The written language is helping to preserve our oral culture

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/11/senegal-new-generation-oral-culture

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In the early 1970s my father Boubacar Diamanka, known as Kanta Lombi, a Fula from the Fouladou region, left Senegal for France one week before my birth as an illegal immigrant to save our family from poverty.

Given that at that time my parents did not know how to read or write, their entire correspondence was conducted through audio cassettes. They recorded themselves talking before giving the cassettes to close family friends to bring to France or Senegal.

My father heard my first cry as a newborn on one of these cassettes (a cassette that I found and still have)

My father heard my first cry as a newborn on one of these cassettes (a cassette that I found and still have). I remember on one cassette my father asking my mother to come closer to the speaker of the cassette player so he could kiss her, as if a kiss could cross the ocean that divided them. Different to a written letter, in the cassettes there is the tone we give to words, there are smiles, there is the breath of the person speaking… there is life.

I was two years old when we joined my father in Bordeaux, where the role of audio and video cassettes became a key tool for transmitting Fula culture and educational values from Senegal to France. My parents would have liked to give my six brothers and sisters and myself the same education as they had received in their birth village, but as the proverb says: “When the music changes, so does the dance.”

They therefore adapted to the new music that was the rhythm of their daily life in Bordeaux, and adapted the dance of education that they wanted to transmit to their children.

Since childhood, the oral culture of the Fula has run in my veins and in my voice. I was rocked by its proverbs and aphorisms, its stories and sayings. From very early on, my rap and spoken-word texts were inspired by this culture: by its proverbs rich in meaning and magic, these aphorisms responsible for the fact that the Fula do not have a country, but a culture that adapts to all environments and that stays almost intact across time and space. The native land, for us, has always been the breath between words spoken aloud.

Often, when one talks about oral culture, there is a tendency to place it in opposition to written culture. Fula culture, on the contrary, seems to be more written than ever due to the fact that the Fula from the Fouladou living in Bordeaux created “Dental Fouladou”, an association whose objective was to share the treasures of Fula heritage. Afterwards, they decided to create “Kawtal Janggobe Pular”, another association to teach and study the Pulaar language in Bordeaux, to ensure that their mother tongue survived in France, and to encourage the Fula in the region to learn and teach Peul.

They received books written in Pulaar from Cairo and Mauritania. Those who knew how to read and write taught those who were trained only as shepherds, then factory workers, and who never went to school. The Pulaar classes were as important to parents as they were to their children.

The association saved up money and ordered books written in Pulaar and printed in Cairo. Finally, they invited a professor of Pulaar, Djiggo Tafsirou, who taught at the University of Cairo, in order to further master their own language and train “professors of Pulaar” in Bordeaux.

These very same defenders of the Fula oral culture, most of them illiterate, decided to organise a conference in Bordeaux, in the La Clairière des Aubiers neighbourhood where I grew up, in order to unify the language. A historic contribution to the written language, this congress was directed by the same illiterate defenders of oral culture who recognised that the Fula oral and written culture are not in opposition, but cohabit and grow together.

The cassette recordings of my father that began in order to maintain family ties between Bordeaux and Dakar and continued in order to promote the value of Fula oral culture, greatly influenced my own art. At the same time that this ancestral orality transformed into contemporary forms within my work, the Fula written culture began to occupy a central role thanks to the unification of the written language.

The widespread assumption that oral culture suffered due to technology and the rise in written culture, is in this case not a fair assumption. For the Fula from the Fouladou, oral culture in fact ensured the propagation of the written language across the global Fula community, initially spread out across the Sahel belt and now around the world. It is thanks to oral culture that the Pulaar language has had a revival worldwide.

The increase in literacy will never replace the Fula oral culture; they grow together in parallel. While the art of the Fula griots transformed itself through modern forms like rap and slam, recognising the role of technology and archiving in its preservation, the Pulaar language was unified and propagated around the world.