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Songhay as Stage
| Article
# : |
17218 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1990 |
6,220 Words |
| Author
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Judith Gleason
Judith Gleason has done field research in African religions
for the last twenty years. Her most recent book is Oya: In
Praise of the Goddess. |
FUSION OF THE WORLDS
An Ethnography of Possession among the Songhay of Niger
Paul Stoller
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
244 pp., $19.95
IN SORCERY'S SHADOW
Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
236 pp., $19.95
He arrives in an old Berliet truck, which sputters to a stop at the western corner of Mehanna's market - Mehanna is a Songhay village located on the west bank of the Niger River. The truck is immediately surrounded by children pointing and chanting a word meaning "European" in their language. Undaunted, the young anthropologist opens the door on the passenger side of the cabin and steps down onto the sand. The undisciplined children, gaping in silence, now surround the stranger's unarmored person. In response, he opens his mouth to utter in his "best oratorical Songhay" a proverbial question posed ironically over the children's heads to adult bystanders, "Are people who stare at other people any different from donkeys?" Whereupon the elders come forward to introduce themselves and to compliment the stranger upon his astonishing fluency in their language. Modestly, he demurs: "But I do not speak Songhay, really. I hear a little." Thus, con brio, Stoller's and Olkes' account of a fascinating apprenticeship begins.
The "arrival scene" leads the reader into new territory and at the same time proposes to disarm any who might be tempted to pass judgment on the reliability of information to follow. The device is immemorial and universal. And incontrovertible "I was there" (implying "but of course you weren't) signals a "true" (even if incredible) story, rather than a legend or myth, to which we are expected to lend a different sort of credence. Thereafter, the narrator of traditional tales (as of classical accounts of exotic customs) effaces himself before circumstantial reality's intrinsic fascination.
But what is "real?" The story from the narrator's point of view might be true and yet not the whole story. Somebody else, differently placed, and with a different temperament or ax to grind, might have construed events in a radically different way. In literature we herewith enter an equally ubiquitous and ancient mode of awareness - the
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