"Popularising" African and African-American Comparative Folklore in the Age of Text-Messaging...

"Popularising" African and African-American Comparative Folklore in the Age of Text-Messaging MillennialsAuthor(s): Debra SmithSource: Folklore, Vol. 118, No. 1 (Apr., 2007), pp. 91-99Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035399 .

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Folklore 118 (April 2007): 91-99

TOPICS, NOTES AND COMMENTS

As contributions to this section, the Editors welcome comment and debate on topical issues or on recent articles or reviews appearing in the journal. Shorter accessibly written items of general interest, reports on work in progress, notes and queries are all also welcome.

"Popularising" African and African-American Comparative Folklore in the Age of Text- messaging Millennials

Debra Smith

Introduction Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler declare that "cultural studies has long been concerned with the everyday terrain of people, and with all the ways that cultural practices speak to, of, and for their lives" (1991, 11). Perhaps the authors were foreshadowing the construction of my undergraduate comparative African and African-American folklore course, falling under the rubric of culture studies. My colleague and I joined together to design a "millennial friendly" course, leaving opportunity available for students to merge "traditional" forms of lore with more modern concepts congruent with their own lives and experiences. Millennials-that generation of students born between 1980 and 2000-compel those of us in the classroom, like much of society, to rethink how to best stimulate them. This article is a pedagogical insight into strategies we used to achieve this result at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. The offspring of baby boomers, millennials are digitally and visually nurtured students, the impetus for "smart" classrooms equipped with PowerPoint projectors and DVD players. Thus, we were prompted to make some millennial strides as well, in order to make this new folklore course an attractive Africana Studies Department undergraduate elective. The term folklore on its face has the potential to conjure up thoughts of age-old programmes that compete for student interest with more "modern" courses like popular culture and contemporary fiction. With many students asking how they can apply the knowledge they learn in a particular course to their career goals and to their lives, I, like many educators, must incorporate the answer to that question within the curriculum, even while striving to make the African Diaspora folklore course compete with all of the aplomb of visual and modern programmes. In Between the Cracks of History: Essays on Teaching and Illustrating Folklore, Jan Brunvand is quoted as defining folklore as "the traditional knowledge of a culture," and assesses that "folklore is continually being changed by those who use it, and the same story, song, custom, or belief can therefore be found in many forms and variants" (1997, 5). So, at the outset of ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/07/010091-9; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis © 2007 The Folklore Society DOI: 10.1080/00155870601095689



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planning the course, it was evident that a primary component should involve demonstration of how folklore, often thought of as being past-tense and historical in scope, enjoys new life in today's modern times. My colleague and I were prepared, therefore, for some less-than-conventional means of exploring our formal required texts, which included the epic tale Sundiata: Epic of Mali (Niane 1965) and its sister text Sunjata (Suso and Kanute 1974); A Treasury of American Folklore (Courlander 1976); Black Folktales (Lester 1991); Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems (Cope 1968); Poetry, Performance and Art: Udje Dance Songs of the Urhobo People (Ojaide 2003), and The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature (Gates and McKay 1997). Compelling results emerge when the contents of formal folklore collections are compared with millennial lore like rap music and even text- messaging, and when the generation that engages in this kind of communication applies folklore canons to everyday life. What follows is a strategy for effectively and engagingly teaching folklore in the age of millennials.

Using the personal experience approach to folklore studies has proved successful as a teaching method, but I was a bit apprehensive this time around. Given that this was to be a new undergraduate comparative course in folklore that was geared towards a generation I knew would rely on our creativity in presentation in order to be able to handle it, I had no reference point for its success. I also considered that since the courses in our department typically attract black students, we might very well have a homogeneous student base that could reflect similar experiences. I was pleasantly surprised, however, that we attracted students from different cultural backgrounds, which allowed for diversity in story landscapes. The concept of personal experience was especially pervasive. Against this background we were of the opinion that the personal experience approach was likely to prove attractive to the students in question and effective as a means of indicating the possible content and dynamic nature of folklore. Rhett Rushing's assertion that "each and every baggage handler at each and every airport in the country has a 'big tip' story. Certainly, they all don't tell the same tale, but the fact that each has that type of story in his or her repertoire can only indicate folklore" (Abernethy and Satterwhite 1997, 55) seemed like a good starting point for our pedagogical endeavour. We sought to determine what "same" yet "different" stories our students held in their personal repertoires, and how much they have changed with each telling. Using Rushing's method of "beginning within," we challenged our students to answer the question "how did I get to be me," by using folklore stories about their lives (Abernethy and Satterwhite 1997, 54.) To ignite this discussion, we started by reading Sunjata. The authors, Suso and Kanute, are both "master jhalis" or "griots"-the latter being African terms for musicians or storytellers. They begin each of their versions of the same epic with starkly different accounts of both the anticipation of lead character's conception, and the length of his mother's pregnancy. We looked at Suso's account first:

I am going to tell you the story of Sunjata, And you must pay attention. Sunjata's father's name was Fata King Makhang ... He went to Sankarang Madiba Konte.



"Popularising" Folklore in the Age of Text-messaging Millennials 93

The soothsayers had said, 'If you go to Sankarang Madiba Konte And find a wife there. She will give birth to a child Who will become king of the black people ... She became pregnant, and for seven years Sunjata's mother was pregnant with him (Suso and Kanute 1974, 4).

Then Kanute writes:

For fourteen years Sunjata's mother was pregnant with him, But the diviners by stones foretold it, The diviners by cowries foretold it; They told Susu Sumanguru Baamagana, 'This child who will destroy your kingship Has already been conceived' (Suso and Kanute 1974, 42).

The variation-which is an integral characteristic of folklore transmission-is clearly evident in the two accounts. Then Kanute adds, "you see one griot, and he gives you an account of it in another way, and you will find that what he has heard has determined his version" (Suso and Kanute 1974, 35). Encouraged by the fact that our class told us "change is good," we then moved to putting the question "how did I get to be me?" into practice, encouraging the students to recall the folklore that they had heard repeatedly as they grew up. They were told that examples of this kind of folklore included stories about how students got their names, tales of their birth, and family "campfire" narratives. We reiterated that these family "stories" comprise the students' earliest collections of personal lore, and perhaps, like Sunjata, change with each account that is told. One student was eager to tell us that the reason he is called James Robinson Truman IV is because, the first male in his family has carried that name, for generations, while another shared how she was born in a movie theatre in the 1980s while captivated movie- goers abandoned their tubs of popcorn and Beverly Hills Cop in favour of watching her mother go into labour in the front row. She was able to relate to the different versions of Sunjata considering that, years later, at family reunions, she learned that, depending upon who was telling this same tried and true story, the movie was said to be either Trading Places or maybe 48 Hours; this was her testimony to the transformative nature of folklore.

We found other ways to explore Sunjata in a comparative fashion when we talked about African traditional rites of passage. Sunjata's acceptance into the Komo society was preceded by a period of initiation followed by a ceremony to indicate the rite of passage to adulthood:

They appointed a day for the circumcision ceremony, And they proclaimed that on the fourteenth day of the next month They would hold a circumcision ceremony in Manding. Every section was to enter a hundred boys;



94 Debra Smith

Every boy who was to go into the bush Would mount a horse, With a gun in his hand And wearing a sword. When the smith had circumcised you, You fired your gun and mounted your horse (Suso and Kanute 1974, 60).

Students' examples of their own rites of passage ran the gamut from one student's getting a driver's licence, to another's first-time hunting trip with his father and older brother at Thanksgiving, a signal to him that he had reached a level of maturity that would warrant his inclusion in this yearly excursion. Furthermore, discussions about gender roles, class systems and family in Sunjata encouraged a dialogue about family being a "simple business" in Africa, a concept that was applied to the model of the student's own family in which specific roles were assigned to family members, based upon a long-standing societal model. In reading Sunjata aloud, we emphasised speech, recitation, and song as components of oral tradition and transmission, and stressed that this epic "forms part of an extensive and vibrant oral tradition of Mande epic stories and praise songs that are constantly being regenerated through new performance" (Suso and Kanute 1974, xi). Our class reading contributed to its continued regeneration.

Another way to demonstrate the dynamic quality of folklore was to give a folk story to the students for analysis. We assigned one with the character "High John the Conqueror," of the trickster tale genre, for their consideration. Students said references within the story established it as one that was often "told," even performed in light of the potential for call and response from the audience. These include "Now some folks say ..." and "You know the kind I mean?" (Lester 1991, 61 and 63). During class, each of our students retold the story. Obviously the retelling was quite varied as there were nineteen students enrolled in the course. A key aspect to emerge was that each student acknowledged that when telling the story they highlighted the aspects that appealed most to them or those elements that they found humorous. Since appeal and humour are subjective, the retelling emphasised and explained how it is that stories they have long heard in their own families have changed with each telling according to what each person defines as important.

During this section of the course, students introduced us to folklore transmission via the cellular telephone text-messaging feature. Students explained that they use text-messaging to communicate with many friends at one time. As we discussed urban myths and contemporary legends, cellular telephone text- messaging revealed to the students that the messages they sent to others were exaggerated with each press of the send key in some cases, while in others they were completely revised to reveal a different "truth."

We did, of course have "required texts" as part of the course. This is probably one of the biggest drawbacks to college programmes, as students may view it as indicating a certain rigidity to the structure of a course long before it even begins. Yes, as educators, it is our responsibility to set the highest standards necessary to stimulate and challenge the young minds in our classrooms. But there is an edge to giving students a choice of stimuli. Thus, in addition to dealing with the assigned folktale collections, we encouraged students to bring in their own. For one student,




it was the first time he recognised that the story of "Tar Baby" (another trickster tale like "High John The Conqueror"), with which he had been familiar since he was a young child, was considered folklore. The connections were even more distinct when we introduced African proverbs to the course and compared them with aphorisms, statements of truth, opinion, or principle. Students complemen- ted our more traditional sayings like "It's hard to make clothes fit a miserable man" with their own, such as "Fool me once cool, fool me twice and I am the fool." Giving them the opportunity to "deconstruct" African proverbs in such a way that they were applicable to their everyday experience yielded an entertaining, yet educational, experience for us all.

In the light of the kind of student body we were dealing with, and in order to remain consistent with our theme of "community" learning, my colleague and I "decentralised" the position of power in the classroom. We made it clear that since we are African-American and African, respectively, we brought different perspectives to the course, and we were-thus learning from each other. In addition, we stressed that we expected to learn from the students whose generation helps confirm the fact that much about folklore involves its evolution and change. And hear from them we did! We found out that students who are immersed in popular culture experience this changing lore at first-hand on a daily basis. At the heart of this course lay the intangibles that could not be represented on the syllabus as objectives to be met during the semester. The impact of this unexpected, yet welcome, new information was all the greater due to the varied ages and races of the student group, their personal experiences, and even their geography. I shall elaborate on these matters later.

During the semester, my colleague and I decided that, in order to keep the momentum going, we had to continue to guide the students towards recognising the role and value of folklore in their own lives. To realise this, we turned to popular culture. So far we had been successful in engaging the students by letting them participate in their instruction, and we saw no reason to stray from that path. So, when we talked about variants of folklore, the creativity really began. For example, in the African udje tradition, individuals conduct themselves in a manner that is consistent with values that include putting the community's well- being before one's own. Like the various folklore collections, udje, a folk-dance form in which rivals duel in song, has political, spiritual, and social roots. This satirical performance relies on creative lyrics that "assail what the traditional society regards as vices: laziness, vanity, wretchedness, miserliness, flirtation, adultery, prostitution, wickedness and greed" (Ojaide 2003, 4). "Wounding" words that carry some hint of truth are hurled at the opposing dancers. Udje in and of itself proved entertaining for the students, especially when they viewed a video recording of an actual udje performance.

Part of the blueprint for keeping students engaged included not only udje performance, but also black Greek-letter organisation step shows. Step shows feature members of a fraternal organisation stomping their feet to a choreographed performance. Fraternities or sororities, or Greek-letter organis- ations, are members-only social clubs that often target students with particular sets of interests. Here, too, we encouraged students to relate these aspects of popular culture to their daily lives. One student commented that udje was comparable with a black Greek step-show in which one group playfully



96 Debra Smith

disparages another while "stepping" to a beat. Step shows of today feature many of the cultural expressions of udje, including call and response, competition and choreographed "steps."

Others likened udje to rap music rivalries. They took this comparison further by bringing in examples of retaliatory rap music. The fact that a popular music type was drawn into our classroom discussion relaxed many a student who might otherwise have hesitated in finding a voice. For instance, a sophomore student at the back of the classroom, who had a keen interest in rap music, gradually found more to share on this topic than any other dealt with during the semester.

Angela Shelf Medearis and Michael Medearis call rap music "the modern-day product of a rich oral tradition that was an important part of African culture" (Medearis and Medearis 1997, 73). African griots were likened to the rap artists of this century.

Another example of using rap music in our folklore course was when we talked about political folklore, or the kind that takes a social stance. We read some political poetry in class, which we then compared with modern orally-transmitted rap lyrics and music. We started with Claude McKay's classic sonnet entitled "If We Must Die":

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honour us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! (Gates and McKay 1997, 984).

As we dissected McKay's message, which is described by author Jean Wagner as "the incarnation of the new spirit" of a subjugated black people no longer passive and submissive, but willing to die for their dignity, we considered the anger and frustration of those caught in race riots of the early 1900s (Wagner 1973, 229). This time, rap music again emerged as modern-day political folklore. Students brought in rap music and lyrics of artists whose views not only expressed the passion of Claude McKay's poetry, but that also seemed to be most aligned with their own. These artists included Tupac Shakur, Public Enemy, and Nas, to name just a few. On many occasions the traditional and the modern folklore messages intersected, and the discussion then considered how the lore of African-American and African people in the past and present reflects their socio-economic conditions, place, and experience. Many of the same themes were to be found in folktales and in rap music, and at the heart of the matter seemed to be the fact that humour was combined with the realism of everyday life. Students were especially participative




during this segment of the course, eager to share their music and lyrics. For example, "If I ruled the world," by rap artist Nas was easy to compare with McKay's poetry. In the lyrics of his song, Nas writes about his desire for harmonious race relations, a rise to power for black people and a "better livin' type of place to raise our kids in" (Farley 1996, 79). The Washington Post Staff Writer, Esther Iverem, says:

The catchy chorus of "If I Ruled the World" summons a schoolyard fantasy of being in charge of the world. The young New York rapper alternates between social commentary about freeing black men from jails and fantasizing about a utopia where all races can wear Armani clothes, flash diamonds and enjoy sex without condoms." If I ruled the world (imagine that) I'd free all my sons ... Black diamonds and pearls ... If I ruled the world ... (Iverem 1996, G1l).

McKay said his poem was written for anyone who felt that they were not in control of their own life. Labelled a "new-school griot" (Saunders 1996, P6), Nas, in comparison, writes a song about "ruling the world," hinting about a desire to control. Iverem credits hip hop music with recording and reflecting peoples' desires and their responses to societal issues, "especially of postindustrial unemployment and of the neighborhoods ravaged by crack (cocaine). They reveal the spirituality and the desire for individual and community betterment that lies beneath superficial preoccupations with street posturing" (1996, G1).

We also talked about "eye dialect" in our course. Eye dialect is the written version of Black Vernacular English. Examples include "I'se" rather than "I am," or "fer" instead of "for." Surprisingly, when we discussed how dialect aptly captured in oral tales often loses some of its allure when those same tales are written, one student of southern geographical roots admitted that what we called "dialect" was simply what he was most accustomed to hearing in his home. He said that formal English was used only in the company of others. So, when we asked the students to read the written folktales in eye dialect-"Dar wus ole Uncle Jack, he want to git free"(Gates and McKay 1997, 39), rather than translate them into "formal" language, he felt comfortable because it was his natural way of speaking. Another student observed that the "dialect" of African-American and African folklore reminded her of the "slang" of modern forms of lore. For example, the Black Vernacular English in which our texts were written reminded the student of phrases like "look at 'em," which might be more probably heard in a rap performance instead of the formal "look at them."

Performance was a key component of our course-perhaps even its strongest element. When we deconstructed the African udje performance further, we were able to make comparisons with the African-American folk performance called "the dozens." Students were divided into two groups to "practice" their "dozens" or "insults" towards the opposing group (for example, "You're so dumb it takes you an hour to cook Minute Rice"). When the performance began, I gave scores to the groups based on their ability to keep the "insults" flowing without pause. This was one of our most successful class days, as everyone was involved in ensuring that their group won. Furthermore, the performance helped in the building of a comfort zone in our classroom where students felt at ease performing. This was especially important for the continued progress of our programme in the course of the semester.



98 Debra Smith

Finding creative ways of maintaining the students' enthusiasm and interest in the course was no small task. While the conventional methods of testing and the awarding of grades ensured that they would not altogether drop out of the course, the less traditional efforts were those that brought more meaning to the programme and kept it interesting for fifteen weeks. Our new folklore course culminated with a discussion about Richard Dorson's concept of "fakelore." Fakelore is a term for contrived folklore created to be accepted as a genuine story to be passed down for years to come. Some consider stories about Santa Claus enjoying cookies and milk at every home he visits on Christmas Eve to be fakelore. Our students were of the opinion that the rap artists of today are more concerned with the "dozens" mentality of one-upping their peers, than with the perceived allure of folklore tradition for their work. Thus, today's rap artist is not interested in creating fakelore.

One of the authors of our course texts states that, the African art of udje is a dying one. Yet, I believe that one semester of teaching a new course proved that this kind folklore is very much alive. When we began our African-American and African comparative folklore course with the epic Sundiata, we busied ourselves with teaching the basics about legends as a narrative genre. But we also learned about the true essence of folklore as that which entertains, explains and teaches. And, while traditional forms of folklore, like udje, are not as widespread as others, they serve as the foundation and springing point from which to explore folklore that students, whether they are initially aware of it or not, recognise as ever- changing, transformative, and dynamic-a kind of folklore that captures the lives, identity, creativity, and worldview of a people, and one on which they themselves can have an impact.

References Cited

Abernethy, Francis 'Edward, and Carolyn Fiedler Satterwhite, eds. Between the Cracks of History: Essays on Teaching and Illustrating Folklore. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1997.

Cope, Trevor. Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Courlander, Harold. A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1976.

Farley, Christopher John. "I'm Not a Gangsta." Time Magazine, 29 July 1996.

Gates, Henry Louis, and Nellie Y. McKay. "The Vernacular Tradition." In The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, 5-125. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary, Nelson, and Paula, Treichler. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge Press, 1991.

Iverem, Esther. "A Less Flip Side: The Spiritual Anthems of Hip Hop." The Washington Post, 29 September 1996, G1.

Lester, Julius. Black Folktales. New York: Grove Press, 1991. Medearis, Angela Shelf, and Michael Medearis. Music: African-American Arts. New York: Twenty-

First Century, 1997.

Niane, D. T. Sundiata: Epic of Mali. New York: Longman, 1965.

Ojaide, Tanure. Poetry, Performance and Art: Udje Dance Songs of the Urhobo People. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2003.




Saunders, Michael. "Nas Offers Promise (and Profit) to Hip-Hop Industry." The Times Union (Albany, NY), 26 September 1996, P6.

Suso, Bamba, and Banna, Kanute. Sunjata. London: Penguin Press, 1974.

Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1973.

Biographical Note Dr Debra C. Smith is assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She teaches courses in folklore, film and popular culture. She is author of the forthcoming book The Words Unspoken: The Hidden Power of Language, to be published by Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, in 2007.



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