Oriki.
Praise poetry, dense with allusion, belonging to an orisha, a town, a lineage, a king, a person, an animal or a plant. It is performed rather than read, it is learned from grandmothers, and the talking drum can play it — because the drum reproduces the tones of the words, so the drumming is speech.
Oriki are chanted praise-poems and they attach to almost everything — orisha, towns, lineages, kings, individuals, occupations, animals and plants. The form is accretive and allusive: strings of epithets, references to past incidents intelligible only to those who know them, boasts, and occasionally rebukes, delivered rapidly and with tonal exactness. Because Yoruba is tonal and the dundun talking drum reproduces speech tones, drummers can and do play oriki, so festival drumming is intelligible speech to those who know the text. Oriki are transmitted domestically, largely by women, and a person unable to recite their lineage's oriki is regarded as deficient in a real way. Karin Barber's I Could Speak Until Tomorrow, a study of oriki in the town of Okuku, remains the standard account of how the genre works socially, and demonstrates that it functions as a means by which individuals and lineages assert standing rather than as decorative verse.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.