The Folk Speaks: Indigenous Aesthetics in Oku Oral Narratives

As early as 1965 Alan Dundes disputed the notion of an oral literary criticism tabula rasa in Africa and stressed on the need to consider the meanings attributed to folklore texts by the people who use them but even now our students are exposed to courses on theories and aesthetics of western oral Literature but are not introduced to the practical criticism of their oral Literature. The question of aesthetics is crucial to literary criticism. Aesthetics is concerned with the description, interpretation, and evaluation of arts. Aesthetics hangs on the notion of the beautiful and the concept of beauty is culture bound, so it is wrong to use a taste nurtured by another culture to judge an art product that evolved from a different culture. It is hoped that after this study we will understand the indigenous aesthetics of Oku people and be able to subject external art to the principle of our indigenous aesthetics. The study is based on the assumption that the aesthetic of Oku oral narratives can only be formulated through the application of tools of analytical philosophy that originate from the folks. The research is directed by questions such as, what philosophy emerges from the folks on oral narratives as it concerns theoretical issues such as the nature, the functions of Oku oral narratives and the role of the oral artist in society. What does the folk mean when it says a narrative is beautiful? What are the prominent criteria employed in the evaluation of Oku oral narratives by the folks? The Reader Response or the aesthetics of reception is used in this study. This approach focuses on the audience, a group completely forgotten by both the positivists, and the formalists. This method exposes the expectation of the audience and how far the work of art satisfies or fails to satisfy them. The audience plays a vital role in Oku orature and they have yardsticks they use to distinguish a good narrator or narrative from a bad one. Some of these yardsticks are functionality, authenticity, clarity and creativity or originality. We have used two variant versions of a tale titled Ikey’s farm, one collected in 1996 and the other in 2015 for our illustrations.