The Opening Formula and the Teller
The extended Àlọ́ Ìjàpá opening formula in Yorùbá with interlinear glossing, the praise-name run for the tortoise embedded in it, and what the collectors record about the apàlọ̀ and his drum.
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The extended Àlọ́ Ìjàpá opening formula in Yorùbá with interlinear glossing, the praise-name run for the tortoise embedded in it, and what the collectors record about the apàlọ̀ and his drum.
An àlọ́ does not begin without a formula, and yoruba-alo documents the short form: the teller cries Ààlọ́ o and the audience answers Ààlọ̀. This file carries the material that file does not, an extended opening formula recorded in Yorùbá with word-by-word glossing, in which the call-and-response is followed by a run of praise-names for Ìjàpá himself. It also collects what the nineteenth-century collectors record about the teller as a professional.
The extended formula matters because it shows the genre doing something the short form conceals: the tale is announced by praising its protagonist, in the manner of oríkì, before a word of narrative is spoken.
Printed by Ọbádélé Kambon with interlinear morphological glossing, cited to Adeboye Babalọlá's Yorùbá-language collection Àkójọpọ̀ Àlọ́ Ìjàpá (1973), p. 1 . Kambon marks the second line in bold as the standard audience response, the rest being spoken by the storyteller.
Àlọ́ o! Àlọ̀! Àló mi dá gbàá Àló mi dá gbòó Àló mi dá fììrìgbágbòó Ó dálérí Ìjàpá, Tìrókò, ọkọ Yánníbo Ẹsẹ̀ danindanin bi àran ọ̀pẹ. T'ó kọ́lé, kọ́lé t'ó fi ìrán bà á jẹ́ Tí ń lọ l'áàrin èpà Tí ìpàkó rẹ̀ ń hàn fírífírí Ó ní ọpẹ́lọpẹ́ pé òun ga
Idiomatic English (Kambon's translations, as printed) Translator: Kambon, Ọbádélé
A story! A story! My story strikes like this My story strikes like that My story strikes falling and bouncing like so It strikes the head of the tortoise, of the silk cotton tree, the husband of Yánníbo with legs tight like the fruit of the palm-tree Who builds houses Who destroys them with the seat of his shell who goes among groundnuts for whom the back of his head shows indistinctly who says it is thanks to the fact that he is tall
Kambon may be followed by a further call and response to begin the narrative proper :
Teller: Ní ìgbà kan ('Once upon a time') Audience: Kan, kan ('Once, once') Teller: Ọba kan wà ('There was a king') Audience: Ó wà bíi ẹwà ('He was there like beauty')
Three things in this text do not survive into English.
The ideophones. Gbàá, gbòó and fììrìgbágbòó are glossed by Kambon simply as IDEO, ideophone, and rendered "like this," "like that," "falling and bouncing like so." They are sound-words describing manner of impact, and the third is an expansion of the first two into a longer, tumbling shape. English has no equivalent class, and the translation has to convert sound into deixis, pointing at a manner it cannot pronounce. The claim being made is that the story strikes, and the ideophones say how hard and in what way.
The rhyme of ìgbà kan and kan, kan. The audience's answer to "once upon a time" is simply the numeral repeated, and to "there was a king," ọba kan wà, the answer is ó wà bíi ẹwà, "he was there like beauty," which turns on the near-echo of wà (to be) and ẹwà (beauty). The response is a pun on the teller's own last word. English cannot carry this and Kambon does not attempt it.
The tonal distinction in the opening pair. Àlọ́ o and Àlọ̀ differ in tone, as yoruba-alo sets out, which is why the exchange looks like meaningless repetition in translation. Note that Kambon's printing here differs slightly from the form given in yoruba-alo from Adegbodu, Ààlọ́ o against Àlọ́ o; both are recorded and the corpus does not adjudicate between two published orthographies of the same spoken formula.
The substantive point is that lines 6 to 13 are praise poetry. They are built exactly as the oríkì described in yoruba-oriki are built: a name, a lineage-style epithet, then a chain of relative clauses each beginning tí or t'ó, "who does such and such," accumulating attributes rather than narrating events.
What they attribute to Ìjàpá is worth reading closely:
Tìrókò, ọkọ Yánníbo. He is given a tree and a wife, which is the standard shape of a Yorùbá praise identification. Yánníbo is his wife across the tradition, and she appears by name in alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo, where the medicine that kills him was prepared for her. Note that the name of Olagoke Ojo's Yorùbá-language collection, Ìjàpá Tìrókò Ọkọ Yannibo, is this line of the formula used as a book title .
T'ó kọ́lé, kọ́lé, t'ó fi ìrán bà á jẹ́. Who builds houses and destroys them with the seat of his shell. This is a compressed statement of the whole cycle's moral shape: he constructs and then wrecks his own construction, using the part of his body that is also the permanent record of his punishments. alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked gathers the tales about that shell.
Tí ń lọ l'áàrin èpà, tí ìpàkó rẹ̀ ń hàn fírífírí. Who goes among the groundnuts, the back of whose head shows indistinctly. The tortoise is so low to the ground that walking through a groundnut field he is barely visible. Compare the proverb recorded in owe-tortoise-ijapa-trickster at entry 2, where the tortoise boasts that walking through a peanut farm the nuts pop one by one into his mouth. The same image, the tortoise in the groundnuts, appears in a proverb as a boast about expertise and in this formula as an observation about his height.
Ó ní ọpẹ́lọpẹ́ pé òun ga. Who says it is thanks to the fact that he is tall. The final line is a joke and it lands on the previous one. Having just been described as so low that only the indistinct back of his head shows above the crop, he is quoted thanking his own tallness. The formula ends by giving the trickster a line of self-congratulation that the preceding line has already refuted.
So the audience, before the tale starts, has been told what kind of creature this is: married, tree-associated, self-defeating, invisible in a field, and vain about it.
Ellis records the teller's titles and the working conditions of the trade in 1894 :
A reciter of tales, called an akpalo (k'a-alo), "maker of alo," is a personage highly esteemed, and in great demand for social gatherings. Some men, indeed, make a profession of story-telling, and wander from place to place reciting tales. Such a man is termed an akpalo kpatita, "one who makes a trade of telling fables."
He adds that "as among the Ewe tribes, the professional story-teller very often uses a drum, with the rhythm of which the pauses in the narrative are filled up," and that on gathering an audience the teller cries "My alo is about so-and-so," naming the hero or heroine, or "My alo is about a man (or woman) who did so-and-so" . Every tale in Ellis opens with that formula, and it is reproduced at the head of each Ellis tale in this section.
Ellis's spellings akpalo and akpalo kpatita are his 1894 orthography for what modern orthography writes apàlọ̀; yoruba-alo gives the modern forms and the paired term agbààlọ̀ for the audience member. His derivation k'a-alo is his own analysis.
The drum detail matters. A professional teller with a drum in his hands changes how several tales in this section read. alo-ijapa-singing-drum turns entirely on a drum that sings, and alo-the-king-and-kini-kini contains a drum text, tinliki, tinliki, tinli-puru, printed as syllables. If the teller had an instrument, the drummed passages were played rather than described. yoruba-drum-poetry treats the wider practice.
Ellis draws a distinction that is easy to lose and worth preserving :
The professional story-teller must not be confounded with the arokin, or narrator of the national traditions, several of whom are attached to each king or paramount chief, and who may be regarded as the depositaries of the ancient chronicles.
He adds that the chief of the arókin is a councillor titled Ọlọ́gbọ́, "one who possesses the old times," and cites a proverb, "Ologbo baba arokin," Ọlọ́gbọ́ is the father of chroniclers . The Yorùbá is printed without tone marks and is reproduced in that state.
The distinction is between fiction and record. An apàlọ̀ tells àlọ́, which the opening formula explicitly marks off as a made thing; the arókin holds dynastic history and is attached to a court. Confusing the two would make the Ìjàpá cycle look like a body of historical claims, which is precisely what the framing formula exists to prevent. yoruba-oral-genre-system treats the genre boundaries, and yoruba-alo the framing function.
alo-ellis-1894-as-a-source. Ellis's etymologies and orthography are his own and are reproduced as printed.
A note on the Babalọlá citation. Kambon's reference list dates Part 2 of Babalọlá's collection to 1979, while the bibliography published at yorubatales.com dates it to 1973. The discrepancy is real and unresolved by this compiler. The formula above is cited to Part 1, 1973, on which both agree. Babalọlá's collection has not been obtained by this compiler; it is the major Yorùbá-language Ìjàpá collection and the principal gap in this section's sourcing.
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.
A tortoise tale in which Ìjàpá rescues a drowning hunter's son on condition of enslaving him, hides him inside a drum that appears to sing by itself, and loses him when he drinks himself unconscious at a dance.
What A. B. Ellis's 1894 collection contains, why its tale texts are usable, and exactly where its colonial framing has to be refused.
What oríkì are, the different kinds, who performs them and why, and how they carry history that written records do not.
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.
Twenty-nine Yorùbá proverbs built around Àjàpá the tortoise, the tradition's central trickster animal, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.