Frontiers Of Folkloreh by William R Bascom

Author:William R Bascom [Bascom, William R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367170769
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

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Later, in the same year, on October 10, 1975, this artist began a new epic, detailing the activities of a Xhosa woman named Nomasomi; this performance took twenty-one days to complete, and totalled between 130 and 140 hours. The two epics are quite different in many ways, but the artist sees the second building thematically and culturally on the first, focusing on Xhosa traditional doctors and medicine (Mrs. Zenani is herself a traditional Xhosa doctor of some renown), as she moves her Xhosa history away from magical, supernatural activities characteristic of the Mityi narrative. Like the earlier work, the second depends on imaginative narratives and a complex of emotionally experienced forms to communicate its message. Then, on November 17, 1975, she commenced a third epic, wholly unified and in many ways independent of the others, yet one which she viewed as a development of the earlier works, the third part of an epic trilogy that rivals the Mahabarata in length.

This work has Nobantu as the chief character, a fictional Xhosa leader noted for her humane treatment of her subjects, a development, the artist asserted, of the earlier works. This astonishing performance, which the artist sees as an imaginary history of Xhosa civilization, took place from July 1 to November 26 of 1975, a total of some three hundred hours. The performer had last experienced the narratives as a unified work some fifty or sixty years before, when her grandmother performed them for her and her peers. She recalled that the performances occurred when she was a young teenager, and took place in the evenings and late afternoons, over long periods of time. The narratives as she was developing them in 1975 were not, of course, precisely like those her grandmother had created--“We’re living in different times”, she said. But the images and the movements of characters were substantially the same. And the formal relationships were little altered. This is the real tradition she emphasized, not those “little children’s tales” that her neighbors told. She had herself more recently performed many of the separate narratives that comprise the vast epics, but only as individual twenty or thirty minute stories.

In the epic as in the much shorter performances, the experience is of forms, and combinations of forms. The body in those narratives in which movement is engaged in by the artist and her audience, assists in revealing the forms and their inter-relationships. The significance of the nonverbal aspects of such narratives was emphasized for me in August, 1972, when, attending performances among the Xesibe people of the Transkei in South Africa, I experienced another

Figure 2 Nongenile Masithathu Zenani during a performance.

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