“But the youthful imagination was fed not only by the
awesome images looming in the dim, sacred, ile-ere.
Ritual, spectacle, song, dance, drumbeats, mystery, and power surrounded him.
Poetry, pageantry, and history combined in the luminous presence of the egungun as the ancestor became flesh and
danced among his children. The boy was attracted to the art of the storyteller,
a tradition of oral literature that has reached a very high level of complexity
and diversity among the Yoruba. But to call these expressions of the culture ‘stories’
is reductive. As developed in this culture, their elaborate narrative line
incorporated elements of theater, music, mime, ritual, magic, dance, and the linguistic
elements of proverb, poetry, riddle, parable, and song. They were not told so
much as performed, dramatically reenacted, so that the accomplished taleteller
had to be master of a range of skills. He was at once actor, mime,
impressionist, singer, dancer, composer, and conductor, using his range of
artistic skills and even the audience and environment to create a multidimensional
experience that has no obvious equivalent in Western culture. A more elaborate
expression of this form—most often with a strictly religious reference, being
ritual recreations of sacred myths—was performed by costumed dancers to the accompaniment
of religious music, and became known to Western observers as ‘folk operas.’”
Michael
Thelwell, 1984, 182-83
“Introduction,” The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola
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