Abstract
Students' lived lives and experiences are tools that they can use to learn and own their writing as they grow and become fluent writers. Theorists have described different ways that students draw from their first languages and culture to write in another language. This chapter showcases how two African students bring their culture of orality into the classroom and use it as a tool to understand, develop, and conquer their writing. The chapter gives examples of the students' narratives as they navigate their writing. As they write, they constantly dig into their culture through tools of translation in order to perform, inform, and transform their writing in English, a language that is different both linguistically and culturally from their own.
TopBackground: African Orality
Mama was always the best teacher I knew. Through her stories, proverbs, songs and anecdotes, she would teach us all the lessons we needed in life. She had a story for everything, and they always started with a proverb or an idiomatic expression. The characters in the stories had their dwelling in our family, and we would speak like Mama when we wanted to correct one another. Therefore, a person who was not clean was “Manya,” the character in Mama’s story who had to be urged by friends to go to the river and take a bath. The person who did not fulfill their duties would be “Oyundi,” Mama’s infamous character who feigned illness during work but showed up during meals. Mama’s way of knowing became my way of knowing. In a culture where knowledge was transmitted through oral forms, she passed on her knowledge to me the best way she knew how. She did not have to read a book. Her storytelling became the way I framed my writing, and I saw and felt her influence in my way of thinking and writing. I learned about oral literature in high school with an indescribable passion, and enjoyed the novels of African writers who depicted their influence from oral literature in their writing. These included Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Grace Ogot.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Multilingual Writers: Students writing in another language other than their first.
African Orality: Handing down education, culture, and history through storytelling, songs, proverbs, etc.
Translation: Rendering of the meanings of words or texts from one language to another.
Transrhetorical: Convincing and effective speaking or writing using various tools across languages or cultures.
Rhetoric: Convincing and effective speaking or writing using various tools
Culture: Way of life of a group, people, or nationality.
Autobiographical Narratives: Stories related to oneself, family, life, etc.