Oral Poetics Research Articles

The emergence of praise-poetry recitation in the Ịjọ community

This article focuses on the emergence of praise-poetry recitation among the Ịjọ of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. It argues that until the contemporary period, the Ịjọ had no such poetic form. The article therefore examines how Chief Adolphus Munamuna, Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe (The Chief Oral Poet of the Ịzọn Nation), was influenced by Yoruba bards to begin a poetic tradition that was previously alien to the Ijo community. It further compares the tradition, as it is practised by the Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe, with other ethnic groups in Africa, including the Yoruba, Hausa, Somali and the Bantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa where the culture of praise chanting continues to this day.

Kajian Historis: Corak Sastra Arab (Zaman Jahiliyah, Shadr Islam dan Umawiyah)

Abstract: This paper aims to examine the style of Arabic literature during the time of Jahiliyah, Shadr Islam (the beginning of Islam) and Umawiyah. The method used in this study is the analytical descriptive method, namely by describing how the form or pattern of Arabic literature during the time of Jahiliyah, Shadr Islam (the beginning of Islam) and Umawiyah. While the approach applied in this study is a historical approach, where researchers look for histories related to the style of Arabic literature during the Jahiliyah, Shadr Islam (the beginning of Islam) and Umawiyah. The results of this research are 1) in the Jahiliyah era, the style of Prose and Poetry in this era is almost the same, starting from the lafadznya which is clear and eloquent, has a deep meaning, rhymes. Prose at this time also consisted of Sermons, Testaments, Matsals, Hikmah, and Qissoh. 2) Shadr Islam In this age Prose and Poetry also developed, but Prose was much more developed than poetry. Especially in the Khutbah, this is because at this time the Khutbah is used to ignite the spirit of the warriors to fight to spread Islam. While poetry has not developed enough, this is because poets at this time are busy fighting and studying the Qur'an and hadith. So, in terms of meaning, imagination, lafadz, and language style do not achieve high dignity. Prose at this time included the Khutbah, Matsal, and Kitabah. 3) The Age of the Umayyad Dynasty, in this age Prose and Poetry are much developed rapidly compared to the previous two eras. This development was due to the emergence of political parties so that many sermons and poems developed to support their respective parties, and this became a source of income for poets. However, at this time poetry had begun to deviate from its original purpose of spreading Islam using good language, but after the establishment of the Umayyads they used the politics of violence and deceit which made it compulsory to buy oral poets. Prose at this time included the Khutbah, Rasail, and Kitabah which in terms of language imitated and decorated from the language style of the Qur'an which was smooth, clear, and had a deep meaning.

Reassurance and Doubt in Homer’s Odyssey

Our Odyssey is shaped by oral poetics but also by storytelling techniques developed to attract and hold audiences’ attention. From Odysseus’s first appearance, episodes consistently bring to mind his revenge plot against the suitors and test the qualities and skills he will need to carry it out. These episodes offer reassuring evidence that Odysseus will defeat the suitors balanced by doubt-inducing signs that he will fail. Taken together, these episodes elicit hope and fear, the constituent elements of suspense, regarding Odysseus’s chances of succeeding. The consistency with which these episodes appear and the balance they strike between reassurance and doubt suggest that the generation of suspense played a significant role in the composition of the Odyssey as we have it.

Udje, Ecosystem, and Sustainability

ABSTRACT: Recent scholarly publications on African literature discuss the African environment and the need to “naturalize” it as if the continent’s environment is not or has not been “natural.” By looking at only recent written African literature and not studying African oral literatures, the works on environmentalism have missed important parts of what the African creative mind has done before later postcolonial writers started. It is this gap that this essay on udje, an African oral poetic genre, is used to fill. This essay looks at how African oral poets made use of land that embraces bush/forests and water with its resources to express the congenial relationship between human and nonhuman beings. The physical environment becomes a repository of tropes to express human relationships and existential ideas. Oral literatures such as udje expressed a complementarity that newer literary works lack and so should be studied for a holistic environmental condition and solution.

Three Versions of the Ballad from Bosnia's North about Pledging a Son for a Brother

Approximately sixty lyrical songs were inscribed into the Folklore Archive of the National Museum during the field research in Brcko conducted by Bosnian writer and folklorist Alija Nametak as an employee of the Institute for Folklore Research in 1956, including a ballad about a mother who sacrificed her son to save her brother's life. This moving ballad has been inscribed at least twice more in Bosnia's north, and two variants of this song were recorded in Derventa - they are included in a large collection made by Smajl Bradaric and kept in the National Museum of BiH's Folklore Archive. The National Museum and the BiH Slavic Committee collaborated to publish this collection (Bradari 2018). The mentioned ballad was also discussed in Munib Maglajlic's 1985 study "Muslim Oral Ballads," in the section entitled Conflict in the Family, indicating its importance, but also a solid number of variants throughout Bosnia (Maglajlić 2018). The variants presented here, however, were not the subjects of Maglajlić's analyses, even though he found as many as nine versions of this ballad from various sources for his study. This paper will use the method of three-variant ballad promotion to see the oral poet from Bosnia's north in action. It will try to show and highlight the poetic achievements of the "northern" variants. The poetic shaping of key motifs will be considered in each recorded variant, and the difference between them will be established. Methods of interpretation and analysis will be used.

Narrator czy… poeta oralny? Mickiewiczowski „Powrót taty” w opracowaniu muzycznym Henryka Jareckiego i Jana Gołębiowskiego

The article discusses the opera-ballad Powrót taty (Father’s return) in a musical edition by Henryk Jarecki with a libretto by Jan Gołębiowski. Its goal is to present the manners of building the character and the narrative. Apart from the characteristic features of a ballad, the text also discusses the category of an oral poet, a “storyteller” and the dialogue relation (“speaking” instead of “talking”.) These are the means that gave Mickiewicz’s ballad a new dimension. Helpful in its reception are texts on cultural practices, especially those referring to oral culture (compare with e.g. Jack Goody, Albert B. Lord, Eric A. Havelock, Walter J. Ong.).

Globalization and the African Praise-Poet: The Example of ??b?b? K?n? ?z?n Ibe (The Chief Oral Poet of the ?z?n Nation)

Scholars exploring the role of praise-poets in contemporary Africa have not yet looked at praise-poets' response to globalization-related issues, such as immigration, gender, environment, HIV/AIDS, and language endangerment and death. This article focuses on the relations between African praisepoets and globalization. It examines how Chief Adolphus Munamuna, an Ịzọn praise-poet, has used his art to address two issues of globalization affecting Africa in general and the Ịzọn in particular: HIV/AIDS and language endangerment and death. It points out that even globalization has not wiped out the social function that praise-poets have been serving since precolonial times; rather, it has opened up new topics and contexts for them to explore.

Formula in the Praise Chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna, Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe (The Chief Oral Poet of the Ịzọn Nation)

This paper begins with the contention that scholars of African oral literature have exhibited a ‘best avoided’ approach towards formula, the most important aspect of the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. It argues that, even in this century, the dominant approaches to the study of African folklore have been performance, Marxism, formalism, structuralism, feminism and functionalism. Therefore, building on the meager literature on formula, this article investigates its occurrence in traditional Ịjọ poetry, particularly in the praise chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that the formula density is high in the bard’s praise poems. This article also notes that formulas are useful and necessary to the Ịjọ bard because they enable him to compose his poems rapidly in the course of performance.

Stylistic elements in the praise poetry of Chief Adolphus Munamuna, ọụbẹbẹ kẹnị Ịjọ ibe (the chief oral poet of the Ịjọ nation)

This article focuses on the language of the praise poetry of Chief Adolphus Munamuna of the Ịzọn ethnic group, located in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region. It examines the extent to which the Ịjọ bard makes use of such stylistic devices as parallelism, ideophone, praise title, metaphor, simile, alliteration, assonance, and personification, amongst others. The article points out that the Otuan-born poet deliberately contrives elements of style to achieve balance, develop ideas and build up his chants. Moreover, the article highlights that some of the stylistic devices add drama and liveliness to the performances of the bard. In addition, the poetic qualities provide a musical element to the chants, as well as vividness to the events described.

Intertextuality in Selected Narrative Poems of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí

The creative works of Adébáyọ Fálétí, a renowned literary writer in Yorùbá, ̀ have been the focus of literary critics. Notable among such are Olatunji (1982a; 1982b; 1982c), Ogunsina (1991), Ìṣọ̀lá (1998) and Adebowale (1999). These scholars have examined the issues of form, style and theme in Fálétí’s poetry. It has been established that Fálétí is a philosophical poet influenced by the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the society that produced his poems. According to Olatunji (1982), “the oral poetic tradition of the Yorùbá constitutes the weft and woof of Fálétí’s poetic genius.” This attests to the claim that “no artist creates in a vacuum” (Agyekum, 2007:31). It could be deduced from the above position that there is an interplay between the text of Fálétí’s poetry and the context that produced it. Using intertextuality approach, this paper, therefore, examines the interplay of the text, context and the writer in selected poems of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí with a view to determining the correlation between the Yorùbá oral poetic genres and the written form in Fálétí’s poetry and determining the continuity of the oral poetic genre in the written form. Fálétí’s biography has been discussed by Olatunji (1982). He was born at Agbóóyè in Ọyọ̀ ́ and had his elementary life on the farm, where he was exposed to the Yorùbá culture undiluted. He was a novelist, playwright, poet, scriptwriter and actor when alive. His works include Ọmọ Olókùn Ẹṣin, Thunderbolt, Baṣọrun Gáà, Fẹrẹ bí Ẹkùn, ̀ and Ogún Àwítẹ́lẹ. Fálétí’s works ̀ are greatly influenced by his family background because his father was a 120 Arinpe Adejumo and Adefemi Akinseloyin prominent member of the sàkàrá calabash beating oral poets and entertainers under Olatunji Kúdẹẹ̀ ̀fù in the court of Ọba Ṣiyanbọ́lá Oníkẹẹ̀ pé Ládìg ́ - bòlù I, the Aláàfin of Ọyọ̀ (1911-1944). Fálétí learnt a lot about narratives and ́ other techniques of rendition from his father’s poetic influence. There are also cases of intertextuality in his narrative poems and other literary works. Fálétí’s narrations and literary works are inspired by the tales he heard from his father, aunt and members of the larger family (Olatunji 1982). These influenced his narrative poems, as they reflect chronicles, heroism and expositions, which he borrowed from the Yorùbá oral poetic genre. Since oral poets are imbued with repertoires of praise poetry, legends, myths, proverbs, songs and history, Fálétí’s narrative poems are filled with the intertextuality of Yorùbá oral materials.

Chief Adolphus Munamuna, Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịjọ Ibe (the chief oral poet of the Ịjọ nation): the Ịjọ praise poet and the Niger Delta issue

The Niger Delta struggle or problem is no longer news to the international community. It has become the preoccupation in the works of contemporary literate writers from the region. In fact, such works have even begot the name, literature of the Niger Delta; and there is much scholarship on the appreciation of these works. However, what has been missing is that scholars in the disciplines of folklore, literature and cultural anthropology have not given attention to the relationship between the struggle and the traditional verbal art forms of the region. Therefore, this paper explores a fairly long oral poem about the struggle, chanted by the Ịjọ praise-singer, Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that, in doing so, Chief Munamuna continues the tradition of the African bard who comments on the goings-on in his society; not just chanting the praises of chiefs and other important personalities. It concludes by noting that the Niger Delta problem becoming a tool in the hands of an oral artist adds a new dimension to the discourse on the Niger Delta struggle.

LITERACY AND ORALITY: BETWEEN ABROGATION AND APPROPRIATION IN NGUGI WA THIONG’O’S THE RIVER BETWEEN

Colonizers have used language as an instrument of socio-political and economic control during colonisation. This has enabled them in the process to establish power hierarchy based mostly on linguistic superiority by undermining native tongues. In recent years, theories of postcolonial discourses hold the view that colonialism has fundamentally affected modes of representation of colonised spaces. Through questioning and travestying western hegemonic discourses, writers from once colonised spaces have challenged and subverted the hegemonic power of the colonial language by inserting different strategies into their own language to suit socio-cultural contexts. For postcolonial literary artists, this consists in taking the language of the former imperial power, to unlearn its worldview and re-place it in a discourse fully adapted to ones’ own space and subsequently, produce new modes of representation in countering colonial canonical texts. In this sense, postcolonial discourse is crystallised by and replete with ‘abrogation’ and ‘appropriation’ in the canon of postcolonial studies. This suggests the writer’s use of linguistic structure of the borrowed language, the manipulation of its syntactical structure as well as its semantics, to convey stance against the colonizer. In its pronouncement, an effort is made to advocate for a critical rethinking of the legacies of colonial domination as well as its accompanying epistemologies. Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o uses elements of oral tradition (orality) or better indigenous poetics in his fictional works, mostly The River Between, to express the meanings, feelings and experiences of his Gikuyu people. Thus, orality as a means of communication and carrier of the culture of those people to whom it is a mother tongue, has social, cultural, and political aesthetic roles to play in the African worldview. To achieve this, Ngugi employs historically significant events, moments and stylistic features which are characteristics of oral tradition to emphasise important key concepts that help to reconstruct positive moral values in conflict with foreign ones in a fragmented Kenyan society. Though many controversies surround Ngugi’s writing and its medium of reception, this paper contends that his fictions written in his mother tongue or in English and/or translated into English, are part and parcel of his endeavour to appropriate the literary enterprise not only as a weapon of active physical revolt and textual indignation but also as against (post)colonial pathologies. Ngugi refashions the colonial English language to show that his country, Kenya, is not a mere passive entity in tolerating colonial legacies; but challenges western hegemonic power dimensions, dismantles them to the point of bringing them under its own terms and conditions. The conceptual frameworks that underpin the study are New historicism (New Culturalism) and postcolonial theory. 
 
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Learning formulaic creativity: Chunking in verbal art and speech

Abstract The chunking problem is central to linguistics, semiotics, and poetics: How do we learn to organize a language into patterns and to use those patterns creatively? Linguistics has mainly offered two answers, one based on rule inference through innate capacities for processing and the other based on usage and on outstanding capacities for memory and retrieval. Both views are based on induction and compositionality. The Parry–Lord theory of oral composition-in-performance has argued that oral singers produce complex poems out of rehearsed improvisation through the mastery of a system of formulas, chunks that integrate phrasal, metrical, and semantic structures. The framework of formulaic creativity proposed here argues that the cognitive study of oral poetics can provide crucial insights into the chunking problem. I show the major connections between Parry–Lord and usage-based cognitive linguistics, mainly Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics. However, these approaches still remain compositional and thus struggle to model creativity and learning in oral poetry and everyday speech. The alternative is to explore a model of formulaic creativity not based on compositional patterns, but on wide learning for connecting discriminative perceptual features directly to semantic contrasts within a complex dynamic system, without the intermediation of a set of discrete units.

A BAKHTINIAN APPROACH TO MAYA ORAL LITERATURE

This article discusses oral literature, as an old and well established term in ethnolinguistics and anthropology, but a controversial one in the field of literature. Recently, the issue has also become an ethical matter related to the cultural rights of native people in the American continent and by the same token, a major aesthetical subject for academic research. With that in mind, I consider the relevance of Bakhtinian literary theory, especially those concepts based on the aesthetics of verbal creation, as a way to approach the study of native oral literatures, the Maya poetics in particular, whose intellectual and artistic achievements stand out for their archaic backgrounds and their resonance in contemporary times. This discussion leads us to the issue of world literature as an artistic sphere whose canon is undergoing important critiques, in part coming from those indigenous voices the canon has left outside, but also from academic voices that aim for an inclusion of native oral poetics as literature. DOI: https://doi.org/10.47295/mren.v9i3.2382

El diálogo intertextual entre Las Argonáuticas de Apolonio de Rodas y las epopeyas homéricas

Apolonio de Rodas fue uno de los principales representantes de la poesía griega del período helenístico. En su única obra conservada, Las Argonáuticas, este autor estableció un significativo diálogo con la tradición literaria anterior, especialmente con las epopeyas homéricas. Debido a la desatención que durante mucho tiempo existió con respecto a la literatura helenística, así como a la ausencia de un estudio integrador acerca de la obra de Apolonio en relación con sus antecedentes épicos, este trabajo se propuso realizar un análisis de la intertextualidad (particularmente la hipertextualidad) entre Las Argonáuticas y los poemas de Homero. Los aspectos examinados permitieron concluir que el poeta helenístico conjugó en su epopeya elementos de tradición y de innovación, y estableció un creativo diálogo intertextual con el antiguo aedo, pues a la vez que asimiló magistralmente los principales recursos y motivos de la épica tradicional, incorporó características estéticas propias de su tiempo.

Mujeres decimistas. Estrategias de instalación en el campo cultural

El presente articulo es parte de una investigacion acerca de mujeres contemporaneas que cultivan la decima escrita e improvisada. Se trata de las payadoras Cecilia Astorga (Chile), Marta Suint y Susana Repetto (Argentina), Mariela Acevedo (Uruguay), Tomasita Quiala (Cuba) y las escritoras Liliana Rodriguez y Odalys Leyva (Cuba), ademas de la agrupacion mexicana Soneras y Versadoras de Tlacotalpan. La pregunta respecto de las estrategias de instalacion en el campo cultural se articula con los procesos de conformacion de su identidad como artistas y con la necesidad de afirmacion de la identidad femenina, estableciendo agrupaciones de mujeres como un modo de legitimar y visibilizar el arte que desarrollan.

Grieg As Storyteller: The Poetics of the Ballade in G Minor, Op. 24

Abstract Critical discussion of Edvard Grieg’s Ballade has tended to dwell on more superficial aspects of its formal layout, rather than investigate the unique poetics that underlies its trajectory. This essay contends that in 1875, when he chose to write a song ‘so people will see / that even the North can be beautiful’, Grieg turned to the most profound and personal of Norway’s literary inheritances, the sagas and Eddas, for formal, structural, and aesthetic inspiration. The juxtaposition of ancient folksong and late-Romantic harmony fuels a dynamic interaction that not only creates the effect of a great abyss of time, but also serves as the dramatic impetus for Grieg’s narrative, one that gradually purges the theme of its chromaticism and transforms it into a barbaric final dance. Grieg’s engagement with his material may be seen as something analogous to the oral poet, illuminating aspects of storytelling sometimes unfamiliar in the Western tradition.

Avdo Međedović’s Post-Traditional Epics and Their Relevance to Homeric Studies

Abstract[Milman Parry established first that Homeric poetry was traditional, based on his studies of its formulae and language, and then that it was oral, based on his experience of recording south Slavic epic; he likened the unusually long epics of Avdo Međedović to those of Homer. Albert Lord put the two concepts together, holding that both south Slavic epic and Homeric poetry were oral-traditional and that all oral epic poetry, including that of Međedović, is traditional. However, the author’s investigations into the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and his personal experience of collecting epics in Montenegro in 1989 prove that this is incorrect. The poems of Avdo Međedović do not conform to traditional uses of language, theme and story-patterns, but offer something new, of which other traditional singers disapproved, as their recorded conversations demonstrate. Similarly, by analogy, the epics of Homer differed from the traditional poems of the Epic Cycle, exactly as Aristotle indicates in the Poetics. Hence neither Međedović nor, by analogy, Homer were fully traditional poets, although they were oral poets; instead, they deliberately adapted the tradition so that the old stories were mixed and matched into much lengthier and more complex epics, which should be called post-traditional.]

Women as Victims of War in Homer’s Oral Poetics

The article presents the problem of the empathy felt by the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey towards women depicted as victims of war. Understanding of the world in the Homeric poems may be misinterpreted today. Since Homer’s works are a product of oral culture, in order to determine his intentions, it is necessary to look at them from the perspective of the tradition from which they derive. Furthermore, the author of an oral work can be deemed as creative because s/he shapes his/her story through interaction with the listening audience. The different aspects of the relationship of women as victims of war with their oppressors are, therefore, interpreted according to the use of traditional techniques adopted to evoke specific emotions in the audience.

Oral Poets in Conflict: Âşık Veysel and Dengbêj Reso on the Rope

Oral Poets in Conflict: Âşık Veysel and Dengbêj Reso on the Rope