African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 919
Domowitz notes that cloth designs are selected very often for the proverbial speech
that they communicate, rather than for their colors and patterns. One woman who had
recently ended a disastrous marriage selected a cloth with cornstalk patterns because of
the appropriate proverb that pattern would elicit. The proverb read, “Men are not like
corn” (meaning if they were corn, one could pull off the husks and examine the interior
kernels before buying them).
One could say that factory cloths for the Agni function like certain aspects of
language. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1966) identifies what he calls the quality
of “mutability,” by which he means that the linguistic sign, being dependent on a rational
principle, is arbitrary and can be organized at will. This suggests that linguistic signs
change their meaning over space and time. Similarly, we see that the proverbial cloth
messages shift in meaning relative to the context in which they operate. For example,
when a divorced Agni man saw his new lover wearing a cloth with a spider motif, he
immediately thought of the proverb, “What one does to cendaa (a small harmless spider),
one does not do to bokohulu” (a large spider considered dangerous), for him a grim
reminder that he should not be unfaithful to her, as he had been to his former wife. In
other words, it was his experiences from the past, combined with circumstances of the
present, that gave meaning to the cloth design. Were she to have worn her spider cloth in
the presence of neighboring Akan groups, they might have gleaned very different
proverbs from the designs.
This essay has highlighted a number of ways in which African textiles encode thought
and speech. It is only the beginning of a potentially rich exploration into the ways in
which textiles in Africa can be, and are, used as language.
References
Aronson, Lisa. 1992. Ijebu Yoruba Aso Olona: A Contextual and Historical Overview. African Arts
25:52–63, 101.
——. 1995. Threads of Thought: African Cloth as Language. In African and African-American
Sensibility, ed. Michael W.Coy, Jr. and Leonard Plotnikov. Pittsburgh: Dept. of Anthropology,
University of Pittsburgh.
Brett-Smith, Sarah, C. 1984. Speech Made Visible: The Irregular as a System of Meaning.
Empirical Studies of the Arts 2:127–47.
Calame-Griaule, G. 1986. Words and the Dogon World, Philadelphia.
Dilley, R. 1987. Myth and Meaning in the Tukulor Loom. Man 22: 256–66.
Domowitz, Susan 1992. Wearing Proverbs: Anyi Names for Printed Factory Cloths. African Arts
25:82–7.
Drewal, H. 1977. Art and the Perception of Women in Yoruba Culture. Cahiers d’Études
Africaines 17:545–67.
Prussin, L. 1986. Hatumere: Islamic Design in West Africa. Berkeley.
Saussure, Fredinand de. 1966. Course in General Linguistics. New York.
LISA ARONSON
See also Body Arts; Gender Representation in African Folklore; Nsibidi;
Proverbs