Popular Poesis: Language and the Pleasures of Everyday Creation

Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnographic record is full of striking examples of linguistic play. Three scenes of Yorùbá linguistic creativity illustrate this: praise poetry in a small town, a traveling popular theater, and early Yorùbá newspapers. Each yields distinctive pleasures, but central to all of these is the act of mutual recognition of forms of words and attunement to the linguistic production of others. Barber suggests that verbal arts bring to consciousness the fundamental processes by which sociality is constituted and may thus provide a potential starting point for social theory from “within.”