The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Reading Human Rights Literatures through Oral Traditions

Katrina M. Powell

You sing about this pain in your heart [dil]. Then you get some solace in your heart, that there have been hard times like this for others in the past. It’s good to sing songs about pain. They make you remember … [a]ny matters of the past that you’ve heard and that are good, you should keep passing those along … . A lot of matters are forgotten along with people. But we singers don’t forget the matters of the past. We don’t forget the old songs.

Tayi (quoted in Narayan 1996: 212)

Many oral traditions, including Appalachian stories, Aboriginal folktales, Māori songs from New Zealand, and the oral performances of griots in Africa, to name a few, resist linear plot lines. The various oral forms of indigenous cultures, and the subsequent contemporary written literature influenced by them, are often in “opposition to European tradition and the rejection of rationalism, in particular” (Jack 1996: 36). Understanding the linkages between oral traditions and contemporary written forms can impact the ways in which we understand multiplicities within human rights discourses and how different cultural spaces might define what counts as human rights.

The precursors to contemporary written forms declaring human rights (such as the Magna Carta, the United States Declaration of Independence, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR]) were conceived through religious or societal codes handed down through oral traditions, which included issues of fairness, dignity, and helping others. Oral literature historically has been defined as only those poems, songs, ballads, or myths that were passed through generations by word of mouth. More recently, however, oral literature has taken on a wider frame, including printed narratives, which include features of the oral tradition, either in terms of aesthetics, content, performativity, or stylistics (Finnegan 2005). Oral traditions from many cultures contain content that we might identify as having human and civil rights themes, though they may not have been originally composed with universal human rights (as we conceive of the concept now) in mind.

As several scholars of human rights literature have suggested, since the UDHR, the human rights narrative has emphasized individual testimony and overcoming insurmountable odds (Hunt 2008; Slaughter 2007; Bystrom 2012; Coundouriotis and Goodlad 2010). This emphasis has had the effect of making individuals “save-able” or “rescue-able” by those with the power to do so (Mutua 2001; Hesford 2012; Lyon 2013; Schaffer and Smith 2001). As a consequence, however, Bystrom concludes that, “authors using traditional, sentimentally inflected, and linear plot lines may negatively impact movements to stop human rights abuses or aid people in crisis situations by facilitating emotional catharsis in the reader,” making action a less likely result (2012: 642).

In human rights scholarship, much of our understanding of what constitutes human rights is based on written documents and not on spoken stories and histories. Human rights scholars Lynn Hunt and Joseph Slaughter focus respectively on the ways that the sentimental novel and the Bildungsroman have influenced (and been influenced by) human rights legal testimony, policy, and legislation. With the recent surge in understanding the oral tradition and its impact on literature in general, it is important to understand how human rights literature might be read differently with oral traditions in mind. Human rights literatures, as this volume attests, include various thematics, forms, and aesthetic devices, but generally human rights literatures are thought to include a documenting of human rights violations of some kind. Oral traditions, steeped in indigenous rhetorics, more often than not focus on communal histories, values of a society, and lessons to be learned by the larger community through the trials of an individual. So while the goal may not be to draw international attention to a particular human rights violation, human rights issues such as violent interactions, land rights disputes, and debates over individual sovereignty do occur in oral texts. Literary analyses of oral traditions tend to focus on content and aesthetics, but not necessarily human rights (Okpewho 1992; Parry and Lord 1954; Pere 1997; Srikanth 2001; Tonkin 1992; Traore 2010). More recently, critical legal studies analyze oral traditions in relation to legal testimonies at trials (Wright 2001; Cruikshank 2000; Slaughter 2007) and the ways people tell stories about their experiences. These recent convergences, then, suggest that human rights literary studies examined through an oral tradition lens might lend insight into the ways that stories are told and whether they are persuasive or effective in enacting change. Although there are many oral traditions and literary examples to explore, I focus on one here to illustrate the possibilities of this lens. In the following example, we might more deeply understand the text itself and we might also expand what we consider to be human rights literature in general.

Scholarship on oral traditions is often interdisciplinary, with researchers in anthropology, folklore, literacy, linguistics, and literature discussing the importance of oral storytelling in communicating various societies’ values, traditions, histories, and events. Within various specific oral traditions, such as American Indian, African, and many others, scholars have worked to identify major themes, linguistic constructions, the importance of storytelling, and the long-lasting impact of storytelling devices in managing communities. Anthropologists and folklorists have identified various themes across oral traditions, which include social change, fairness, and cultural history. The forms of legal testimony and autobiographical testimony (through memoir and other life writing forms) have also been influenced by oral storytelling traditions. However, the impact of oral traditions on human rights literatures has only recently emerged. This is likely because oral traditions spent time being disregarded in favor of understanding written literacy’s impact on literary forms. With an emergence of interest in the importance of oral traditions in terms of literacy, knowledge, and historical and literary narrative, understanding the ways that human rights literature is informed by oral traditions can help us navigate forms and content with further contextual depth.

Similarly, the recent critical approach to human rights literature points to tensions between “commemorations and mourning” (Becker and Werth 2012: 653) and the ways that contemporary human rights literatures can also “[lend] a critical eye to the limitations of the [truth] commissions” (Becker and Werth 2012: 654). This critical approach allows for understanding the complexities within contemporary human rights literature, particularly when it challenges audiences’ expectations of identifying with the “hero” and coming to a satisfying resolution. In this way, literary explorations of human rights challenge our notion of what constitutes universal human rights. Postmodern genres such as the “encounter film … [enable] us to grasp the ideological underpinnings of extralegal crimes but also to see them as intimately connected to the project of human rights” (Coundouriotis and Goodlad 2010: 124). This imaginative space allows for the complexities of human rights discourses to become visible to audiences. Whereas sentimental novels or recovery narratives often present one-dimensional characters and linear plot lines, literature that imagines more complex definitions of human rights represents the multiple, contested, and “third space” (Bhabha 1994) of genres that attend to both.

In the following discussion of the film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), I suggest that perhaps the third spaces that have been identified in postmodern genres of human rights literature also existed earlier in various oral traditions, but were eclipsed by the turn toward affect and identifying with the individual in literature produced after the UDHR. Oral traditions (at least those briefly discussed here) address the complexities and multiple spaces occupied by examining the way things are rather than a universal sense of how things should be. Though not typically seen as human rights literature, a film like Beasts, through an oral tradition lens, can be analyzed for the human rights elements it contains.

In order to consider human rights concerns in Beasts through an oral tradition lens, we must understand the West African oral tradition more particularly. In the West African oral tradition, griots (sometimes called bards, loremasters, or praise singers) serve as the Mande empire’s chroniclers, interpreters of culture, advisors, preservers of customs and values, and mediators. In this way, when they sing the history of their cultures (mostly in Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and other western African areas), they pass along their culture’s history. With years of training, griots are masters at delivery of epic stories, cultural wisdom, and histories of familial lineage through song, poetry, and oral performance. In western European traditions, the epic tends to consist of a long narrative poem, recited orally, that celebrates the actions of an individual hero, battles or long journeys and quests, struggles to reclaim lost land, and fulfilling a hero’s destiny (such as ancient Greece’s Iliad and Odyssey and England’s medieval Beowolf). The epic oral tradition from Africa also includes many of these themes (Finnegan 2012; Austen 1999; Bulman 2004; Janson 2004; Traore 2010; Okpewho 1992); however, it also includes didactic material to teach lessons about the ethical norms of a society or culture. The emphasis is less on an individual’s conquests and more on telling a culture’s or community’s history and preserving the values and customs of that community. Rather than tell what did happen in the sense of a series of facts, African myths and epics tell what could happen if the moral of the story is not followed. In this way, they are often pedagogical tales. In addition, particular plot lines and details are not memorized. Rather, a key part of the telling is its performative nature. Structures are open to reinterpretation and the story is full of imagination, repetitions, and other forms of performativity, highlighting the skills of the griot to improvise and incorporate audience response. Several oral traditions also include the use of humor, the trickster trope, and foibles of various characters that lead to lessons in morality and cultural values. There are many cultures whose oral traditions deeply influence their printed literary traditions, such as African American slave songs coded with geographic information similar to African oral traditions including geography and astronomy. The call and response features of African American speeches and religious sermons are rooted in the ways storytellers had to be encouraged by communal audience response. These traditions reflect the cultural values of shared knowledge and community solidarity. Scholars of African oral traditions provide rich explorations of these traditions, citing oral literature’s impact on contemporary literature, performance, and other artistic endeavors (Harris 2009; Rossier Smith 1997; Keïta! L’Heritage du griot 1995). While the “scattered” scholarship of African oral literature continues to emerge, interest in African oral traditions has led to more recent comparative studies delineating the similarities between oral traditions and contemporary printed texts (Finnegan 2005: 29–31).

Benh Zeitlin’s film Beasts of the Southern Wild won the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Pomme D’Or prize in 2012 and was nominated for four Academy Awards. The film creates a mystical narrative that is a thinly veiled depiction of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Not typically discussed for its concern with human rights issues, the film is generally praised for its mythical quality and for the resilience of the heroine and her community despite overwhelming odds. Film critic Ruby Rich describes the film as a “fable” that is an “intense vision of community and apocalypse” (2012: 66) and likens the film to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). However, the film has also garnered criticism for rendering black bodies in abject poverty, images that are steeped in stereotypes and that have long been criticized in the film industry generally. Indeed, one of the most poignant criticisms comes from bell hooks, who says,

No wonder then that seeing this film causes some of us to feel a deep sense of hurt and remembered pain. Sorrow for all the lost traumatized children, but especially abused and abandoned black children, whose bodies become the playing fields where pornographies of violence are hidden behind romantic evocations of mythic union and reunion with nature. In the end there is no one to lift these small bodies up, to call down from the skies a healing grace that can redeem and set free … . For Hushpuppy and those like her, there is no love, no hands holding on, just a blank emptiness onto which any mark can be placed, any fantastical story written. All along the way Hushpuppy has not been at the center of Beasts of the Southern Wild. She is marginalized; she is a backup singer. No wonder then, so few listeners fail to choose a standpoint where they might witness her suffering or hear her ongoing anguished lament.

(hooks 2012)

Clearly hooks’ (and others’) critique of the film warrants consideration: enslaved, naked, black women’s and children’s bodies in film that are deemed as Academy Award–winning have serious implications. The pornography of violence to which hooks and other scholars refer is also an ongoing debate in human rights discourses. How do we alert audiences to human rights abuses and violations without objectifying and reappropriating the embodiment of those abuses either through filmic, photographic, or literary representations? As Wendy Hesford and others have pointed out, this continues to be a critical debate (Hesford 2012; Mutua 2001; Schaffer and Smith 2001). Beasts’ attention to myth and allusion to oral traditions, albeit worthy of critique, are worth considering to further understand the film. Rather than dismiss the film because of problematic representations, a systematic examination through an oral tradition lens lends insights into the ways the film challenges dominant notions of survival and community despite its problems of representation. This analysis can also complicate the limited hero analysis of the film and challenge audiences to look beyond the myopic “overcoming great odds” story. Like stories told in many oral traditions, Hushpuppy’s role as a griot figure is an example of how a community (and individuals) use story to understand the world around them.

Literary scholar Patricia Yaeger’s analysis of the film points to the evocative ways that the film is a “quest for a way to represent our species’ relation to global warming” (2013). She argues that while the “eloquent” criticisms of the film such as hooks’ are worthy, Beasts

is not a slice of life or a realist creed; its business is mythological: it proffers a sacred narrative with overtones of awe and cosmic investigation. Querying the social order, it offers strange pedagogies about how we should live in a melting world.

(Yaeger 2013)

She recognizes the “staggering” poverty portrayed in the film, but her focus is on the “dirty ecology” where those in poverty do not have the luxury to create a “carbon-free democracy.” Yet despite her insightful critique on the environmental concerns of the film, her mention of the mythic or fable quality of Beasts is less as a way to understand the narrative more deeply than to appreciate the film’s aesthetic attraction. I would add to her “dirty ecology” analysis – indeed, her analysis leads us to further examine the western lens placed on the film – that the myth ecology of the film, borne of African oral traditions, summons us to understand more deeply the societal structures leading to the so-called “squalor” of Hushpuppy, her father, and their community.

At the beginning of the film, Hushpuppy is riding on her father Wink’s “boat” (made of a repurposed truck bed), an observer scanning the water like a sea captain – she is framed as the storytelling griot. She says in the film’s voice-over, “Once there was a Hushpuppy, and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.” As her community’s storyteller, she tells of their history, the ways they have survived calamity and resisted outside values of technological advance. When she says, “they built the wall that cuts us off,” the audience sees an enormous oil refinery, one like the many that line the waterways and coastline of Louisiana, on the opposite side of the levee from the Bathtub (the name of the bayou area where her community lives). The oil industry’s place in Louisiana is fraught with tension – it at once brings jobs and pollutes the air with cancerous chemicals. This allusion at the beginning of the film sets the stage for the many tensions and contradictions throughout the film, which makes any one interpretation difficult.

Hushpuppy’s storyteller status is revealed not only by use of voice-over, but also by what she says and what she repeats several times throughout the film:

If daddy kill me, I ain’t gonna be forgotten. I’m recording my story for the scientists in the future. In a million years, when kids go to school, they’re gonna know that once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in the Bathtub.

Here she inserts her lasting history not only in the moment during her father’s anger about the fire she set, but also generally about his leaving her alone (to seek medical attention) and his questionable actions as a father (he yells at her and hits her). When she states later in the film, “I wanna be cohesive,” she knows, like all good storytellers, that story is what helps us be cohesive in traumatic situations.

As is typical of the stories of griots and several other storytelling traditions, Hushpuppy repeats several other phrases in the voice-overs in the film such as, “the whole universe depends on everything fittin’ together right.” In addition to the trope of the griot in the film, other themes from oral traditions are present, creating three dualities in Beasts: (1) reporting reality versus instructions on how to live; (2) individual focus versus community focus; (3) victim stance versus self-sufficiency. First, if we read the film as a reflection of reality (even with the mythical elements), then we tend to understand the film as “reporting” the situation, of representing the way that Hushpuppy and her father live in “squalor” and the problematic representations of bodies, race, and gender. However, in oral traditions, griots “instruct” subsequent generations in lessons on how to live. Hushpuppy is instructed in survival strategies by her father, and in turn she instructs the audience on ways to understand the choices her community has made (i.e., remaining during the storm, living on the other side of the levee). Because the government has failed the community (as it did before and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina), because the poor and blacks are often viewed as less than full citizens, Wink’s community chooses to live off-grid.

Second, if we only focus on Hushpuppy as the heroine overcoming great odds, then we might tend to focus on the display of her body, the violence of her father, and the poverty in which she lives. However, from an oral tradition perspective, while the hero trope is employed, the hero is also understood in relation to the community. Hushpuppy’s recounting of her story is also one of maintaining the sustainability of her community and how she learns to do so not only from her father but also from the others like her teacher, Miss Bathsheeba. This is especially salient in the moment when the group runs away from the Open Arms Processing Center. Hushpuppy and the others (also like many Hurricane Katrina survivors) resist the notion of being warehoused like refugees and refuse the narrative of victim under a rule of law where their way of life is devalued. Whereas Yaeger says that, “Zeitlin falters as his mythic backdrop falls away,” we can view the scenes in the processing center as a comment on the ways that warehousing refugees, or hurricane survivors, compromises their agency, and they resist being taken from their homes merely because it is more efficient for the “rescuers.” The implication of accepting the help of the aid worker is that one risks losing any sense of independence – a documented fact in the wake of not only Hurricane Katrina but in other disasters and refugee situations. The film is a commentary not only on one little girl’s story of survival, but also on the nature of “rescuing,” its inadequacies, and the social and political structures that contribute to those inadequacies.

Finally, Hushpuppy’s community refuses to become victims. Miss Bathsheeba says to her students, “y’all better learn to survive, now.” If they accept victim status, they are often forced into passive relationships with bureaucratic organizations. Conversely, Hushpuppy’s community actively stands up and resists being taken from the homes and community they have built, even if they might be viewed from the outside as inadequate. In his review of the film, Frederick Ruf states that,

What is most striking about the film is how rooted it is in squalor. The opening shot is of weeds, scrub, a nearby oil refinery, and a trailer home that ought not be inhabited … and to describe it as ramshackle is to understate the state of disintegration and collapse in which the child lives.

(2013: 30)

This description of Hushpuppy’s home, made of found objects and reflecting the ways that many in poverty find innovative ways of surviving, evokes elitist descriptions of the urban and rural poor during the Depression era, who were often blamed for their own poverty. While Ruf describes his desire for “social services or the Red Cross” (2013: 30), those familiar with the situation in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina know that many of the social programs, including FEMA, largely failed the citizens of New Orleans. Similarly, critic Thomas Hacket states that, “Nobody in this jungley spit of land they call The Bathtub appears to work. Or bathe. Or feed their children. Hushpuppy is mostly left to fend for herself, eating cat food and living in total squalor” (2013). Like the paternalistic descriptions of migrant and poor populations during the Progressive era of education and reform, these dismissive portrayals are often used to convince the broader public that people should be displaced for “their own good,” need to be saved, to be put in various institutions, and to conform to a white elitist society’s conception of what it means to be “clean” and “pure.” Hushpuppy’s tale of strength, resistance, and moments of learning and love (albeit in a harsh and brutal environment) is a commentary, from a child’s and from an insider’s point of view, on ways to survive without relying on the unreliable governmental, colonialist, or outside structures. This insider’s perspective is a critical component of storytelling in oral traditions, focusing on the indigenous perspective rather than colonial or western interpretations of innovative ways of surviving.

Many of the film reviews published soon after the film’s release focus on what audiences are supposed to learn about Hushpuppy as an individual. However, if we focus on the societal commentary of the film, as the oral tradition asks us to do, we might understand Hushpuppy’s telling of the story as a griot, as an interpreter, and as a performer of history. Though her body is exposed as bell hooks points out, her father does provide parental guidance by telling her to “put some pants on” – she is in shorts, a long t-shirt, or jeans throughout most of the rest of the film. As a gendered hero, Hushpuppy not only upturns the expectation that griots are male, her character also challenges outside interpretations of her community’s decisions, a challenge that aligns her with others speaking back to white middle-class assessments of decisions before and after the storm. In addition, as Micere M. G. Mugo argues in African Orature and Human Rights (1991), any human rights or restitution or justice demanded by the oral culture is also closely tied to traditional or tribal notions of gender, age, and social position.

Like many in Louisiana facing criticism for not evacuating before the storm, Hushpuppy provides an insider’s view of that decision-making process – if it is indeed a decision one is able to make. Furthermore, Hushpuppy and her community are determined to rebuild after the storm’s destruction. In the documentary film Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, written and directed by Times Picayune reporter Lolis Eric Elie, poet laureate Brenda Osbey says of Hurricane Katrina:

This is a destruction and an exodus truly of biblical proportions. But it isn’t a greater catastrophe, it isn’t a greater disaster than we are a people. And that’s what I think has to come through. That we hold on to this city, for who we are and what we are and that everywhere we go we take this city with us, we take the spirit of this city with us, we take the spirit of this city’s heroes with us, a will to live and fight again.

(Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans 2008)

Likewise, Hushpuppy says about the impending storm in Beasts, “When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces … Everybody loses the thing that made them. The brave men stay and watch it happen. They don’t run.” She implies that staying through the storm, both literally and figuratively, and returning and rebuilding after the storm requires courage and a will to survive.

This brief discussion raises just a few of the issues we might consider if we examine literary texts, including film, with human rights elements through the lens of oral traditions. We could also examine Wink as exhibiting characteristics of the trickster figure, the foil to Hushpuppy’s movement through her community. In several oral traditions, the trickster is presented as a way to understand what not to do or as a way to show how those in power underestimate or misinterpret the marginalized. Wink, a name worth examining in relation to the trickster figure, constructs a plan to destroy the levee, as a way to “level the playing field” as tricksters often do with those in power (Harris 2009; Rossier Smith 1997). African American men are expected by those in power to be angry and poor – Wink plays into those expectations, fooling those that built the levee that he would be capable of destroying it. He and his community take care of themselves, knowing that the government (e.g., FEMA) will not necessarily take care of them. His questionable behavior – yelling at and hitting his daughter – might serve as a deflection from other aspects of the film. With a focus on his brutality and anger, we miss the ways he functions as an indirect commentary on the social structures that have led to the poverty and lack of resources for people in the Bathtub in the first place. So when Hushpuppy, a girl griot narrator, stands up in defiance to these social structures that make the natural disaster worse than it might be, I hesitate to dismiss the significance of her defiance and the film’s overall commentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because oral traditions often resist linear narratives where western notions of rationale and tidy endings are valued, we can understand Beasts as something other than a community rising above all odds. Instead, at the end of the film when Hushpuppy leads the others across the levee where water splashes over, it is ambiguous whether their community will survive – the water is rising. Though their community is threatened, Hushpuppy, as the storyteller, has ensured that their story is not forgotten, despite the uncertainty of their survival.

Ultimately, a film like Beasts poses dilemmas for audiences. While racial stereotypes and clichéd representations warrant critique, an oral tradition perspective directs our attention to human rights concerns. Although this analysis or any other may not persuade us that Beasts is a human rights literary text, examining the text from the perspective of human rights, through oral traditions, provides additional ways of interpreting “squalor” and stereotypes in broader contexts, the relationships of deeper social structures (Cruikshank 2000), and the land use violations at play. When we do this, we see Beasts as a literary text (film) imbued with human rights concerns such as land rights abuses and forcing the warehousing of refugees, even if these concerns are not more readily recognizable human rights concerns such as mass killings and violence. Viewing a text from the oral tradition perspective helps broaden our perspective of what can count as human rights literature and in turn what issues and contexts might be seen as human rights violations.

With written literacy rates at an all time high among refugee populations, and the number of displaced persons increasing, many of whom have suffered human rights violations, understanding how populations steeped in oral storytelling traditions relay their experiences becomes increasingly important. Oral testimony in trials and forms of oral storytelling all inform the written literature that gets published and disseminated. The oral tradition then can influence our thinking about human rights literature in at least two ways. First, it can reframe our thinking about literature that we already categorize as human rights literature by drawing attention to elements of oral tradition within that literature. Second, it can help us examine literature like Beasts that we might not necessarily categorize as human rights literature in a new light, attending to the elements of oral tradition that overlap with human rights issues including land rights, indigenous rights, oral storytelling as evidentiary in courts of law.

Many scholars interested in oral traditions and human rights literatures analyze competing discourses of power and definitions of what is meant by rights. For instance, Rajini Srikanth examines how the notion of “human” is articulated in western literary traditions as different from the way “human” is articulated in many African and Asian traditions (2001). During the struggle to end slavery in the United States, for example, abolitionists often chose to publish written slave narratives, complete with extensive legitimizing documentation to attest to the author’s character, to further their cause and gain approval from white audiences – thus the western conception of the human was privileged over alternative conceptions of the human found in the African oral tradition. Likewise, American Indian rhetoric scholar Malea Powell discusses similar issues of rhetoric through the writings of Sarah Winnemucca and Charles Eastman as they shifted their rhetorical approaches learned from their oral traditions to the rhetorical approaches expected by white audiences (see M. Powell 2002). Claret Vargas argues similarly that Mayan author Victor Montejo’s work “deploys tactically, and quite consciously, the human discourse of the West” (2012: 2). In these and other scholarly studies, we can learn from the way oral traditions influence our understanding of the ways human rights narratives are documented and understood.