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Copyright

Ayele Kebede Roba;

Published On

2025-01-31

Page Range

pp. 113–144

Language

  • English

Print Length

32 pages

3. The Novelization of Orature in Ethiopian Village Novels

  • Ayele Kebede (author)
Chapter of: Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation(pp. 113–144)
The implication of exclusively privileging writing over orality, which perniciously demeans the epistemic base of orally produced knowledge systems, is still perceptible in Ethiopian (literary) studies. Consequently, the literature of the Semitic languages, Geez and Amharic—which have a long history of writing— are presumed as ‘literature proper’ whereas those in other Ethiopian languages are denied such a recognition and exempted from important academic platforms up to recent times. However, orature is impactfully present in literature including the mostly celebrated genre of modern print culture, the novel. More importantly, scholars of African literature such as Eileen Julien, Fiona Moolla and Olankunke George argue that the presence of orature in the novel is not only for ‘ornamental’ (Julien) purposes, but also it is an ‘analytical category’ in the study of the novel. Against this backdrop, this chapter presents the comparative study of an Amharic novel, Evangadi by Fiqremarqos Desta (1998) and an Afan Oromo novel, Gurraacha Abbayaa [A Black Man from Abbaya] by Dhaba Wayessa (1996). The chapter, first, examines the narrative and textual strategies employed by the authors to ‘novelize orature’ and to foreground ‘an ongoing relationship of coevalness and simultaneity’ between the novel and orature. Second, it explores how orature shapes the overall narrative structure of the novels, but also how the novels contribute to the preservation and transformation of orature. Lastly, the chapter reflects on how the novels contest the alleged ‘linear progression’ from oral to written and unsettle the hierarchical relationship between orature and literature.

Contributors

Ayele Kebede

(author)
Assistant Professor at University of York

Ayele Kebede Roba is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of York. He holds a PhD in Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies from SOAS University of London (2022), which was carried out as part of the MULOSIGE research project. He stayed at SOAS after his PhD to take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics (2022-2023) before starting his current job at York. Prior to moving to the UK for his PhD, Ayele completed a BA from Ambo University, an MA from Addis Ababa University, and worked for six years as a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Bule Hora, Ethiopia. At Bule Hora, he was the recipient of a number of research grants to study the oral literature, sociolinguistics, and cultural traditions of the Guji Oromo in Southern Ethiopia. Ayele specialises in the literatures of two widely spoken African languages (Amharic and Oromo) indigenous to the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on the novel, literary multilingualism, the interplay between oral literature and literary texts. His research has been published in Critical African Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, the Journal of Oromo Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of African Literature.