literature vs. oral traditions

"...the safety, the integrity, and the authenticity of the tale told" (Rushdy 100).


"She couldn't read. Books could be awesome mysteries to her, or they could be dangerous time-wasting nonsense" (Butler 145).

"While attaining the prohibited literacy is often cast as one of the crucial stages in the progress of freedom in slave narratives and later African American Bildungsromane, the written word is also a potent weapon against people of African descent" (Rushdy 99).


The use of literature to disseminate any slave narrative is problematic, both because it seems to deny the oral tradition of story-telling that in many ways defined African culture and also because literacy had, for so long, been used as a weapon of oppression.

Authors of neo-slave narratives face yet another dilemma: the necessity of relying on written data to provide glimpses into pasts they never experienced first-hand.

• Margaret Walker relied on "rigorous archival research amongst the papers and books about slavery" in an effort to "substantiate" or "authenticate" the "story she had received from her grandmother's lips" (Rushdy 91-92)
• Alex Haley asserted that, after extensive research for Roots, he "trusted the oral history better than [he] trusted the page" (Rushdy 92).

The problem of literature is also present in Kindred:

Dana's knowledge of her ancestry is relegated to a family tree scrawled in a Bible...but even the information it provides is at least partially falsified; she had no knowledge of the fact that Rufus was white.

"No doubt most information about her life had died with her. At least it had died before it filtered down to me. There was only the Bible left" (Butler 28).

When they return to 1976, both Dana and Kevin attempt to write, but they find that writing is somehow incapable of articulating their experiences.

In comparison to the oral tradition, there is much that literature cannot accomplish. But what literature can do is give a voice to those who would otherwise remain silent.