Ong - Orality and Literacy Reading (Part 2)

             Even though literacy is not a natural thing for us, most of the cultures had accepted it as characteristic of humans and a normal thing for each one of us. Studying about other cultures can open our minds and make us understand that literacy haven’t reached the entire humanity yet. There are still some cultures that are primary oral and because of that all their cultural history, as well as their lives are drastically different. Imagining a culture without literacy is not as easy. I don’t think people that are able to read and write realize that. Not having literacy means that communication is affected negatively, and their cultural stories are not able to stay the same along the generation.

            “Most, if not all, oral cultures generate quite substantial narratives or series of narratives, such as the stories of the Trojan wars among the ancient Greeks, the coyote stories among various Native American populations, the Anansi (spider) stories in Belize and other Caribbean cultures with some African heritage, the Sunjata stories of old Mali, the Mwindo stories among the Nyanga, and so on. Because of their size and complexity of scenes and actions, narratives of this sort are often the roomiest repositories of an oral culture’s lore.” – Page 138

            We all know a lot of those stories and we realize there are not possible, and we might question how the stories started at first place. After reading the text, and understanding the importance of literacy, I understand that each generation can add or subtract a small detail to make the story sound more heroic and more nationalistic in some cases. The power of literacy is to preserve the content of a narrative and primary oral cultures don’t have the ability to do that. Instead they create these heroic stories that can even relate to religion in some cases.

            I started thinking about this by myself and I realize this doesn’t happen only with primary oral cultures. Each one of us knows a popular saying, or a proverb, or even a ritual that is not proven anywhere, and it is not written in any book, but we still say it because it is a cultural idea. There is a lot of “bad luck” ideas that we believe in that have no logical explanation. For example, Friday the 13^th has a historical explanation of one single event that occurred on that day, and for any reason, we believe that bad things are going to happen every Friday 13^th. We have to understand that is each generation would have changed the path of each one of these stories, we wouldn’t know them the way they are. And if we would have written them down, everything would be clear. This is one of the biggest advantages of literacy and knowing that there are cultures limited at this point, we understand that it is not a natural thing.