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Traditions of Eloquence in Afro-American Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Roger D. Abrahams
Roger D. Abrahams*
Affiliation:
African and Afro-American Research Institute, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
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Extract

…In the south there was the daily impact upon the white man of the effect of the Negro, concerning whom nothing is so certain as his remarkable tendency to seize on lovely words, to roll them in his throat, to heap them in redundant profusion one upon another until meaning vanishes, until there is nothing left but the sweet, canorous drunkenness, nothing but the play of primitive rhythm upon the secret springs of emotion. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

Both in Africa and in America the Negro seems to find a decided pleasure in altiloquent speech. Perhaps this bombast is partly due to the fact that the long and unusual word has a sort of awe-inspiring almost fetishistic significance to the uneducated person, and with the Negro, at least, it indicated a desire to approximate the white man in outward signs of learning. As it is, the Negro is constantly being lost in a labyrinth of jaw-breaking words full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of Southern Negroes

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , Winter 1970 , pp. 505 - 527
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1970

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References

1 Abrahams, Roger D., Deep Down in the Jungle, rev. ed. (Chicago: Aldine Publishers, 1970)Google Scholar.

2 For a survey of the most important forms of West Indian traditional expression, see Abrahams, , “The Shaping of Folklore Traditions in the British West Indies,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 9 (1967) :456–480 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Albert, Ethel M., “ ‘Rhetoric', ‘Logic’ and ‘Poetics’ in Burundi: Culture Patterning of Speech Behavior,” American Anthropologist 66 (1964), part 6, p. 35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though this account is the fullest, many Africans have made much of the importance of oratory in their own ethnic groups; see, for instance. Chinua Achebe, “Foreword” in ed. Whitely, W. H., A Selection of African Prose (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1964), iix Google Scholar.

4 Finnegan, Ruth, Limba Stories and Story-Telling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 13 Google Scholar.

5 Bohannon, Laura (pseud. Eleanor Smith Bowen), Return to Laughter (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1968)Google Scholar.

6 Webster, Staten W., The Disadvantaged Learner (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1966), pp. 4–5 Google Scholar.

7 Herskovits, Melville J., Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941)Google Scholar.

8 Stuckey, Sterling, “Relationships between Africans and Afro-Americans,” Africa Today 16, no. 2 (1969): 4 Google Scholar

9 Lomax, Alan, Folk Song Style and Culture, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., Publication No. 88, pp. 94–95 Google Scholar.

10 Szwed, John, “Musical Adaptation among American Negroes,” Journal of American Folklore 82 (1969): 117–118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Thompson, Robert Farris, “Dance and Culture,” African Forum 2 (1966): 98 Google Scholar.

12 Mervyn C. Alleyne, “The Cultural Matrix of Caribbean Dialects,” to be published in the Proceedings of the Second Conference on Creole Languages, Mona, Jamaica.

13 Kirke, Henry, Twenty-five Years in British Guiana, 1872-1897 (London, 1898. BG edition, 1948), p. 191 Google Scholar.

14 Cash, W. S., The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941), p. 53 Google Scholar.

15 [Mrs. Lanigan], , Antigua and the Antiguans (London, 1844), 2: 45 Google Scholar.

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19 Bell, Hesketh, Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies (London: Sampsom Low, Marston, Garleand Rivington, Ltd., 1889), p. 139 Google Scholar.

20 Bell, , Witchcraft, p. 140 Google Scholar. Reference to this courtship and love-letter tradition in the United States are conveniently brought together by Puckett, Newbell Niles, Folk Belief of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926), pp. 29–30 Google Scholar. For other West Indian reportings, see [Charles Rampini] Letters from Jamaica (Edinburgh, 1873), pp. 103–110 Google ScholarPubMed; James, Winifred, The Mulberry Tree (London, 1913), pp. 45–57 Google Scholar.

21 Ferguson, Charles, “Diglossia,” Word 15:325–340 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For an example, see Abrahams, , “Speech Mas’ on Tobago” in Tire Shrinker to Dragster (Austin: The Encino Press, 1968), pp. 125–144 Google Scholar.

23 Collected from Rosalie Jeffers, Brick Kiln, Nevis, B.W.I., in August, 1962.

24 Collected from Charles Jack in Yambou, St. Vincent, B.W.I., in August, 1968.

25 Riesman, Karl, “Cultural and Linguistic Ambiguity in a West Indian Village,” Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, Whitten, Norman E. and Szwed, John F., eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1970), p. 141 Google Scholar.