ABSTRACT
Recent studies on orality have stressed the porous nature of the boundaries between orality and literacy while stating emphatically that they remain different territories. Both Hofmeyr and Tonkinworking respectively on oral historical narrative from the Transvaal region of South Africa, and from Liberia in West Africa, direct our attention to the complex textuality of oral forms and oral genres.1
They are ‘not’—as the novelist Chinua Achebe once remarked about stories-‘innocent’. Oral genres, as much as written, come with their own hinterland of specific cultural and historical imperatives and their own subjectivities. Far from existing fenced off and out of timea little like the world of the Reserve in Huxley’s Brave New Worldthey impinge, often awkwardly, on written genres and the discourses constructed from them. Sometimes they seem so awkward that their powerful, difficult presence is largely ignored or at best underrated.2
Certainly in the case of names and the land in both the South African and Aboriginal poetry I will be discussing there are ways of regarding the body and the land, ways of belonging, which are difficult to ascertain without the crossing and recrossing of cognitive boundaries, a revision of what constitutes ‘text’ and ‘post-colonial text’, and a search for a new aesthetic.
