Ọwe Inside Performance
How proverbs behave when they are embedded in chanted and sung genres rather than used in conversation, and why a quoted proverb changes what a performance is doing.
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How proverbs behave when they are embedded in chanted and sung genres rather than used in conversation, and why a quoted proverb changes what a performance is doing.
The main treatment of Yoruba proverbs is in yoruba-owe-proverbs, which holds the collection and the account of how ọwe work in speech: as authority, as adjudication, as indirect correction, as compression, as a display of competence. This file does one thing that file does not. It asks what changes when a proverb is not spoken in an argument but embedded in a performed genre, inside an oríkì, a chant, a tale or a drummed text.
The short answer is that the proverb stops being the speaker's move and becomes a quoted object, and that this shift is central to how Yoruba oral genres are built.
Performers do not confine themselves to an authorised corpus. Karin Barber's finding is that oríkì performers raid other subjects' oríkì and also raid other verbal genres, proverbs, riddles and Ifá verses, for material to add to the flow . The result is a pervasive intertextuality in which the incorporated elements are partially but not fully subordinated to the incorporating genre, casting what she calls a haze of quotedness over the whole field of Yoruba verbal art .
That phrase, partially but not fully subordinated, is the precise description. A proverb inside an oríkì does not dissolve into the oríkì. It stays recognisably a proverb, and the listener hears it as an import. This is different from how metaphor works in English poetry, where a borrowed phrase is normally naturalised.
The clearest published example is the passage Barber records from a praise performance, discussed also in yoruba-oral-genre-system.
"Ó gbọ́ Ifá ó yalé Ó gbọ́hìnkùlé mọ̀ye odù tó hù 'Àìgbọ́fá là á wòkè, Ifá kan ò sí párá'" Ló tọ́ Babaa Fárónkẹ.
"He hears the chink of the divining chain, he stops to come in, from out in the yard he already knows what figure has emerged. 'Not knowing Ifá, we gaze up, but there's no Ifá in the rafters.'" This is what Father of Fárónkẹ is worthy to be called.
Translator: Karin Barber
The third line is the proverb, and it is doing three things at once that a proverb in conversation does not do.
It is used by inversion. The proverb describes people who do not know Ifá and therefore stare uselessly upward, hoping to find divination in the rafters. It is applied to a man who is the opposite of that. Barber calls this characteristic Yoruba inversion: the proverb is cited not because it describes the subject but because the subject is its negative . A listener has to perform that flip to get the compliment, and the flip is the wit.
It is marked as quoted. The line arrives inside the performance as a self-contained, recognisable saying, and everyone present knows it already. Barber's point about quotation is that a quotation is only a quotation when it is inserted into a new context, so that in the very act of recognising a stretch of discourse as having an independent existence, the quoter is re-embedding it . The proverb's pre-existence is part of its effect.
It is converted into a name. The closing line, ló tọ́ Babaa Fárónkẹ, reaches back and declares that everything just said, the two descriptive lines and the proverb, is what the man is worthy to be called . The proverb has been turned into an attribution, an epithet, a thing a person can be named by. That is a genuinely strange operation from an English point of view. It would be like ending a description of someone by saying "and that is what he is worthy to be called: a stitch in time saves nine."
Barber's further observation is that these formulations belong to the oríkì singer's repertoire and can be applied to anyone whose skill as a diviner merits it, and that in the act of attribution she highlights this fact, drawing attention to the pre-existence of the formulation and to its character as already-constituted text .
Four differences from conversational use.
Authority is redirected. In speech a proverb lends the speaker impersonal authority: I am not saying this, the ancestors are. In performance the performer is already speaking with borrowed authority, and the proverb instead lends its weight to the subject being praised. The transfer runs to the addressee rather than to the speaker.
Aptness is judged publicly. A proverb misapplied in conversation is a small embarrassment. In performance, before an audience that is both respondent and judge , and that already knows the corpus, a badly chosen proverb is a visible failure of skill. This is part of what is being assessed when older chanters criticise younger ones at hunters' gatherings .
It becomes mobile. Once a proverb is in a performer's repertoire it can be attached to any suitable subject, as Barber notes of the Ifá formulation . It is no longer tied to a situation. This is the entextualisation process described in yoruba-oral-genre-system operating on a unit that was already portable.
It can be delivered without words at all. A proverb is a fixed sequence of syllables with a fixed tone pattern, which makes it drummable. Proverbs are among the standard texts of the dùndún repertoire, and a drummer can quote one to a person in a crowd, with the meaning fully available to anyone who knows the saying. File 11 treats this. It is the strongest evidence that a proverb functions as an object with an identity independent of its being spoken: it survives the removal of every vowel and consonant.
In àlọ́. Tales frequently end in a proverb, and proverbs frequently exist as the compressed residue of a tale. The relationship is treated in file 08 with àlọ ni ti Ìjàpá, àbọ̀ ni ti àna rẹ̀, the proverb that states the moral of the Tortoise and Snail tale and that presupposes the tale in order to be intelligible. That is the same structure Barber identifies for oríkì and ìtàn: a compact formulation whose expansion is held in a separate genre .
In ọfọ̀. Incantation uses proverb-like general statements as the precedent step of its argument, as described in file 07. Where an ọfọ̀ says that a flowing river does not run backwards, it is using the form of a proverb to establish the premise from which the application follows. The corpus notes there that the reasoning of the stomach-ache incantation turns explicitly on a proverb about ingratitude to a benefactor .
In ẹkún ìyàwó. The bride's chant uses proverbs to state the obligations she is invoking, and the analysis of the genre notes the proverb t'ọmọdé bá ti júbà àgbà ó dájú kò ní ṣìse, once a child has paid homage to the elders it is certain the child will not fail, as the principle behind the ìkíni segment .
In sung and popular genres. Proverbs are dense in fuji, apala, juju and Afrobeats lyrics, where they perform the same operation of borrowing inherited authority, now for a commercial performer addressing a paying audience. File 14 follows this.
If you are reading a transcribed Yoruba oral text and you meet a line that seems to change register, to state a general truth, or to be about something other than the subject at hand, the likeliest explanation is that it is a proverb being quoted, and that the performer expects you to already know it and to work out its relevance yourself.
Two further consequences follow. The line is probably not the performer's composition, so reading it as a personal statement is a category error. And its relevance may be by inversion, so the surface sense may be the opposite of the point.
The main collection in yoruba-owe-proverbs and Owomoyela's Yoruba Proverbs are therefore working tools for reading the performed genres, not a separate topic.
yoruba-owe-proverbs.What Yorùbá proverbs do in speech and in law, and a worked collection of more than forty proverbs in original, literal gloss, and idiomatic English.
How Yoruba verbal art is classified into named genres by vocal manner rather than subject, who performs each and on what occasion, and why the European category "oral literature" fits the material imperfectly.
What oríkì are, the different kinds, who performs them and why, and how they carry history that written records do not.
The evening storytelling tradition, the call-and-response frame that opens it, riddles as a separate discipline, and the Ìjàpá cycle read as a body of ethical and comic literature.
The dùndún as a literary instrument rather than a technical curiosity: oríkì and proverbs delivered on the drum, what the drummer composes from, and how drummed, sung and spoken text relate in one performance.
The hunters' chant associated with Ògún, its vocal manner, the ìjálá artist and how he is judged, the contest setting, and what the chant does as self-portrait and as praise of animals.