THE PERSON
Alhaji Papa Bunka Susso was griot-in-residence at the Against All Odds Conference in Asmara, Eritrea, this past January. During coffee breaks, Susso, from The Gambia, would set up in the lobby of the Intercontinental -- the only European hotel in town, it’s shaped like an Eritrean bread basket -- and gently wail, his fingers flying over his 21-string gourd harp, the kora. The conference participants, from all over Africa, lined up to have their pictures taken with the griot.

Five hundred academics and students and everyday Eritreans jammed the hotel’s auditorium for the plenary sessions. Whenever there was an administrative delay, Kassahun Checole, one of the Organizing Chairs and the Publisher of Africa World Press & the Red Sea Press, would race through the happily milling throng and drag him up on stage. Susso would drop a mike down one of his kora’s soundholes and launch his job. It was a lesson in poetry as social force: No one stopped to listen, but everyone heard. The lilting repetition of the kora strings was a calmative, a spirit-enhancer, a subtle reminder that the work being done was in fact a continuation of the work accomplished. Susso’s words, in one of the eight West African tongues he speaks, were understood by very few, but their meaning was clear: Poetry was in the air and it connected us all.

THE WORD
Papa and I were chatting a couple nights later when his pal Thomas Hale dropped by. I learned Hale was delivering a paper the next day, and its title ratcheted up the conversation: “Griotspeech: Learning to Live with Verbal Ambiguity, Opacity and Obscurity.” Susso and I had been talking poet-to-poet, but I felt like I was interviewing; with Hale, I let my ignorance lead, while Susso accompanied Hale’s scholarship with kora and voice.

We started with the word “griot” itself. Amiri Baraka, in his charged essay, “Griot/Djali: Poetry, Music, History, Message” in the Ellipsis Arts CD/book package Jali Kunda (1997), comes down hard on the word as having a “‘French’ vibration,” carrying with it the insistence of “Cry,” as in “Cry Out” / “Town Crier.” Baraka also hears “gris” (gray) and “gris-gris” (fetish). Hale, who’s Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University, acknowledged that the term “griot” is one of the most controversial features of the profession -- some West Africans think it’s an insult: the word does not appear in any African language. But Susso and most other griots see “griot” as a unifier and many African Americans see the word as a link to their culture. It’s almost a Baraka vs. Haley thing; it was in Roots that most Americans first learned of griots: Haley found his relatives through a griot’s genealogy. Take the Eurocentric version of a family tree -- a medical chart with lines and dates. Contrast to the griot spinning the history of the tribe’s interrelationships as the kora flows on. . . .

Meanwhile, our conversation rolled deeper and deeper into griot land, with Hale punctuating the conversation with “read the book!” and then I’d ask another question and we’d go round again and Susso had the kora going laughing and singing a poem as his part of the conversation and the first thing I did when I got home was get the book where I found Hale has catalogued the theories of where “griot” comes from: Wolof guewel, Fulbe gawlo,

THE BOOK

Included in a griot’s job description: genealogist, historian, adviser, spokesperson, diplomat, mediator, interpreter, translator, musician, composer, teacher, exhorter, warrior, witness, praise-singer, ceremony participant. A single label doesn’t work -- whenever the voice is called for, it’s the griot’s. It’s as if an event cannot transpire unless a griot is there to witness it, to make it history, to allow it to have happened. And each of these jobs inspires a different kind of form, and each event, too -- a different form for a naming poem, initiation (the only form that rhymes), courtship, marriage, installation, funeral. (For English, try replacing “sonnet,” “villanelle,” “haiku” for the above. Not to negate epithalamium or eulogy.)

From cover to last appendix, Griots & Griottes translates into text ideas that are outside text. Even the gorgeous full-color cover speaks: you see a griotte, Adama Suso (with a karinyan or newo, the tubular bell struck like a percussion instrument in griot performance) and griot Ma Lamini Jobarteh (with kora). They are smiling, mid-flight, standing in front of the words of the title. They are leading the parade of words. They are actually being born there, from language, appearing somehow out of the words they are: Griots & Griottes.

To skip from cover to the last appendix, Appendix G: “Theories for the Origin of the Word Griot,” which is reduced to a list above, and which concludes with Hale’s Own Theory, based on the slaves passing through the Bab Agenaou, Gate of the Black Africans, in medieval Marrakech. Hale’s astonishing scholarship, while not totally convincing, sends you gasping into the music/poetry itself.

Too many highlights, brain overload and loving it, a passport to a nation of poets, Griots & Griottes is a book to mark up and love and live and be inspired by and renew your respect for great scholarship. You’ll learn the history, and try to decide if the first griot was Mohammed’s mouthpiece, who got the biggest share of the take because he drew the crowds. Is a griot a manager-pr person for a chief? How does a griot get paid? The differences between griot and sorcerer. The continuation of language for which the meaning has been lost: language becoming sheer music. A ruler who not only wants to control what his griot writes, but who hears what songs. Wars fought with poems. Griots as cheerleaders in wrestling matches. Why you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry a griot. How great African pop stars like Youssou N’Dour are griots. Influence of griots on rap (and vice versa).

Since the rise in volume of the oral tradition in the US we have been hearing how the roots of many African American poetries reside in the griots. This is the book that makes those links, that informs the connections. Griots & Griottes digs into the beauty and contradictions of a history heretofore totally dependent on voice and ear. It relishes in scholarship of a different sort, scholarship that, like poetry, allows for ambiguity and contradiction. In so doing, Thomas Hale has given us the tools for understanding that which cannot be written down, a basis for the reemergence of the oral tradition in the digital age.