Prophetic Riddling: A Dialogue of Genres in Choctaw Performance

Abstract

Riddles claim obscurity. Prophecy claims clarity. Despite this initial divide, the two can be so similar they appear to be indistinguishable. The similarities are both inherent and constructed. This study will explore the similarities between the two both when viewed as verbal genres and when brought into dialogue during the act of performance. Prophetic discourse among the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians provides a particularly informative case study. Tribal members have cultivated an oral tradition of prophecy with rigorous aesthetic, structural, and temporal rules. As the prophecies become fulfilled, however, these rules have become virtually impossible to uphold. Many Choctaw narrators have found a creative compromise by exploiting the similarities between prophecy and riddle. An examination of the structural, functional, stylistic, and linguistic parallels between riddle and prophecy at the nexus of performance shows how Choctaw narrators maintain one tradition by borrowing from another.

When Estelline Tubby was a young girl, growing up in the middle of Mississippi, her Choctaw elders used to tell her about strange things that would soon be coming. "They said there would be something in the house that can be talked to and talk to the other house. Said you don't have to walk up there to tell things. There'll be days coming like that.

"And it's true. I heard that, too. That the future, the phones are coming. It's true now. Every house probably has it, isn't it?" she asks, laughing (Tubby 1999).

Her elders told her a prophecy. Estelline Tubby retells a riddle. The generic divide between the two seems virtually nonexistent.

Western literature also provides examples of riddling prophecies. When the prophet Tieresias prophesizes to Oedipus that "This day shall give thee birth and give thee death," Oedipus explodes: "Forever riddles, riddles does thou speak" (Sophocles 1966:26). Oedipus is proficient at riddles, having earlier solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Nest that riddle in prophecy, however, and he fails tragically. The opposite problem plagues Shakespeare's Macbeth. "Be bloody, bold, and resolute," the three weird sisters tell him.¹ "Laugh to scorn the power of man; for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth" (4.1.79-81). Macbeth recognizes prophecy but fails to recognize the other genre the witches employ: riddle. The mistake costs him his life.

Generally, misinterpretations of generic form are not as fatal as the one familiar in Shakespeare's play, more often resulting in loss of face, not loss of life. For the scholar, however, to miss these parallels between genres and their use together to create new meaning and new solutions to performance is not just embarrassing but risks misinterpretation of the art of expressive communication. Formal analyses of the riddle and prophetic narrative as verbal genres suggest the two are remarkably similar, particularly between nonoppositional riddles and prophecies of new technology. I will begin by discussing these generic similarities, then examine how these similarities are exploited in a specific community-the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In doing so, I will explore the impact of generic borrowing on performance aesthetics and functions, genre boundaries, and linguistic competence.

Generic Parallels between Prophecy and Riddles

The Riddle: Implicit Question and Perplexing Description

Despite extensive scholarship on the riddle, a satisfactory etic definition continues to elude scholars. Ironically, one of the earliest modern attempts to define the riddle remains one of the most frequently referenced: Archer Taylor's English Riddles from Oral Tradition (1944). Scholars have certainly pointed out the inconsistencies and shortcomings of this work, but many of his observations have remained useful to subsequent scholarship. Introducing his collection, Taylor notes:

This collection includes only true riddles. These are descriptions of objects in terms intended to suggest something entirely different. The Humpty Dumpty riddle, for example, describes an egg as a man sitting on a wall. Only the queer fact, which is contradictory to the usual nature of a man, that he cannot be cured or put together again after falling gives notice that we are not listening to an incident from life; in other words, that we are being asked to guess a riddle...