Isidore Okpewho

Isidore Okpewho, NNOM (9 November 1941 – 4 September 2016), was a Nigerian novelist and critic. He won the 1976 African Arts Prize for Literature, and the 1993 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best Book Africa. Quotes Perhaps the most fundamental element in this enquiry involves what one might define as the traditional African world-view. In this respect, one cannot accept without qualification some of the phrases that have constantly been bandied about. When they have approached clarity, they have often implied a tendency among members of the traditional society to respect the unlimited scheme of things and like helpless romantics to preserve unmolested the sanctity of a complex universe I stress the idea of a dynamic, creative temper, because it would appear to be the source of true aesthetic worth. Art came to the service of religion only after the craftsman had attained a creditable sureness of hand; only then was he recognized as the repository of a certain measure of beauty and thus enlisted as a trustee of communal truth Is the traditional African artist primarily a slave to model, or does he, like the truly imaginative leader of his people, seek first and foremost to give vitality and meaning to the community’s life and myth with the aid of his creative vigour An oral epic is fundamentally a tale about the fantastic deeds of a man or men endowed with something more than human might and operating in something larger than the normal human context and it is of significance in portraying some stage of the cultural or political development of a people The hero is simply the ordinary man writ large In examining the art of composition in the oral epic, we must bear constantly in mind the moment of performance – with music, histrionic resources, emotional relationship between singer and audience – which makes this tradition of art different from the literate variety. Each performance is the product o one specific moment or context and, in a creative tradition of the oral epic, is never exactly repeated. Though there are some fixed structural laws which the narrative will obey by the very nature of its oral medium, the results of any performance depend mainly on the particular audience, mood, and atmosphere It’s common among bards to attribute their powers of storytelling to a divine source (or to someone else). But the tale remains unique The training of a bard is not a training in memory, or not solely. It’s a training in process of story creation and, of course, he’s supposed to know the main points of all the stories. But that’s it It’s common among bards to attribute their powers of storytelling to a divine source (or to someone else). But the tale remains unique Whatever the context in which it originally occurred (whether recreational or religious), repetition was first and foremost a token of the joy of recollection In this way, we are inclined to see the poet more as a slave to a fossilized pattern than as a skillful manipulator of sounds and ideas that continually suggest themselves to his mind in the rather challenging circumstances of his act Isidore Okpewho’s The Epic in Africa (1979) External Links