4 - Contexts of Performance

Summary

THE VARIETY OF STYLES

The same oriki can be performed in strikingly different styles - not usually identifiable as discrete genres, but occupying a continuum from the relatively fixed to the relatively fluid, the relatively coherent to the relatively fragmented, the relatively homogenous to the relatively heterogeneous. I begin this chapter by comparing two passages which both contain the same oriki orile, those of the Ale-Oyun people, represented in Okuku by ile Ọlokọ. The first is from a performance of rara iyawo (bride's lament) by a young girl practising with her friends before her wedding day. The second is from a performance by Sangowemi on the occasion of the Ogun festival; it is addressed primarily to the Oluode, the Head of the Hunters, who was a prominent elder in ile Ọlokọ. The two passages are at opposite ends of the stylistic continuum.

Rara iyawo is the first performance style a girl learns, in her childhood and adolescence. The style is simple and easily mastered. It is also the least characteristic of oriki chants, in the sense that the features discussed in the last chapter - the intense vocative mode, the interjections, the insertion of personal names, and so on - are at their least developed. Ṣangowemi's chant, by contrast, displays these features in their most full-blown form, taking them almost to extremes.

This difference is partly to be understood in terms of the stages of the learning-process. Women master chanting styles gradually, starting with rara iyawo and moving on, as they gain maturity and experience, to more complex and fluid styles. This shows that the fragmentedness and apparent shapelessness of the mature woman's chant is not an accident, nor the mere outcome of ‘orality’: it is a hard-won, gradually attained skill, the product of long habituation and experience. The more experienced and artful the performer, the more fluid her performance. This chapter goes on, after the initial comparison of styles, to trace the development of women's mastery of them.

But variations in style also arise from the different purposes to which performances are put.