The Powers of Genre: Interpreting Haya Oral Literature (review)

This study is an attempt to "operationalize genre as an interpretive instrument" (p. 224). It offers the results of a journey of discovery for Peter Seitel as a collector and editor of Haya heroic ballads from Tanzania. In an effort to understand the material better, Seitel noticed connections with the Haya folktales he had already collected and edited under the title See So That We May See (Indiana University Press, 1980). One insight led to another—discussions with Haya colleagues and his own scholarly reading sharpened his hypotheses—and this book is the product of those dialogues. It concludes with a six-step "recipe" for those who wish to apply Seitel's methodology for themselves. Well, as they say, the proof of the pudding's in the eating: does Seitel's "top-down perspective" (p. 31) produce a consistent cake?

Seitel's argument proceeds elegantly from simplicity to complexity. After setting out his aims and defining his terms, and introducing the Haya and their oral literature, he offers successive analyses of proverbs, folktales, and heroic ballads, amplifying and extending his techniques on the way. Thirteen proverbs form the basis of his lucid argument in chapter 2. In the next chapter three folktales, all told by women, are presented for discussion in English translation. In chapter 3, Seitel comes to his most complex form in a discussion of three heroic ballads performed by male bards. "Kachwenyanja" is presented in Haya and English translation, with full explanatory and textual annotation; "Rukiza" and "Mugasha" are presented in English translation only, with only explanatory notes. After these three chapters, constituting part 1, Seitel offers three chapters in part 2 focused on "Kachwenyanja."

As he proceeds, Seitel develops "a genre-powered interpretive tool composed of inter-related analytic procedures" (p. 4). Essentially structuralist, Seitel's methodology pays due homage to his scholarly heroes at all points, drawing them into the vivid present of his argument and showing how he modifies their concepts in applying them. Seitel's text plots a dialogue with Bahktin and Propp, Foucault and Hymes, Tedlock and Lévi-Strauss, just as he entered into dialogue with Haya scholars over his insights into the Tanzanian verbal art forms. In searching for the rules of the proverb genre, for example, Seitel tells us that he achieved little success "until I had first analyzed how Haya folktales articulate their thematic significance, then did the same for Haya epics, and finally found an overall heuristic approach to describing genres in Bakhtin through Hanks" (p. 35). Seitel's method and text are explicitly dialogic: "This system of interpretation is based on the idea of genre as a specific, concrete, yet often changing body of texts, as a framework for creating and interpreting them, and as a 'form-shaping ideology' through which both creator and critic enter into dialogue with the collective wisdom of a tradition" (p. 3). Genres inform other genres, and the composition, style, and themes of genres interact.

Does Seitel's recipe succeed? "The goal of the analytic approach described and illustrated in this book," he writes, is "nurturing creative understandings of verbal art" (p. 3). Judged in these terms, Seitel succeeds in heightening our respect for the subtleties and complexities, the very sophistication of the texts and performances he discusses. He shares genuine insights with his readers and communicates his enjoyment of these art forms. His method is also impressive in that it permits predictability as a critical tool, so that he is able to argue not only from what is present in a text but also from what is omitted.

However, one wonders how his terminological dexterity and complex arguments would go down with a Haya bard or tale-teller, or their audiences. Seitel argues that scholarly description "cannot be an outsider's exclusive privilege," but "necessarily results from a dialogue between performers, indigenous...