"Oratory, a genre more significant in native America (and Africa) than in European lore, encompasses prayer, educational monologues, ceremonial colloquy, and the magical prose poems, or formulas, calculated to bring about a desired result by coercion. Composed of set phrases, whose sequence may be varied considerably, oratory falls between the strictness of song and the freedom of narrative" (p. 3065).
"In performance, such texts were accompanied by the . . . upright skin drum (played with bare hands), and the . . . slit drum (played with mallets). Gongs, flutes, whistles, and other instruments might also be present, as the singer intones his phrases, punctuated by the cries of dancers in military attire. Although the program for any particular song text cannot be reconstructed, contemporary descriptions allow one to imagine a lively scene, staged as an outdoor theatrical complete with its ominous drumming and the sight of glistening unsheathed weapons" (p. 3074).
"The interplay between core elements of the text, which are relatively fixed (for example, genealogies of families and clans), and the performer's free improvisations (often involving digressions and general reflections as well as anachronistic references and topical allusions) generates a profound / sense that the story, though established by tradition, is at the same time constantly renewed in performance. Thus if orality implies limitations, it also implies creative possibilities, apparently in the many differeing versions of the epic recorded by individual griots" (pp. 2410-11).
– Link 1
A page from the Madrid codex, a Maya screen fold book, from a Web site devoted to Mesoamerican images taken by J. Q. Jacobs.
OVERVIEW: THE ANCIENT WORD
The three quite disparate literatures gathered together in Volume C of The Norton Anthology of World Literature share at least one unifying feature: a reverence for the past. In labeling the period from 1350 to1650 the Renaissance, European intellectuals acknowledged the "legacy of the ancient world of Greece and Rome" (p. 2465). Schoolboys were taught by imitation: an age of discovery and exploration drew much of its energy from studying and repeating canonical texts, many of which were orations that had been written down and preserved because of the vigor of their expression and the moral weight of their content. Like the Renaissance humanists, the bards of pre-literate thirteenth- and fourteenth-century West Africa and the spiritual leaders of the pre-Columbian Americas prized the rhetorical formulas in which inhered the wisdom and the traditions of their communities. And like the Renaissance humanists, who gained access to the words of the ancients by a revived ability to read Greek letters, scholars in the twentieth century gained access to the powerful oratory of Africa and the New World by cracking their linguistic and performative codes.
The Oral Traditions of Mesoamerica
The classical age of Maya culture, centered in and around the Guatemalan highlands, flourished more than a thousand years before Columbus and Cortes sailed to the Americas, from A.D.100-900. The written language of this ancient civilization, Quiche, is mainly expressed in hieroglyphics. By the year 1325, the Aztecs, whose language was Nahuatl, had come from the north and settled in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Like the Maya, the Aztecs also had a system of writing that was pictorial rather than alphabetic. Their scribes were artists who created magnificent painted books, "foundational documents from which elaborate . . . songs . . . were orally developed" (Elizabeth Hill Boone, "Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico," Native Traditions in the Postconquest World, eds. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins [Dumbarton Oaks, 1998], p. 152). Although the picture books alone did not represent the sum of the information to be shared, those who were responsible for preserving and communicating the ancient word were known as tlacuilos, Nahuatl for speaking by painting.
– Link 2
A photograph of p. 59 from the Borgia Codex, in the collection of the Vatican Library.
A photograph of p. 59 from the Borgia Codex, in the collection of the Vatican Library.
This excerpt from one of the Cantares Mexicanos in a manuscript owned by the National Library of Mexico characterizes the special hybrid of oral and visual language of the pre-Columbian Mexicas:
I sing the pictures of the book
and see them propagating,
I am a graceful bird
for I can make the books speak
within the house of the paintings.
(as quoted in the introduction by Miguel Leon-Portilla to Native American Spirituality: Ancient Myths, Discourses, Stories, Doctrines, Hymns, Poems from the Aztec, Yucatec, Quiche-Maya, and Other Sacred Traditions [New York:Paulist Press, 1980], p. 33)
The opening of the Popol Vuh demonstrates the difficulty faced by the performer who had to speak without the assistance of the picture books:
This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called Quiche. . . .There is the original book and ancient writing, but the one who reads and assesses it has a hidden identity.4 It takes a long performance and account to complete the lighting of all the sky-earth. . . . (pp. 3080-81).
The reader must hide, as footnote 4 points out, "to avoid the missionaries." With the purposeful destruction of the picture books, the Spanish conquistadors sought to eradicate the language, the religion, and the cultural practices of the aboriginal inhabitants of Central America.
– Link 3
From the Florentine Codex, a painting that shows words flowing from the mouth of the speaker, a typical device (called a speech scroll) linking the oratorical and the visual as means of communication.
Fray Bernardino de Sahagun and The Ancient Word
The Franciscan missionary Fray Bernardino de Sahagun arrived in the New World in 1529 and, along with other members of his order, devoted himself to linguistic studies. The friars learned Nahuatl in order to Christianize the Indians, but some of them became fascinated by what they were learning of the Aztec world. In 1547, Sahagun undertook to write a General History of the Things of New Spain, beginning with what was to become the Sixth Book. This invaluable collection of huehuetlatolli (a compound Nahuatl term adding tlatolli, "word, oration, or language," to huehue, or "old man") Sahagun titled "Of the Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy and Theology of the Mexican people." In the prologue to his General History, a magisterial twelve-book "record of Aztec culture" (p. 3070), writing more than twenty years after the establishment of the Catholic Church in Mexico (now called New Spain), Sahagun declares the need for this study:
A doctor cannot correctly apply medicines to the ill without first knowing
from what disposition and cause the sickness proceeds; therefore a good
physician should be knowledgeable in medicines and in sicknesses so as to apply
correctly to each disease the corrective medicine; and the preachers and the
confessors, being doctors of the soul, should be experienced in the medicines and illnesses of the spirit in order to cure the spiritual ills . . . the sins of idolatry,
idolatrous rites and beliefs, omens, superstitions, and idolatrous ceremonies have
not yet totally disappeared.
As quoted by Alfredo Lopez Austin, "The Research Method of Sahagun,"
in Munro S. Edmonson, ed. Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), p. 113.
To amass his materials, Sahagun asked the leaders of a village for advice; they directed him to ten or twelve of the village elders, who would "truly answer everything that might be asked of them" (p. 116). Accordingly, assisted in his inquiries by four young natives to whom Sahagun had previously taught Latin, he consulted experts, the orators, priests, and midwives who spoke "the rhetorical, ritual, and ceremonial language of . . . an inordinately ritualistic and ceremonial people" (Thelma D. Sullivan in "The Rhetorical Orations, or Huehuetlatolli, Collected by Sahagun," in Edmonson, p. 109).
– Link 4
Tenochtitlan, the city of Mexico, in an engraving from a seventeenth-century manuscript in the collection of Washington University of St. Louis.
Nahuatl Lyric: Cantares Mexicanos
The social occasions and events marked in the Nahuatl orations collected by Sahagun-prayers in time of plague or sickness, ceremonial court utterances, instructions by parents to their children, exhortations to merchants about to set out on journeys, cautionary words on the birth of an infant-testify to the continuity of human experience. Though spoken over five hundred years ago, the huehuetlatolli impress us with the care and gravity expected in the organization of everyday life. Children studied oratory in order both to learn their language and to civilize their manners: the orations show us the norms of a traditional culture. The Cantares Mexicanos, by contrast, reflect the extremes of a culture threatened by outsiders; John Bierhorst calls these poems nativistic (p. 3073), expressions of a subversive and militaristic ethos that were recorded by conquerors who failed to understand how these poems implied a challenge to Spanish rule. Frequent references to narcotic intoxication suggest the power of the word performed to lift the singer out of ordinary life and perhaps to encourage warriors to fight without concern for preserving ordinary life.
– Link 5
A map of the Aztec Empire, from a History Department site of the University of Calgary.
Figures of Speech in Nahuatl Oratory and Poetry
The rhetorical devices characteristic of Mesoamerican ceremonial utterance resemble patterns of eloquence that we may recall from other traditions that straddle the threshold between oral and written speech. The orations from Book Six of Sahagun's General History and the poems of the Cantares Mexicanos rely on repetition, parallel phrasing, and compound metaphors, as do, say, the Hebrew Psalms or Anglo-Saxon poems. But the natural and social worlds from which they draw their terms uniquely reflect environmental and cultural norms that seem exotic and sometimes shocking to a North American in the twenty-first century. Thelma Sullivan, one of the leading interpreters of Nahuatl oratory, gives a sense of how idiosyncratic its metaphors can be: the combination of "water" and "mountain," for example, stands for "city"; "out of the clouds, out of the mist"= "a wonder." And "saliva, spittle" indicates "falsehood" (p. 99).
Even more remarkable is the vocabulary of the Cantares Mexicanos. To understand the relationship between "city of the eagles" and "battlefield" (Song XII, p. 3076), we need only remember that birds of prey swoop down upon the dead. To go deeper into the diction of these poems, however, requires both expertise and inspired guesswork. The elaborate system of equivalences in which "jade" or "gold necklace" denotes a person, and "flower" means not only "song" but also the ghost of a dead warrior suggests that these lyrics express ritual acts rather than the personal feeling that modern-day readers associate with the genre. Even so dedicated a student as Sahagun admitted that he found these poems impenetrable: "For the most part they sing of idolatrous things in a style so obscure that there is no one who really understands them-except themselves alone" (as quoted in John Bierhorst, trans., intro, commentary, Cantares Mexicanos : Songs of the Aztecs [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985], p. 17).
However unintelligible the words may be to a reader today, however, sixteenth-century accounts of performance attest to the spectacular song and dance that animated the texts. As early as 1539, it appears that the Church was eager to ban native singing (Bierhorst, p. 109). Here is a description by Fray Diego Duran, another sixteenth-century observer of Mexican life, of a ritual enacted at the altar of a temple:
While they danced, some boys descended dressed as birds and others as butterflies, well adorned with rich plumes, green and blue and red and yellow.
They climbed up in these trees and went from branch to branch sucking the dew
of those roses.
Then the gods came out, each in their costumes, they way they were in the
altars-Indians, dressed up in the same way. And with their blowguns in hand
They went and shot at the make-believe birds that were moving around in the trees . . . . This was the most impressive dance that this nation had . . . .
(From Book of the Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar, as quoted in Bierhorst, p. 71).
The fascinated and horrified Spaniards had the last word, of course; by the end of the sixteenth century, the ghost-song ritual had died, presumably because the loss of cultural autonomy meant that youngsters were no longer trained in the tradition of the Cantares.
– Link 6
A picture of griot Jali Nyama Suso, The Gambia, 1974, playing the kora (note his name on the instrument), from the Web site of The College of Staten Island, City University of New York.
West African oral epic
Contemporizing the ancient word
In Africa, oratory and oral performance have persisted up to the present. The Epic of Son-Jara originated as a celebration of a semi-legendary figure who ruled the Manding people in the thirteenth century. Fundamentally an oral work, it is to this day recreated each time a new griot or jeli (the Malinke term) tells the story. Readers of John William Johnson's translation of the text as spoken by Fa-Digi Sisoko can get a sense of the excitement of oral performance in the marginal indications of audience participation that pepper the narrative. And in some of the incantatory passages we see how traditions of oratory not unlike those of the Aztecs have been preserved in the African story. There is an important distinction to mark, however: Nahuatl oratory is tied to ritual. Its formulas are sacred, and thus memorized and repeated. The African bards improvise, so no two versions of the epic of Son-Jara (Sundiata, Sunjata) are alike. At the very start of the African poem, for example, the griot inserts a reference to "The Republic of Mali" (p. 2415), which dates from 1960. Yet the events in the poem take place in the legendary past.
– Link 7
From the Atlas Catalan, a fourteenth-century set of Spanish maps in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, a famous image of Mansa Musa, the grandson of Son-Jara who ruled the Mal Empire from 1312-1327 and made a pilgrimage to Mecca that literally put Mali on the map.
This freedom to recreate flourishes in a culture that does not rely on mnemonynic visual images like the pre-Columbian picture books. Writing and oratory in African seem to have existed in parallel universes, whereas the Native American model demonstrates an overlapping of visual and oral literacies. Where Islamic influence was strong, as in The Epic of Son-Jara, the griot's role complements that of the Arabic literate tradition. The naming of ancestors that begin the anthology selections, for example, might be compared with the beginning of Ibn Ishaq's Biography of the Prophet, which starts out with the genealogy of Muhammad. The names on the lists vary, however, from recitation to recitation; where writing fixes relationships, the African oral tradition expects variations. But when the griot is steeped in Islamic culture, Son-Jara's lineage is always traced to Bilal bin Rabah, who served Abu Bakr, Muhammad's father-in-law, as is the case here.
– Link 8
This illustration from David Wisniewski's contemporary children's version of Sundiata, Lion King of Mali demonstrates how the story continues to be re-told, here in a Western adaptation.
The building blocks of African oral poetry
The African oral poet does not work from a memorized text, but draws upon a common menu of formulaic phrases to satisfy the rhythmic and melodic requirements of a flexible poetic line. Similarly, the shorter forms of oral tradition give texture to the narrative content of the epic. In introducing his translation, John William Johnson mentions "the simpler generic forms . . . praise-names, folk etymologies, proverbs, incantations, curses, and oaths," all of which have been incorporated in The Epic of Son-Jara (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986, p. 57). Most of these traditional forms by definition preserve ancient lore, but reshaped into poetic language and detached from their original context, they often are, as annotators frequently must admit, "cryptic" (see fn. 5, p. 2421). For modern readers, for instance, the praise-name "Biribiriba" defies explanation. We admire its sound and sense its flavor, but lack understanding of the denotative meaning of the term. Other praise names can still be parsed: "Stump-in-the-Dark-of-Night" and "Granary-Guard-Dog" (ll. 34, 37, p. 2416) speak of the ways farmers protect their belongings in a rural world and thus characterize the hero who takes care of his people.
– Link 9
From the Kupferstichkabinett, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung in Basle, a folio page of The Praise of Folly by Erasmus with a pen-and-ink drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger: "Folly steps down from the pulpit."
OVERVIEW: THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY
The defeat of the Aztecs has been laid to the limitations of a civilization that invests authority exclusively in ritual, oratory, and the ancient word. Montezuma welcomed Cortes as a god because he had no other way to comprehend the appearance of so alien a being on Mexican soil. In The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (trans. Richard Howard, New York: Harper & Row, 1984), the critic Tzvetan Todorov interprets the significance of the confrontation between the native American and the conquistador:
Masters in the art of ritual discourse, the Indians are inadequate in a situation
requiring improvisation, and this is precisely the situation of the conquest. Their verbal education favors paradigm over syntagm, code over context, conformity-to-order over efficacity-of-the-moment, the past over the present. . . . the Spanish
invasion creates a radically new, entirely unprecedented situation, in which the
art of improvisation matters more than that of ritual (p. 87).
For Todorov, writing "favors improvisation over ritual" (p. 252) and thus made inevitable the ascendancy of the Europeans. By breaking with the old, they created the technology that allowed them to conquer the world. The only example of European oratory in Volume C playfully points the way to a new mode of thinking. In Erasmus's The Praise of Folly, the speaker, Folly in person, parodies the oration and turns the ancient word on its end. Declaring that she hates a listener with a memory, Folly invalidates all her learned discourse and abandons the pulpit, leaving her audience to reconsider inherited wisdom and fend for themselves. The oral literature of Africa and pre-Columbian America preserves a communal past. The oratory of the West, in the mouths of leaders like Pericles or Abraham Lincoln, bears the signature of an individual creator intent on shaping a people's response to often disturbing news.
