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4. Preserving the Voice of Ancestors: Yoruba Myth and Ritual in The Palm-Wine Drinkard
- State University of New York Press
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As we saw in the case of Tagore, indigenous religion and myth can operate in much the same way as metropolitan religion and myth. For while Tagore was writing back to a single indigenous work, he was simultaneously writing back to a work of singular religious and mythic importance. Clearly, he saw this work as perniciously hierarchy preserving and he set about writing back to it for that reason. On the other hand, there are some very important differences between metropolitan and indigenous religion and myth. While both have oppressive and subaltern strains, one religion is itself in a position of cultural domination over the other. Hindu, Igbo, Yoruba, and other systems of belief indigenous to the colonized world are continually endangered by Christianity. As discussed in the preceding chapter, Christians have widely maintained that their views are morally and ontologically superior, and have proselytized in those terms. Moreover, they have the economic and political power to undermine indigenous religions, directly or indirectly—as when European employers effectively required their domestic servants to attend Christian services, be married in a Christian church, and so forth (see Emecheta 50). Thus there is a strong tendency for indigenous religions to be eroded by the influx of Christian teaching and conversion. In contrast, there is no risk in the opposite direction. While there might be an occasional European who “goes native” and is 125 Chapter Four Preserving the Voice of Ancestors Yoruba Myth and Ritual in The Palm-Wine Drinkard accepted into Yoruba, Igbo, or Hindu society, the number of these “reverse converts” is minuscule—and clearly no threat to the colonial religion. The risk to indigenous bodies of faith is particularly great when the beliefs, stories, practices, and so on, are not codified in sacred texts, and when they are highly localized. For a number of reasons, a religion such as Islam or Hinduism is far more stable than, say, Igbo or Yoruba custom. First of all, Islam and Hinduism cover broad geographical areas, which makes their practices transportable. More importantly, their central tenets are recorded in sacred texts, which makes them enduring. In contrast, Igbo or Yoruba practices are very difficult to preserve when one is living away from Igboland or Yorubaland. Whereas a Hindu could go anywhere in India and find temples, festivals, and the like, and thus preserve his/her faith, an Igbo could not travel even to Lagos and expect to find his/her traditions preserved. More significantly , without a set of sacred texts, every loss to such a religion threatens to be both permanent and absolute. If a ritual is practiced only in one set of villages in Igboland, and is not preserved in any texts, then if that ritual is not practiced for a single generation, it will die. In this way, a postcolonization author from an oral tradition is likely to be faced with a dilemma very different from that facing an author from a written tradition. Far from having to assert his/her individual voice in response to powerful precursors, he/she may be confronted with the possible loss of the entire indigenous tradition in which his/her own work would be located. In this way, one prime task of a postcolonization author may be the preservation of indigenous tradition. Of course, the author cannot merely present that tradition as it is. Indeed, that does not even make any sense. A tradition is a wide range of practices, stories, ideas, organized and articulated in different ways, at different times, with different relations depending upon context and immediate purpose. The author who sets him/herself the task of preserving this tradition has to refashion some part of it, shape elements of tradition into a literary work—just as the living tradition is itself always refashioned, for particular purposes and for a particular audience at a particular time. In this case, the author must structure tradition into a work that can be read on its own, and read by a general and unfamiliar readership—not a present audience, with shared experience and memory. In this way, the author is not merely preserving tradition, as if he/she were an anthropologist. Rather he/she is sculpting it into a coherent work of art, oriented to a new readership. The new author cannot simply set up a microphone and record an oral performance, delivered by a poet to a familiar audience, all of whom are living within that tradition of culture and orature. The nature of the postcolonization...