ABSTRACT
To speak of oral literature is to speak of storytelling in its infinite manifestations. In principle, oral literature should be understood as an oxymoron or at least a paradox because its oral nature ontologically opposes any written encoding. The collective oral source lacks a singular script and is “not writing at all”, while the transliterated, scripted object implies a “transaction between a text and a [lonely] reader” (Titon 2003, 70). Yet, both methodologies for record-keeping have preserved and promoted people’s cultural values and norms, so that people endure through the performance, transliteration and translation of their cultural expressions in their many scripted forms (musical, literary, historical, performative, etc.). Aural/oral and literary texts have particularly contributed to the creation and destruction of knowledge and belief systems, of the temples and rituals that define the character of a community and make it ‘different’ from another. When writers translate into script any piece of oral literature (from poems, songs, ballads or odes to folktales), they carry across the haunting of a people’s past. Translators and writers alike use these haunted stories to renew the past and counterbalance historical violence, which often targets ‘others’ ideologically and rhetorically constructed. Diana Taylor explains:
There is a continuum of ways of storing and transmitting memory that spans from the archival to the embodied, […] a repertoire of embodied thought/memory, with all sorts of mediated and mixed modes in between. The archive […] can contain the grisly record of criminal violence […]. The repertoire, for them, holds the tales of the survivors.
(192–193)