Storytellers, "Senachie" and "Griot"
Until very recent times, every village or rural townland in Ireland had a person known in the Irish language as a seanachie (pronounced “shahn’-a-key”). The word had a meaning that was dual, according to our analytical way of thinking: historian and storyteller. For them, however, as for many pre-industrial peoples, the meanings were identical. To know the history of one’s people was to carry the intricate and intimate web of genealogy in one’s head and to be able to retrieve and recite it as the occasion demanded; it was also to carry the legacy of stories, legends and proverbs that were these ancestors’ collective gift.
In his 1976 best-seller Roots, Alex Haley described a crucial encounter with one such West African storyteller, the local name for which is griot.
“The old man sat down, facing me, as the people hurriedly gathered behind him. Then he began to recite for me the ancestral history of the Kinte clan, as it had been passed along orally down across centuries from the forefathers’ time. It was not merely conversational, but more as if a scroll were being read; for the still, silent villagers it was clearly a formal occasion. The griot would speak, bending forward from the waist, his body rigid, his neck cords standing out... Spilling from the griot’s head came an incredibly complex Kinte clan lineage that reached back across many generations... I was struck not only by the profusion of details, but also by the narrative’s biblical style, something like “—‘and so-and-so took as a wife so-and-so, and begat... and begat... and begat’...”
Haley’s account points up the connection of this African oral tradition to that of the Hebrew scribes of the Old Testament, who were merely making early written records of their own community traditions, stretching back to mythic times, times when our ancestors walked and talked with gods.
Though the culture of print, and later of still higher tech modes of memory, seemed to make such human-scaled history obsolete, the advent of the portable cassette recorder has at least ensured that every person’s oral performance, no matter how unpracticed by comparison with the seanachies’ and griots’, can be preserved as a gift to their descendants. And this tinderbox of technology meets the spark of a deep longing on the part of individuals to cultivate a more personal connection to their pasts. Oral history is like a resistance movement, a counter wave within the onrushing throwaway ethic of American communities, affecting several areas, including civic planning