I’m working with African folktales and these come from an oral tradition. I’m working from documents of stories which were taken down by linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, who wanted to get written alphabets of these hundreds of tribal languages, which were not written languages. Yet story was a very vital part of the life and day. Now those linguists and anthropologists wanted to get written alphabets, to create a dictionary of those languages. They generally would ask for stories. But the stories, when told by the informant, was very often summarized. It was like a précis of the motif. They did very valuable work in documenting the story motifs but very rarely was it told in a way that when it entered the book, you felt the richness of the oral tradition.
I work from these documents. I work from the Shawnberg Library in Harlem in New York City, 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. It’s a research library. People have come from all over the world to use those resources. Today with the Internet and all of that they don’t have to leave anywhere, they can tap into those resources from home. They have the works that are long out of print from the 1800’s and early 1900’s, and these are the sources that I work from. I go to the Shawnberg Library, I copy out these documents of stories when there are stories that interest me. Then I become the storyteller. What can I do with stories that were in the oral tradition and it’s going to be in a book?
How can I bring something of the feeling of the oral tradition into my writing? Ah, through poetry. I use the devices of poetry in my prose. In reading any of my stories you’re going to hear the rhyme, the rhythm, the syncopation; you’ll find onomatopoeia, the playing with sounds, all of the devices of poetry work closely in my prose.
What often a prose writer will avoid because they would want you to read more fluently, more directly, I am seizing upon and using in the way I write my stories. I would like my reader to feel while reading the story even silently, that he or she can hear the storyteller, you see. By using those devices of poetry, I open that up quite directly.