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Title: I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town by Karin Barber ISBN: 1-56098-043-5 Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press Pub. Date: May, 1991 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $48.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: An exellent literary and anthropological piece
Comment: This work by Karin Barber focuses on the Oriki (Praise-poetry or nominal laudatory forms)primarily using Okuku as her field site. The book is an excellent piece of literary and ethnographic composition, articulate, well-structured and critically provides the analysis of social systems and literary forms. It waives various genre of a complex character into readable and analytic form. This book articulates, not just the Yoruba world, but has far-reaching significance for the understanding of African oral and poetic forms, ritual practices, social structuring, literary constructions that are naturally alien and hidden from the view of many scholarly discourses. This work, if understood properly, provides a vital link toward understanding certain salient themes that exists in African religions, rituals, poetry and social structures, and the reasons for the formation and non-formation of these forms among people of the African diaspora in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago and other such places. It relates the documentation of poetry flexible form of collective memory as constituting continuity and discontinuity; as enduring texts of social retention and heuristic construction of meaning, and history.
A critical distillation of this work would adequately provide valuable insights as to the reasons why many African religions retained some elements of their African identity and past within their existential contemporary corpus of thought while lossing others. It answers such questions, even though not explicitly, why some of these forms are visibly present for instance more in Cuba than in the USA, while also indicating the reasons why the Cuban assertion of Yoruba culture and religion (Santeria) are remarkably similar and also critically different. The answer as can be glimpsed from this is within the very thought and social expression of reality by the Yoruba, even prior to slavery. Social forms are both continuous and discreet.
Karin Barber, work is in deed a master piece, whose influence transcends even the structure and strictures of African society, but has eternal relevance for the understanding of the construction of history and identity among people of oral culture.
This work is clearly written,articulately presented and the mass of seemingly complex materials perfectly integrated that it constitutes meaning and understanding. Karin Barber's effort can only be undone by very few scholars, Karin has shown through this work her genius and has established a fame, among writers writing about non-western cultures, presenting these cultures without super-imposing their cultural strictures and mode of biases arbitrarily upon such texts.
This book is a must for all who intend to understand the Yoruba world, African poetic form and the entire expression of orality as myth, history and social construction. Such a work as this is rare, and it is advantageous to acquint oneself with its content.
Tolle Lege!!! (Take and Read!)