Globalectics by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Author:Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

4

THE ORAL NATIVE AND THE WRITING MASTER

Orature, Orality, and Cyborality

Aesthetic feudalism, arising from placing cultures in a hierarchy, is best seen in the relationship between oral and written languages, where the oral, even when viewed as being “more” authentic or closer to the natural, is treated as the bondsman to the writing master. With orality taken as the source for the written and orature as the raw material for literature, both were certainly placed on a lower rung in the ladder of achievement and civilization.

It has not always been the case that orality or speech was regarded with less esteem than the written, the basis for expelling some cultures from history and complex thoughts, consigning them to a place in hell. In Plato’s Phaedrus, speech is seen as the living and animate, the proper residence for the science of the dialectic, as opposed to the written which “trundles about everywhere in the same way”—a phantom.1 And for Aristotle, words spoken were signs of the soul while words written were merely signs of words spoken.2 There is of course the subversive irony against Socrates’ claims on behalf of speech in that his dialogues, including the argument between him and Phaedrus, have continually remained animate through the ages because of writing. The two interlocutors are not, of course, in a position to know that writing would make possible the afterlife of their exchange, including Socrates’ argument for the oral against the letter.

This essay expands considerably the arguments in my paper, “Notes towards a Performance Theory of Orature,” Performance Research 12, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 4–7. See also Ngugî wa Thiong’o, “Oral Power and Europhone Glory: Orature, Literature, and Stolen Legacies,” in Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

Even in the European Middle Ages, and wherever there were forms of writing, the written and oral performance (singing, reading aloud, playing, etc.) were genuinely coexistent and interactive as “equals.”

The hegemony of the written over the oral comes with the printing press, the dominance of capitalism, and colonization. This hegemony, or its perception, has roots in the rider-and-the-horse pairing of master and slave, or colonizer and colonized, a process in which the latter begins to be demonized as the possessor of deficiencies, including of languages.3 The absence of a writing system—ideographic, hieroglyphic, or, mostly, alphabetic—is taken as the prime evidence. What we witness in this context is a double colonization: first, a language is seen as lower than another in general, and second, its oral ontology is considered to be lower than the written “being” of the dominant other.

Let’s take the examples of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Claude Lévi-Strauss, a choice partly motivated by the fact that they are good evocative writers, able to tell a story and create scene and character, as in their books Out of Africa (1937) and Tristes Tropiques (1955), but mainly because they are not directly members of the ruling authority over the peoples about whom they write, respectively the Agĩkũyũ of Kenya and the Nambikwara of Brazil.

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