Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual ed. by Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy (review)

Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond makes a bold case for the importance of engaging with the interfaces between the oral, the written, and the visual and, through its eighteen chapters, of finally dispensing with the historically entrenched tendency to conceptualize these continua as simplistic binary opposites. As the introduction notes, the three sections of the book follow “three thematic arcs: performance poetics, print textualizations of the oral, and the place of visual culture at the oral-written interface.” In keeping with its overarching theme of relationality, the collection is interdisciplinary, with contributors from a range of disciplines, including poet-critics, storyteller-activists, musician-essayists, and artist-scholars whose chapters challenge institutional academic practices that consistently privilege text over performance, the visual over the aural, and discrete categorization over affiliation.

The introduction provides some innovative ways of “conceptualizing continua” at the oral-written interface, including coinages such as “the oral+” to capture the complex layerings of “multimodal elements of communication” of “speech and other vocalizations.” The chapters by Helen Gregory and Gugu Hlongwane exemplify this approach by arguing for the importance of recognizing the mutual interactivity between the page and stage in British slam and in the poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng respectively. Hlongwane insists that “for Rampolokeng, the bottom line is that he writes and performs what he has written.” More than Gregory, however, Hlongwane draws attention to the cultural and racial assumptions that underpin the persistent bias against the oral, demonstrating how Rampolokeng has struggled to both reject and reclaim the label of “poetry” in his critique of the nationalist rhetoric of unity in the “New South Africa.” Likewise, George Elliott Clarke, even as he celebrates the power of voice and performance in the work of two Afro-Caribbean–Canadian dub poets, d’bi. young.anitafrika and Oni Joseph, asks whether “orality” is too quickly assumed to be underpinning black writing. For Clarke, the great divide between orality and writing, which continues to exert its influence, is “stained by ‘race.’” Waziyatawin points out the colonial legacies of appropriation in practices of transcribing Indigenous people’s oral traditions; yet for her, taking on the responsibility of textualizing her grandmother’s oral stories is an act of resistance that provides spiritual and cultural sustenance to a larger project of the renewal of the Dakota nation. Waziyatawin’s chapter also plays a key connective role in the collection as a whole as it engages with the terrain of the visual in relation to oral and written modes of representation.

In spite of the collection’s general emphasis on interface rather than opposition, some of the contributors quite plainly state the incommensurability of page and stage. The absence of d’bi.young.anitafrika’s contribution from the printed pages of the collection is itself a strong statement, while her performance, available only in a video online, powerfully asserts the interdependence of her embodied telling and what she calls “the storyteller’s integrity.” Hugh Hodges insists that the distinction between performance poetry and the “textualized record/trace of performance poetry” should be respected, arguing that trying to appreciate a performance by reading its transcription is like “trying to enjoy a concerto by sniffing the ink used to write the sheet music.” In inferring the key role that oral performance played in the production and reception of John Donne’s sermons, Brent Nelson does not mince words when he refers to the “textual surrogate” that only approximates the “oral origins.” Wendy Roy also emphasizes the sometimes antagonistic relationship between writing and orality, suggesting that textualized forms of oral narrative in contemporary Canadian novels often function as a form of resistance against “the tyranny of the written” and, by extension, the tyranny of official history.

The collection is impressive in its scope in engaging with such a range of forms – including (to name a few...