from Journal of Folklore Research Volume 40, Number 3

Excerpt from

Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?

Isidore Okpewho

---

Permission to Copy

You may download, save, or print for your personal use without permission. If you wish to disseminate the electronic article, or to produce multiple copies for classroom or educational use, please request permission from:

Copyright Clearance Center
Professional Relations Department
222 Rosewood Drive
Danvers MA 01923

FAX: 978-750-4470/4744
Web address: www.copyright.com

For other permissions or reprint use contact:

Rights and Permissions, Journals Division
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton St.
Bloomington, IN 47404

FAX: 812 855-8507
E-mail: journals@indiana.edu

---

IN ONE OF THE MANY arresting moments of The Ozidi Saga, an epic tale from the Ijo of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, the narrator, Okabou Ojobolo, has just finished presenting Ozidi's encounter with Ogueren, the formidable monster of twenty limbs. Then comes a new opponent, Badoba, bragging that he will dispose of Ozidi without any difficulty; the hero's earlier opponents performed so poorly against him because they lacked the necessary resources for taking him on. Okabou then paints a fittingly terrifying picture of Badoba's physique: his head touches the sky and the length of his sword is interminable. In light of the picture Okabou painted earlier of Ogueren, a comparison between him and Badoba becomes inevitable, as we can see in the following exchange between the narrator and a member of the audience:

Spectator: Was he greater than Ogueren?
Okabou: What, greater than Ogueren? The heroes and heroes there--how can they be compared? Each had his own might.
Audience: Right. (Clark-Bekederemo [1977] 1991:147-48)¹

The episode illustrates well the challenges facing oral narrators in the all too immediate circumstances of their performance before a discerning audience. A careful reading of The Ozidi Saga reveals that Okabou enjoyed considerable empathy from his ethnic fellows among the audience, whose patriotic pride was greatly fired by this performance of their traditional epic in an environment (Ibadan) far from their Delta homeland. But the spectator's question clearly indicates the always-present risk of an aesthetic discrepancy between narrator and audience: the latter are less easily drawn than the former into the fantastical world of the tale, being frequently inclined to take a realistic view of the images conjured by the narrator. This does not mean that our spectator thinks any the less of the narrator. It may simply point to an effort on the spectator's part to come to terms with the highly nuanced outlook the narrator is trying to present with his choice of figures that are not exactly part of the landscape of everyday life; in other words, the spectator is struggling to make a mental switch from objective to mythic reality.

Yet these narrators, even the highly skilled ones among them, have been so customized by their training and practice in the craft that they make these aesthetic demands of their audience even in tales located squarely in the world of everyday reality. In this paper, I wish to examine some of the narratives I have collected over the years from my part of Nigeria, the Delta State, in light of the aesthetic discrepancy I have suggested between narrator and audience. For although I agree that the audience, being arguably less subject than the performer to the emotive charge of the tale, are entirely entitled to take a more rational view of its contents, I fear their expectations may not sufficiently address some of the perspectives from which the narrative art endeavors to reorder the often complex signs (cultural, political, and otherwise) of our varied existence.

IU Press Journals Home Page

More about Journal of Folklore Research

Library Recommendation

Table of Contents

Advance Information

Copyright Clearance