Thread: Oral storytelling

I was talking to someone recently who is interested in traditional oral stories. One of the first things to come up was Anasi, they had heard of the stories but did not know them. Anansi originates in West Africa as the son of the Sky God but by the time he re-appears in the West Indies he is demoted to Hero status. In the story I told them he rids a village of a giant snake and is rewarded by the Sky God with a “Book of knowledge”. Thinking about it afterwards I realised that it must have been very rare, if not unknown, for a slave to be taught reading. Could rewarding him with a book of knowledge be viewed as a form of cargo cult?
The other point was that they felt that each story had its central theme and the ways the storyteller changes it were simply embellishment, this seems totally wrong to me. A well told story consists of layer upon layer of metaphor and meaning and the storyteller will be adjusting it according to subtle clues from their audience. The audience for such stories were acquainted with natural and man made death and disaster on a daily basis, I meet people my age in this society who have never even seen a dead body, never mind regular public executions. It is my belief that story telling was one of the mechanisms by which they coped with this and the stories might be compared to the therapeutic metaphors one finds in Milton Erickson’s “And my voice will go with you”. That is a striking and distracting backbone to hang all sorts of subtle messages on for the listener to absorb sub consciously

Have you read Gaiman's American Gods or Anansi Boys? Good stuff and only slightly off topic.

Originally Posted by Olly Buckle

I was talking to someone recently who is interested in traditional oral stories. One of the first things to come up was Anasi, they had heard of the stories but did not know them. Anansi originates in West Africa as the son of the Sky God but by the time he re-appears in the West Indies he is demoted to Hero status. In the story I told them he rids a village of a giant snake and is rewarded by the Sky God with a “Book of knowledge”. Thinking about it afterwards I realised that it must have been very rare, if not unknown, for a slave to be taught reading. Could rewarding him with a book of knowledge be viewed as a form of cargo cult?

The other point was that they felt that each story had its central theme and the ways the storyteller changes it were simply embellishment, this seems totally wrong to me. A well told story consists of layer upon layer of metaphor and meaning and the storyteller will be adjusting it according to subtle clues from their audience. The audience for such stories were acquainted with natural and man made death and disaster on a daily basis, I meet people my age in this society who have never even seen a dead body, never mind regular public executions. It is my belief that story telling was one of the mechanisms by which they coped with this and the stories might be compared to the therapeutic metaphors one finds in Milton Erickson’s “And my voice will go with you”. That is a striking and distracting backbone to hang all sorts of subtle messages on for the listener to absorb sub consciously

I am sure you have a head full of all manner of interesting stuff. All you need is someone skilled at putting it into a form that can be easily followed when written down. Your second parargraph lost me completely.

OK, So she thought that each story had an essential central theme that was the most important thing in it, for example Rumplestiltskin was about female empowerment (Don't as me, it was her example). I feel that the main theme was actually secondary and the subtle metaphors contained within it were more important. In a society where death disease and human cruelty were so commonplace that most of the population suffered from something we would now call post traumatic stress, or similar, they served the same sort of purpose that therapeutic metaphors do nowadays. Being enthralled by the story would give it the same sort of extra effect that trance induction does.

Telling oral stories isn't so bad.

Move into some of the other Freudian states and it can get a little gross.

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Interesting because down in the south of Belize I've been at drum circles with dances that told stories straight out of old Africa.

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What I know best is Dangriga. But my impression was that there is a lot of evidence behind the "slave ship excapees mixing with Caribs" idea. And I'm having a hard time picturing a migration from Africa to Brazil, then up the coast.

But one thing that hits you right off is that you've got these ex-slaves in the North talking like Jamaicans and in the South the people are like Straight Outa Africa. It's a pretty startling contrast.

Oral traditions can be remarkably persistent. A researcher investigating childrens playground rhymes that they teach each other, as opposed to nursery rhymes they are taught by adults, found a record of one made by a master at Westminster school in the 1600s that was still being sung in central London 400 years later. If you reckon a maximum of 5 years to a generation of children, probably less, that's the equivalent of an oral tradition in adult culture lasting about two and a half thousand years. I think it was Valerian was the Roman general who accompanied Claudius on the conquest of Britain and went south and west while he went north and east, anyway, he describes a village in the south west that performed a ritual spring song every year, sounds very much like the Padstow spring song.

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Originally Posted by garza

Olly - It is that kind of oral tradition that is being lost. I love today's technology, but I hate the uses to which it is being put. I can remember as a small child hearing my father talk about the possibilities of television, how at last there would be universal literacy and universal understanding. So we got television. 'Captain Video', 'Howdy Doody', and 'I Love Lucy'. Today the Internet has the same problem. The potential for infinite good is here, but the uses to which it is put are destructive. Another few generations and we may find that much of that oral tradition has been forever lost.

I do not belive it, there may be times when it sinks low but I bet it will re-emerge. A few miles from here on the south downs there is a figure of a man cut in the chalk, the long man of Wilmington, some researcher recently dicovered they could date it, something to do with fine chemical analysis of the exposed chalk, it is over three thousand years old. Now get this, unless it had been weeded and cleaned up at least every two or three years it would have disappeared, so that was a consistent effort on the part of the locals, through invasion, conquest, plague, famine and all the rest for three thousand years, think a few ipods and a bit of telly will stop them? There will always be some bearded weirdo with a collection of stories as well, and the TV also shows Planet earth and The Blue Planet, the next generation of Rainbow Warrior crew members are watching them right now.

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