literary tradition

Much of Nigerian oral poetry, especially the musical genre, has been increasingly reduced to digital formats through the instrumentality of new media technologies. This transformation has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged in oral literary researches and discourses. This alternative existence acquired by the oral forms manifests itself in digital technological modes like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, digital radio and television and the internet which assure them of longevity. This paper, therefore, engages Nigerian oral poetry and its inscription in digital processes using new media technologies. In particular, it negotiates the trajectory of transforming primary orality to secondary and tertiary orality through which oral performances like songs have acquired new modes of existence and meanings by way of recordings and digitalization using the new media. Many of these poetic forms have travelled through historical time to the postmodern moment as migrant metaphors and have become stored in digital forms thus making them new wine though preserved in the old wineskins of the poets and new media processes. Using an emergent generation of Nigerian popular poets and musical artistes, the paper problematizes the episteme of authorship. It interrogates the very idea of authorship in the contested and interstitial space of communal and individual authorship in the digital age where the term has undergone radical destabilisation. Who owns the oral forms, for instance? Is it the so-called anonymous composer in traditional society, the collector or recorder who mediates the creative process and becomes a surrogate agent, or the contemporary artist who is heir to this timeless tradition of oral intellection through performances that are digitalized and stored in retrieval systems, or is it a virtual community of authors, or a hybrid of all of these? The paper concludes that digital technologies are a means of preserving these oral forms and endowing them with vitality and enduring relevance to meet the immediacy and urgency of postmodern societal needs in Nigeria.

When I open the Spatterlight application to access “Galatea,” one of Emily Short’s many fabulous
pieces of interactive fiction, a supple string of text hails me, flirts with me, and stops just short of
calling me by name. The more I read, the more I learn about the source of the text itself, Galatea.
“She” is a simple yet oddly convincing AI, one who is as reactive as she is acted upon, whose words
emerge in response to my own, and whose short temper has shut down our collective story more
times than I can count. As startling as her salutations initially seemed and as accustomed to her
spurning me as I have become, I remain intrigued by Galatea’s overt and shameless invocation of her reader—in this case, me.

Strictly speaking, this mode of address should not be possible, at least not according to the
familiar conventions of literary tradition. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye states the matter
unequivocally: “Criticism can talk, and all the arts are dumb…there is a most important sense in
which poems are as silent as statues.”(4). While works of IF are decidedly not the poetical specimens
Frye has in mind, his stance nevertheless serves as a firm response to a larger problem, one that
has endured since antiquity and persists to this day, a problem that can be crudely summarized
in the following terms: there has always been something of a gap between the written word and
its reception. We see this problem articulated fully and eloquently in the work of Plato. In the
Phaedrus, for example, Socrates’ attitude toward the written word is one of curiosity, skepticism, and frustration.

In an extremely clarifying reading of Plato, however, Jacques Derrida offers the possibility that
while Socrates laments the written word’s ability to respond, he nevertheless expresses the desire to
see the mute, still properties of art come to life. To illustrate this point, Derrida directs our attention
to key moments in a different dialog, the Timaeus, with Socrates’ discussion of the khora, which
translates as “receiver,” “receptacle,” or “receiving space.” Derrida mines the Timaeus exhaustively, teasing out every potential signification that possibly inheres in the concept of the “receiving space,”
suggesting that while the receptacle does not successfully overturn the separation that Plato specifies as existing between artist, artwork, and receiver, it nevertheless reveals a desire on his part to think of the three as mutually constituted.
The hypothesis that I would like to test in this presentation is that in works such as Short’s “Galatea,”
direct address functions to bring the text into being, by signaling the reader and requiring a response of her. This response becomes a part of the initial text, such that the text that emerges is literally constituted through the feedback that exists between the reader’s actions and the author’s words. “Galatea,” I wish to argue, functions as Plato’s khora does, as a peculiar intermediary between form and copy.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)