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African Words, Academic Choices: Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Anne Reef
Anne Reef*
Affiliation:
University of Memphis
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Extract

There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them (so she says in one of the paragraphs she has not crossed out yet) is a bottle with a genie in it. When the storyteller opens the bottle, the genie is released into the world, and it costs all hell to get him back in again. Her position … better, on the whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.

So says the narrator of the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello. Costello, an aging novelist, philosophizes at a point in the book where Coetzee has conspired to provoke a moment of ethical reflection on the process of telling stories. Irony and paradox cleave to this paragraph's core—clearly, Coetzee, by continuing to write and to publish, does not really believe that the genie should stay bottled. But, while Costello intends to edit this reflection from her written work, both the narrator and Coetzee consider it worthy of inclusion in the novel, thus endorsing its importance.

Costello's comment provokes consideration of the nature and effects of narration in other representations. One such site is academic writing that uses interviews and oral histories as source material. Such writing necessitates at least two levels of narration: first, re-presentation of the primary material and second, the author's analysis, synthesis, and commentary on it. As in other genres, this distils into two kinds of material: mimesis and diegesis. Here Elizabeth Tonkin's definitions of these terms are useful. She describes mimesis as “the representation of direct speech” and diegesis as “the description of nonverbal events.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 35 , January 2008 , pp. 419 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2008

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Footnotes

1

This title plays on that of a recent collection of essays on African history and its relation to interviews and oral traditions—this is African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, eds. Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen (Bloomington, 2001). This paper makes no significant distinction between the terms “oral tradition” and “oral history.”

References

2 Coetzee, J.M., Elizabeth Costello (New York, 2003), 167Google Scholar.

3 Tonkin, Elizabeth, Narrating Our Pasts: the Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1992), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 This was first published in French in 1961.

7 Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985), 160Google Scholar.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 196.

10 Barber, Karen and Farias, P.F. de Moraes, Discourse and Its Disguises: the Interpretation of African Oral Texts (Birmingham, 1989), 4Google Scholar.

11 Klieman, Karen A., “The Pygmies Were Our Compass”: Bantu and Batwa in the History of West Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 C.E. (Portsmouth NH, 2003), xxGoogle Scholar.

12 Lunn, Joe, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: a Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth NH: 1999), 226Google Scholar.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 van Onselen, Charles, The Seed is Mine: the Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985 (New York, 1996), 3Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., 11.

17 Geiger, Susan, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism (Portsmouth NH; 1997), 204Google Scholar.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 15, 103, 204.

20 Ibid., 6.

21 Ibid., 64, 65.

22 Achebe, Nwando, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 (Portsmouth NH: 2005), 36Google Scholar.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., 225.

25 Malkki, Liisa H., Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995), 232Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 1.

27 Ibid., 232.

28 Ibid., 233.

29 Ibrahim, Abdullahi A., “The Birth of the Interview: the Thin and the Fat of It” in African Words, African Voices, 104Google Scholar.

30 Foucault, Michel, “The Carceral” from Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translator Sheridan, Alan, published in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, eds. Leitch, Vincent B.et al (New York, 2001), 1639Google Scholar.

31 Ibrahim, , “Birth of the Interview,” 104Google Scholar.

32 Ibid., 117.

33 Cohen, “In a Nation of White Cars … One White Car, or ‘A White Car,’ Becomes a Truth” in African Words, African Voices.

34 Tonkin, , Narrating Our Pasts, 4, 12Google Scholar.

35 Ibid., 51.

36 Ibid., 90.

37 Ibid., 1.

38 Achebe, , Farmers, 41–42Google Scholar.

39 Lunn, , Memoirs of the Maelstrom, 1Google Scholar.

40 Ibid.,9.

41 Unlike Klieman, van Onselen does not use quotation marks in his title.

42 Geiger, , TANU Women, 65Google Scholar.

43 Malkki, , Purity and Exile, 107Google Scholar.

44 Ibid., 107, 59.

45 Ibid., 58.

46 Klieman, , “The Pygmies Were Our Compass,” xxivGoogle Scholar.

47 Rich, Jeremy, review of “The Pygmies Were Our Compass,” IJAHS 37(2004), 185Google Scholar.

48 Van Onselen, , Seed is Mine, 13Google Scholar. The text on which van Onselen draws is MacMillan, William H., The South African Agrarian Problem and Its Historical Development (Johannesburg, 1919)Google Scholar.

49 Van Onselen, , Seed Is Mine, viGoogle Scholar.

50 Ibid., v.

51 Tonkin, , Narrating Our Pasts, 3Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., 17.

53 Ibid.

54 Achebe, , Farmers, 4Google Scholar.

55 Ibid., 18, 19.

56 Ibid., 63.

57 Ibid., 7.

58 Ibid., 66, 112, 153.

59 Ibid., 116, 128, 133.

60 Van Onselen, , Seed is Mine, 329Google Scholar, emphasis in original. Van Onselen cites this as prose although, while employing the same wording, another version of the passage, without italics, (ed. Arthur Barrett, London, [1951]) offers it as poetry with different punctuation:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;

A breath can make them, as a breath has made:

But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,

When once destroyed, can never be supplied. (ll 51-56)

61 Malkki, , Purity and Exile, 7Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., 258. Some versions of the poem use “tiger,” not “tyger.”

63 Ibid., 255, 258.

64 Van Onselen, , Seed is Mine, 532Google Scholar.

65 Ibid.

66 Cohen, , “White Cars,” 265Google Scholar.

67 Ibid., 278.