2 - Other Voices, Other Texts

Summary

In so many ways, then, our narrator Okabou Ojobolo has constructed a hero who represents—sometimes by reflection, sometimes by refraction—a viable measure of the physical and metaphysical worlds that defi ne Ijo culture and society. It remains for us to evaluate Clark-Bekederemo's effort in transporting Okabou's presentation of this jewel of Ijo oral tradition from the fluid medium of performance to the fixity of print. However, in discussing the Ozidi story as it emerges from the texts available to us, we need to be careful about embracing a rigid view of what has often glibly been called “tradition.” The outlines of any story in the so-called tradition are generally loose and depend on the level of imagination brought to it by every successive artist handling it. Although Okabou tells us he learned the Ozidi story from a previous narrator, Izevbaye's idea of “the archetype handed down” to him or of a “conventional treatment of the hero” Ozidi (10, 12) seems to perpetuate an erroneous perception of something set in stone to which any re-creation of the story must be compared. We are certainly in a much better frame of mind for appreciating each narrator's version when we see it in terms of what Lauri Honko has called a “mental text” (“Epic along the Silk Roads,” 4-5; “Text as Process,” 22-23), which suggests the broad outlines of the story that the artist proceeds to flesh out into a performance that proclaims his or her personal genius, as Clark-Bekederemo came to find out for himself in the course of his fieldwork.