Mythological Recuperation and Performance as Agency for Genealogical Return in Djanet Sears’s Afrika Solo
Abstract
:Background: Understanding the Difference in a “Different” Aesthetic Tradition
I grew up in a society where I was considered a minority, minor, inferior, and somewhere along the line, I developed a type of internalized oppression. Although the ways in which each of us experiences internalized oppression are unique, no black person in this society has been spared. ‘Internalized racism’ has been the primary means by which we have been forced to perpetuate and ‘agree’ to our own oppression (1990).
We come from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Ghana, Haiti, Guyana, Nigeria, Canada, the United States and South Africa. As writers, we push the limits of literature and redefine images of representation. In the process, we create our realities. We are a new generation of griots—town criers, or spiritual messengers—whose stories have been transferred to the printed page. Despite the diversity of cultural backgrounds, we write out of a collective African consciousness—a consciousness embodied in the fabric of oral traditions, woven from one generation to the next, through rhythms, storytelling, fables, proverbs, rituals, worksongs and sermons meshed with Western literary forms.(p. xi)
Performing the (Un)known: Sears’s Return to Her Roots in Afrika Solo
They’d be telling some traditional story in a language I did not know. It was in a local language, not the colonial language […] and this story, which everybody knew apparently, was told by the narrator poet, but it was told in parts by dancers, and singers and musicians who told the story—sometimes better, and sometimes separately!
Not the Final Word
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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1 | See for example, (Balogun 2017a). |
2 | Courlander is even more specific about both the locations and those traditions that Sears and many diaspora artists recuperate, “[Various] elements of African-derived custom, including attitudes and values, which are visible today in the United States [and elsewhere], even in subtle or disguised forms [are traceable to] the Yoruba, the Fon people of Dahomey, the Ashanti, and various other tribes of West Africa [with their] highly developed religious systems, complex systems of law and equity, pride of history and tradition, a high order of arts and crafts, music and dance, a vast oral literature ranging from proverbs to epics, moral and ethical codes … and complex systems of social organization” (p. 5). |
3 | Until the late 19th century the influence of the Oyo (Yoruba) Empire extended as far as Aja, Dahomey, and Whyddah in present day Benin Republic. Several aspects of their belief and ritual were subsequently influenced by the Yoruba tradition and, as of today, Nigerians and mostly Yoruba account for about 42% of the total population of the country. |
4 | Sears could be seen as an Ìyánífá (the female counterpart of the Babalawo) who uses for divination such paraphernalia as agbìgbà, èèrìndínlógún, and iṣà. |
5 | Arnoldi and Kreamer (1995) write that “Among the Yoruba in Nigeria...the head is the seat of ori, personal destiny. Surrounding this “inner head,” the physical head, visible to the world, becomes the focus of many important rituals...” (pp. 23–24). |
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Balogun, L. Mythological Recuperation and Performance as Agency for Genealogical Return in Djanet Sears’s Afrika Solo. Genealogy 2018, 2, 14. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2020014
Balogun L. Mythological Recuperation and Performance as Agency for Genealogical Return in Djanet Sears’s Afrika Solo. Genealogy. 2018; 2(2):14. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2020014
Chicago/Turabian StyleBalogun, Lekan. 2018. "Mythological Recuperation and Performance as Agency for Genealogical Return in Djanet Sears’s Afrika Solo" Genealogy 2, no. 2: 14. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy2020014