The Custodians of Culture and Orature

Abstract

 Apropos this rubric, it is difficult to oversee the contribution of Gay Wilentz in his book, Binding Cultures, which explores the cultural affiliation between African and African American women writers such as Nigerian Flora Nwapa and Ghanaians Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, writers who focus on the role of women in passing on cultural values to future generations, and African American writers Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Paule Marshall, who self-consciously invoke African culture to help create a more integrated African American community. These writers present a reality which conveys not only the diverse and varied experiences of women but also illustrate the complexity of an existence that is fraught with dilemmas. There is a constant foregrounding of black women's resilience, struggle for survival and unfaltering determination to change their circumstance of marginality. In their own voice, these women writers have confronted the sources of oppression and have identified generational and cultural continuity passed on by women as the construct which has held their communities together. These writers have not only undertaken recursive journey into their foremothers’ orature but have also documented this mothering process of cultural transmission thereby keeping these traditions alive. Thus, these women writers seem to be concerned with the role of women as “custodians of the traditions.” The writers underscore the primary role of their foremothers, as well as their own role to our community of readers. In this regard, the use of orature as a method of education and the orality of the writing style of each author is important. The authors redefine the dialectics of residual African based culture by uncovering aspects of their communal heritage veiled by hegemonic dominant discourse.  In addition, I have attempted to explore the authors’ sense of discovery/recovery of the self.