argues that Darwish’s poem expresses an inclusive perspective that requires appreciation of the interconnection between the national and ecological struggle of the colonized. The analysis in this article is premised on Darwish’s dictum in this poem that the resistance of the colonized against loss of homeland is also a resistance against loss of nature; that is, Darwish seems to argue that the ecological ethos is inherent in the resistance of colonized people against settler colonialism. In “The Red Indian’s Penultimate Speech to the White Man,” Darwish expresses consciousness of a history of colonial domination that aggressively exploitated natural resources and destroyed natural habitations that natives had nurtured and depended on for their subsistence over the years. In other words, the poet represents the central ecocritical argument that environmental issues are integral to the existence of colonized peoples.

Song Form and the Mainstreaming of Hip-Hop Music

Song form in North American hip-hop music has evolved along the genre’s journey from its origins as a live musical practice, through its commercial ascent in the 1980s and 1990s, to its dominance of mainstream popular music in the 21st century. This paper explores the nature and evolution of song form in hip-hop music and uses them as a musical lens to view the gradual and ongoing mainstreaming of this genre. With the help of a corpus of 160 hip-hop songs released since 1979, I describe and unpack section types common to hip-hop music­—verses, hooks, and instrumentals—illustrating how these sections combine in different formal paradigms, such as strophic and verse-hook. I evaluate the extent to which formal structures in hip-hop music can be understood as products of the genre’s live performance culture; one with roots in African American oral vernacular traditions such as toasting. Finally, I discuss how form in hip-hop music has increasingly foregrounded the hook (chorus): the emergence of the verse-hook song form, an increase in sung hooks (often by singers outside the hip-hop genre), the earlier arrival of hook sections in songs, and the greater share of a song’s duration occupied by hooks. Viewing hip-hop music’s evolution through this increasing importance of the hook provides a clear representation of the genre’s roots outside of, and assimilation into, mainstream popular music; one of many Black musical genres to have traversed this path (George, 1988).

“Sim, há uma”: tradução e performance em português de “See-line woman”, a partir de uma interpretação de Nina Simone

“See-line Woman”, peça musical de tradição oral norte-americana, foi registrada em 1939, recolhida e reproduzida em diferentes performances orais, tais como as de Leslie Feist (2007), e Nina Simone (1964). Tomando como original a gravação constante no álbum Mississipi Goddam (1964), de Nina Simone, e evidenciando a dubiedade de som e sentido que o registro da letra ”“ tradução da oralidade ”“ pode evidenciar, abordarei alguns problemas atinentes à tradução de canção para performance quando me deparo com um original que tensiona a letra da canção registrada de maneira distinta à s outras versões oralizadas de 1939 e de 2007.

"Place" in the Small Stories of African American Elders: A Narrative Case Study.

Although there is a rich literature on place and home within gerontology, few studies have considered how place acts as identity markers for older African Americans. Since narratives and stories represent ways of expressing self and identity through ordered talk, they offer an interesting way to consider how people age biographically such as through links between place and self. We analyzed small stories (i.e., stories that can appear as snippets of talk immersed within a larger narrative) from five African Americans (three women, two men, ages 78-93 years) to better understand "place" in the context of their lives. Overall, place in participants' small stories was linked to the African American oral tradition and, for some, the Great Migration (1915-1970) from south to north. Place identity in the small stories therefore went beyond fond reminisce and instead became a type of resistance to dominant narratives of place. Studying small stories can therefore be an important tool in better understanding deeply personal experiences of place for under-represented elders.

“That’s What They Used to Say”: Reflections on Native American Oral Traditions

“That’s What They Used to Say”: Reflections on Native American Oral Traditions

The Star-Beings and stones: Petroforms and the reflection of Native American cosmology, myth and stellar traditions

Native American myths, legends and oral traditions are rich with stories of giant beings existing in ancient times. They all talk of giant Thunderers or Thunder-beings, giant snakes and great Thunderbirds. Even the first humans were said to be giants, some half man, half animal. The Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) have a name for the giant beings that their ancestors encountered during the early migration to the grasslands of the Great Plains. They called them haztova hotoxceo or “two-faced star people”. Other Plains tribes such as the Black Feet, Gros Ventres and Lakota have similar stories.These old stories may have real world counterparts. Discovered in a prehistoric effigy-mound group (the Kolterman Mounds) in south-eastern Wisconsin (U.S.A.) is a human-like petroform or lithic effigy with a serpentine body and wing-like arms known as the ‘Star-being’. Configured in stone, it is approximately 20 metres in length with a red coloured, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. However, it is not a lone or singular occurrence. The ‘Star-being’ is but one of two human-like petroform effigies discovered in south-eastern Wisconsin. There is another of almost the same size called the Starman which also has a red coloured, bison-shaped headstone aligned to face the summer solstice sunrise. Both the Starman and Star-Being lithic complexes are codified by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin as archaeological sites of Archaic age.Each giant lithic effigy appears to be a reflection of certain constellations and stars. The ‘Star-being’ is a mirror-image of the (western) constellations of Scorpius and Libra (with Sagittarius); the Starman is an almost exact representation of Taurus and the Pleiades. Both giant effigies are estimated to be 3500-6000 years old, embodiments of ancient legends and traditions writ large in stone and connected to ‘The People’ through ceremony and acts of cosmic renewal.

Native American storytelling toward symbiosis and sustainable design

In Native American traditions, humans are viewed as part of the natural system. Thus, all forms of life are related to humans and must be treated with equal respect. Legends, ceremonies, songs, dances, arts, and stories are integrated parts of the spiritual system, instructing people on how to behave with each other and the environment. This perspective piece discusses the role of Native American oral tradition as it relates to Traditional Ecological Knowledge that has been carried through generations, as a means of understanding Native Americans’ role and responsibility to the earth and its resources. The paper also reviews communal intelligence and Native American sustainable design with the aim of translating such knowledge to contemporary aspects of sustainability and green design. Critical thought of the foundations of current day sustainable guidelines and ordinances is needed, along with the application of Seventh Generation Teachings and a move toward a regional perspective of defining sustainability. Finally, this paper is a call for additional nuanced research in the discovery of Traditional Environmental Knowledge held by many Native Americans, to better understand the fragile nature of humans’ relationship to the earth and its provisions and its application to sustainable design paradigms today.

The structure of everyday narrative in a city market: An ethnopoetics approach

This paper considers the value of Hymesian ethnopoetics as a means of analysing everyday narrative in conditions of mobility and change. The paper offers an account of the development of ethnopoetics as a means to make visible and valorize narrative in the Native American oral tradition, and as a method of revealing culturally specific relations of form and meaning. Hymes’ ethnopoetic approach viewed narrative structure as a reflection of a cultural tradition of meaning‐making. Hymes’ analysis proposed that traditional narrative was a culturally shaped way of speaking, and analysis of narrative structure could reveal and recreate culture. His orientation rested on an assumption that the culture of a group was more or less stable and fixed. This paper adopts an approach to analysis based on ethnopoetics, representing everyday narrative dramatically, organized not only as lines and verses, but also as scenes and acts. Representation in scenes and acts makes visible the dynamic nature of the narrative. The paper asks whether Hymes’ ground‐breaking work on ethnopoetics still has currency and purchase in 21st‐century conditions of mobility, change, and unpredictability. Analysis of everyday narrative in a city market concludes that, notwithstanding the complexity of notions of ‘culture’ and ‘language’ in such conditions, ethnopoetics can be productively applied to everyday contexts for the analysis of narrative.

Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions

This article examines how Native places are made, named, and reconstructed after colonization through storytelling. Storying the land is a process whereby the land is invested with the moral and spiritual perspectives specific to Native American communities. As seen in the oral traditions and written literature of Native American storytellers and authors, the voices of indigenous people retrace and remap cartographies for the land after colonization through storytelling. This article shows that the Americas were storied by Native American communities long before colonial contact beginning in the fifteenth century and demonstrates how the land continues to be storied in the present as a method of decolonization and cultural survivance. The article examines manifestations of the oral tradition in multiple forms, including poetry, interviews, fiction, photography, and film, to demonstrate that the land itself, through storytelling, becomes a repository of the oral tradition. The article investigates oral narratives from precontact and postcolonial time periods and across numerous nations and geographical regions in the Americas, including stories from the Mayan Popol Vuh; Algonkian; Western Apache; Hopi; Haudenosaunee/Iroquois; and Laguna Pueblo stories; and the contemporary poetry and fiction of Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Creek Nation) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo).

‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’: African American students’ reclamation of smartness as resistance

In African American culture competing value systems shape the definition and value of smartness. This article will explore African American ‘sayins’ as a tool to transmit the counter-hegemonic cultural value of smartness. ‘Sayins’, a facet of the African American oral tradition, are drawn from the deep structures of African American culture. Like proverbs and parables ‘sayins’ are linguistic tools which function to transmit cultural knowledge and govern modes of behavior. African American ‘sayins’ are imbued with an awareness of the contradicted lived experience and consequent values of resistance. The exploration of these funds of knowledge makes transparent the value and definition of smartness aligned with the principles of transformative resistance. Unpacking and reframing smartness within the cultural and epistemological context of the African American experience works in opposition to debilitating normative ways of knowing which inform teaching and learning.

Memories of Work and the Definition of Community: The Making of Italian Americans in the Mahoning Valley

Memories of Work and the Definition of Community:The Making of Italian Americans in the Mahoning Valley Donna M. Deblasio (bio) and Martha I. Pallante (bio) Henry Glassie, noted American folklorist, describes history as “stories we tell about the past in the present to define our future.”1 Nowhere is that notion of telling a story more poignant or more important than in the recovery and retention of the history of work. Work and workplaces, and the communities that workers construct are fundamentals of the human experience. The work that people do and the associations that they create around their workplaces shape not only workers’ lives but the lives of their immediate and extended families. The memories and stories that they recall are also interwoven into the lives of their succeeding generations. This impact is particularly evident in the development of two Italian American enclaves in northeastern Ohio at the end of the nineteenth century whose foundations rested on the region’s burgeoning steel industry. Smoky Hollow in Youngstown and the east side of Niles, though physically distinct, are remarkably similar in character, memory, and experience. While the oral accounts of their inhabitants appear straightforward and frankly discuss the events and attitudes that permeated their lives, they also reveal an interesting tension between reality and memory. The way people remember their past is an important consideration in the construction of identity. Oral historian Alessandro Portelli, in his important essay, “The Death of Luigi Trastulli,” examined memories of the death of Italian steelworker Luigi Trastulli in Terni, Italy. Most of Portelli’s interviewees recalled Trastulli dying during a demonstration over layoffs at the local steel [End Page 89] mill in 1953 rather than his actual demise at an anti-NATO rally in 1949. For Portelli, meaning and significance lie beyond the “facts” of Trastulli’s life and death, and he states: “Its importance lies, rather, in the fact that it became the ground upon which collective memory and imagination built a cluster of tales, symbols, legends and imaginary reconstructions.”2 Oral history interviews can and do reveal much not only about people’s lives and experiences, but also how they make meaning for themselves and their posterity out of those memories. Two recent works utilizing the voices of Italians and Italian Americans are Anthony V. Riccio’s The Italian American Experience in New Haven: Images and Oral Histories and Mary Ellen Mancina Batinich’s Italian Voices: Making Minnesota Our Home, which acknowledge that one of the few ways that the generations can connect is through memory.3 As Riccio stated, “Because the Italian American oral tradition—that body of fables, proverbs and life experience stories by which a family learns its past—is rarely recorded but kept in memory, the legacy fades as generations pass on.”4 Not only are these memories valuable within families, but they also help scholars paint a richer and more inclusive view of the past. The use of oral histories to examine the predominately Italian American neighborhoods of Smoky Hollow in Youngstown, and Niles, Ohio, reveal complex networks of relationships that have their nuclei in workplaces but extend beyond into their everyday lives and the processes of self-identification. The residents and former residents speak of life in their neighborhoods as well as their experiences in the workplace. The interviewees include those who emigrated from Italy and those of Italian heritage who were born in the United States. The stories are very rich and several tropes emerge as dominant in the evolving construction of their identities. The first are those representing their attitudes about work and their workplaces, and the second are their own socioeconomic achievements and those of their offspring. These recollections were often tied to their efforts at community building. The third theme revealed by the interviews detailed ongoing concerns about the nature of discrimination and prejudice within the immigrants’ adopted communities and the selective preservation of their ethnic heritage. The narratives clearly illustrate the dichotomy frequently encountered within immigrant communities as they navigate between their desires to retain their ethnic identities [End Page 90] and to obtain acceptance in the mainstream culture. As the interviewees discussed the role of their Italian culture in...

ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750–1830

ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750-1830. By Hilary E. Wyss. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. xii + 251 pp. $59.95.Hilary Wyss has emerged as a major force in recovery of early Native American writers. For years, standard anthologies, and a good deal of scholarship, acknowledged only two: seventeenth-century Mohegan missionary Samson Occom and nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess. This limiting (abetted by Heath and Norton anthologies' annoying persistence in relegating Native American oral traditions to their pre-literate, pre-1700 sections) helps perpetuate racist myths: that Native Americans vanished; that they had relatively little to contribute to American literature; and that, when they did write, they did so only as tools of colonial order.Alphabetic literacy is certainly a technology of colonial domination, but Wyss's first book, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity and Native Community in Early America (2000), argued that indigenous textual production between and preceding Occom and Apess is much more complicated and much more voluminous, if only we are willing to read archives more deeply. Bearing out her claim, last decade and a half have produced a cascade of new work on early Native authors: Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks's widely cited study, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in Northeast (2008), and Drew Lopenzina's Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up Pen in Colonial Period (2012), as well as brilliant documentary anthology that Wyss coedited with Kristina Bross, Early Native Literacies in New England (2008), and Robert Dale Parker's Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Poetry to 1930 (2010). These volumes, and many more, have assiduously illustrated that Native Americans who embraced alphabetic literacy-and even those who had it thrust upon them-exercised their own agency in writing and articulated complex ideals of self-determination and tribal sovereignty.You cannot understand early Native American literature without understanding early education. As Wyss puts it,Indian education is nexus through which social, political, and cultural differences were played out among Native groups, between colonial and indigenous peoples, and between competing colonial figures invested in idea of Native literacy. . . . And under often intensely difficult conditions Native Americans sustained themselves as people with their own history and culture while accepting material artifacts of English life. (35-36)English Letters and Literacies continues to fill in this history with a sustained examination of Congregationalist boarding schools operating within and outside of New England between two Great Awakenings. Evangelical efforts to educate Indians, and thereby to convert them, began almost as soon as Puritans arrived. These projects ranged from John Eliot's famous praying towns to more diffuse, home- and communitybased reading instruction. In mid-eighteenth century, New England authorities began pinning their hopes on boarding schools-precursors to infamous Carlisle School of later nineteenth century, which removed Native children from their home communities in interests of speedier assimilation. Most of these early experiments were short-lived: [N]one of them were able to sustain good relations for more than a few years with various tribes they claimed to serve . . . [revealing] gap between what Natives wanted from such ventures and what missionaries expected of their students (18). Yet schools also left extensive archives, documents that have much to tell us about colonial ideals of literacy and about Native uses of writing.Wyss characterizes former ideal as the Readerly Indian (one imagined as a passive recipient of European missionary message) and latter as the Writerly Indian, a construct that aims, strategically and purposefully, to recover agency of Indians who picked up pen. …

‘An eye for an eye’: examining a cuneiform inscription on the Nebraska State Capitol

There is little doubt that the Nebraska State Capitol building is a masterwork of art, architecture, history and mythology (fig. 1). Its skin of Indiana limestone records the political and legal growth of human civilization with quotations from Plato, Aristotle and Native American oral tradition, and the figures of great thinkers and leaders from Solon to Napoleon, who laid the philosophical foundation of the modern world. The designers of the Capitol wanted these depictions to shroud the elements of state government, while exposing those who worked there to the legacy of which they were a part. If it were not for a shared history and theme, some of the faces and languages on the Capitol would seem a strange find in Nebraska. Perhaps one of the strangest is Hammurabi1 and the depiction of a portion of his famous Code. While Hammurabi, though probably not his stylized appearance, is familiar to many, the script carved near him is not. The inscription is cuneiform, the wedge-and-line script of several civilizations in the ancient Near East. While the script on the Capitol expresses one of Hammurabi's most famous laws, its depiction is not completely accurate, and the translation given in perhaps the best article on the symbolism of the building needs updating.2The Nebraska State Capitol, built between 1922 and 1932, stands 15 storeys (121 m) high in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. When the previous capitol needed to be replaced, a Capitol Commission was formed to select an architect for what would be one of the largest construction projects in Lincoln at the time. The commission established principles to guide the project, namely that the building be a functional house of government, built with integrity and pride, and that it be:An inspiring monument worthy of the State for which it stands; a thing of beauty, so conceived and fashioned as to properly record and exploit our civilization, aspirations, and patriotism, past, present, and future; intelligently designed, durably and conscientiously built, and of worthy materials; and all beautifully and fittingly set, surrounded, embellished, and adequately furnished.During a competitive process, the commission selected the plan of the architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924). Goodhue did not, however, work alone: to address the mandate that the new capitol record the history of civilization, specifically the development of law and government, he engaged the sculptor Lee Lawrie (1877-1963). Lawrie, together with a professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Hartley Burr Alexander (1873-1939), used what is termed 'architectural sculpture': 'The exterior sculpture, a major part of the symbolism on Nebraska's capitol, is best described as architectural sculpture. It is clearly intended to be subordinate to the architecture.'4Lawrie appreciated that architectural sculpture was a critical, almost foundational, element of the entire concept of sculptural art. He noted, 'the sculptures of Babylon, Egypt, Greece and even of the Middle Ages were made almost entirely for and on buildings. The art museum is a recent invention . . . and sculpture in early days was done for a reason.'5 The sculpture of the capitol had a mission to accomplish, and what Lawrie and Alexander did with the canvas of Indiana limestone was breathtaking. The Capitol Commission declared 'The Capitol of a State is the outward sign of the character of its people. Their respect for its traditions and history, their belief in its importance and worth, and their love of its fair name - all find expression in its Capitol.'6 And that is what Nebraskans received. The sculpture of the capitol is, as Alexander wrote, 'a book, logically arranged, with introduction, body and conclusion'.7 This 'book' records the stories of Minos, Hammurabi, Moses, Akhenaten, Solon, Solomon, Julius Caesar, Justinian I, Charlemagne and Napoleon, referred to collectively as the great lawgivers, along with elements depicting the ideals of culture such as history, reason and liberation. …

Parsing Pragmatics

Parsing Pragmatics

The Sacred oral tradition of the Havasupai: as retold by elders and headmen Manakaja and Sinyella 1918-1921

Early in the twentieth century, Leslie Spier and Erna Gunther, graduate students trained by anthropologist Franz Boas, hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon to learn about Havasupai culture. In the process, they asked two Havasupai leaders and elders for every story they could remember. These were translated by native speakers and transcribed by Spier and, later, Gunther. Yet for unknown reasons Spier never published the whole collection of forty-eight stories, one of the earliest, most complete translations of an entire Native American oral tradition. Passed from Spier to anthropologist and Havasupai scholar Dr. Robert C. Euler, the stories, published here for the first time in book form with the permission of the Havasupai Tribal Council, are a cultural library and a cultural treasure that reflect an ancient Yuman-language mythological tradition. Publication restores them to the People (Pai/Pa/Pah) from whom they arose.In addition to the forty-eight stories, the volume includes essays on the cultural prehistory of the Grand Canyon and the cultural life of the Havasupai, as well as an overview of Havasupai history, leadership, and language, and an introduction to scientific thought on sacred story and mythology.

Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon J. Ortiz: Pathways to the Tradition

Abstract Native American1 literature in North America has been in a self-declared state of renaissance since 1969. This rebirth is perhaps more aptly described as an attempt to recover traditions, beliefs, and even languages that were lost, suppressed, or marginalized during a centuries-long history of conquest that ended near the close of the nineteenth century, at least in military terms. The object of this recovery is to rediscover and revivify an identity uniquely Indian in its cultural and traditional affiliations (for example, Owens 1992:3-16). Native American writers such as Simon J. Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko have been at the forefront of this recovery, and both authors have been instrumental in suggesting how Native American oral traditions can be extended into the realm of a comparatively young literature.2 Aside from the great inherent differences between oral traditional and literary modes of expression, this undertaking is rendered problematic by the fact that the majority of Native American literature is written in English. Since students of Native oral traditions have focused much of their effort on delineating an ethnopoetics of those traditions,3 it appears at first blush that scholars of the traditions and the Native American writers who are seeking to extend those traditions may not have much in common even though the traditions are of central concern to both. Certainly their priorities are different. Also, it is clear that a literary tradition, by its very nature, must utilize oral tradition in ways that are convenient to its individualized ends, resulting in an abundance of divergent approaches even within the work of a single writer. Studies in Native American literature are in a creative ferment; the field is very diffuse, and much of the scholarship is exploratory and tentative in nature, as we shall see.

The Bad Boy of Radio: The Continuity and Extension of African American Communication Dynamics Through Talk Elements of the Michael Baisden Radio Show

This study sought to examine the continuity and extension of African American communication characteristics in the talk elements (the host, guest, and callers) of the Michael Baisden Radio Show by exploring the specific oral practices that characterize talk elements of Black radio as well as the way(s) these practices related to the African American oral tradition. The African American communication characteristics of the vernacular use of language, humor, empathetic understanding, and community harmony are readily apparent in this research. The findings of this research also support the idea that when motivated by the power of the spoken word, listeners respond to the call of their radio griot.

2008 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture * Principle: The Hummingbird and the Sloth

“The elders remind us of the importance of the long view when they say, ‘pin Peyeh Obi’ look to the mountain. They use this phrase to remind us that we need to look at things as if we are looking out from the top of a mountain, seeing things in the much broader perspective of the generations that are to come. They remind us that in dealing with the landscape, we must think in terms of a ten-thousand-, twenty-thousand-, or thirty-thousand-year relationship.” In familial primary conditioning to Eastern Northern American oral tradition through Indigenous oratory; the bearing of congenital historical and still present memory of this very hemisphere for thousands of generations; the critical mapping of self; habituation of essential abstract reasoning and critical-thinking skills accumulated during formative years is immersed in belonging to place and to prayer, poetic oratory, song, and Story. The narrativising soul of human consciousness is positioned, stimulated, and engendered as a multidimensional active assembly, principled, spiritually supported, intentionally providing functional relevance to the juxtapositions of natural and perceived beauty, horrendous obtrusive dilemma, historical significance, and the meaning of presence–life.

Los fantasmas de Beloved

Tony Morrison’s novel is inspired in the real story of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, and can be considered a ghost story belonging to the African American oral tradition as well as a slave narrative. In it, Morrison wants to break the silence around the dreadful events that took place in the lives of millions of black slaves in The United States of America. Her characters must learn to "speak the unspeakable" in order to exorcise the demons of slavery through "rememory", the painful remembrance of the past that haunts not only the black community but the whole history of this nation. Morrison’s intention may well be to write a "literary archaology", recovering the past in an original narrative mode that gives a voice to those that had been silenced for centuries.