African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

convey hypocrisy. Its power can and should sometimes be tempered by rechanneling it,
by having a spokesperson intervene. Ournarou (1996) illustrates how Zabia Hussei and
Ali na Maliki, two contemporary oral artists from Niger, create a poetic metalanguage as
they create poetry itself, by using images such as the building offences or farming to
allude to the process of creating oral poetry or song.
Verbal art and the artists who create it are often believed to be endowed with
exceptional power. This is in part because of the capacity of verbal art to transform, to
produce an emotional response. Language which is rhythmic, metaphorical, or
ambiguous is created by calling attention to linguistic form and structure. Jourdain (1997)
suggests that emotion is a reaction to unexpected experience. Verbal artists craft language
in unexpected ways, thereby committing what Jakobson refers to as “organized violence
on ordinary speech,” (1960, 353) and in so doing create language with the power to
move, to impassion, and to transfix.
References
Bird, Charles. 1972. Aspects of Prosody in West African Poetry. In Current Trends in Stylistics,
eds. Braj Kachru and Herbert Stahlke. Champaign, Illinois: Linguistic Research.
Crystal, David. 1987. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Elhadji Ournarou, Chaibou. 1996. Individual Talent in Contemporary Hausa Oral Poetry. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Furniss, Graham. 1996. Poetry, Prose, and Popular Culture in Hausa. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Henkel, Jacqueline M. 1996. Language of Criticism: Linguistic Models and Literary Theory. Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Language, ed.
Thomas A.Sebeok. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.
Jourdain, Robert. 1997. Music, the Brain and Ecstasy. New York: William Morrow.
Nketia, J.H.Kwabena. 1971. The Linguistic Aspect of Style in African Languages. Current Trends
in Linguistics 7:733–57.
Okpewho, Isidore. 1992. African Oral Literature: Backwounds, Character, Continuity.
Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1915. Cours de linguistique Renerale. Paris: Payot.
Schuh, Russell, G. 1988. Prealable to a Theory of Hausa Poetic Meter. In Studies in Hausa
Language and Linguistics: In Honor of F.W.Parsons, eds. Graham Furniss and Philip J.Jaggar.
London and New York: Kegan Paul International in association with the International African
Institute.
LINDA HUNTER
See also Ideophones; Proverbs; Silence in Expressive Behavior
See History and Folklore: The Luba
African Americans 439
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