Abstract
Two hackneyed phrases in English capture a certain impatient and impersonal sensibility regarding capital in the West: Time is money, and talk is cheap. These phrases make little or no sense in Hausa speaking Niger, so far as I can tell, in which the classic adage regarding capital is magana jari ce—speech is wealth. While this expression is commonly invoked in celebration of Hausa literary arts (indeed a well-known publication promoting literacy is so named), in this chapter I would like to take seriously for a moment the understanding that oral performance can be a form of capital. The Hausa language has many words for wealth, but it is the word jari, generally used to mean investment capital, that is used in this proverb. What would it mean to say that the act of speech is a kind of investment or that oral performance can be thought of as a transaction involving wealth? The finest gift I ever received in Maradi was a song. Of course one receives many gifts as a researcher: eggs, soap, chickens, taxi fare, cloth. One struggles mightily to ascertain what sorts of gifts might be appropriate to give in return. In this chapter I would like to return a gift commensurate with the kind of wealth that was given to me—a celebration of a life through the power of song, an evocation of the potency of what can be heard but not seen.
Narrators are, in more than one sense, formed by their own narrations.
—Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts
I would like to thank the many readers and listeners whose comments have helped me in my thinking, including Mohammed Bamyeh, Steve Caton, Abena Busia, Claire Robertson, Maria Grosz-Ngate, Donald Moore, Sheryl McCurdy, and the students in my Orality Literacy and History class in the Gallatin School at New York University. Special thanks to my colleague Vasu Varadhan for generously sharing her materials on literacy and the media and engaging in many lively debates. I am indebted to Beverly Mack and Jean Boyd, whose painstaking and imaginative work on Hausa women’s poetry has changed the face of scholarship on the Hausa. And finally my incalculable gratitude to the many women in Maradi whose generosity of spirit has made my own less worthy texts possible. Tunda magana jari ce, aka ba ni, ga maganar Hajjiya Malaya mai daraja, ya dace in bado.
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© 2001 Dorothy Hodgson
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Cooper, B.M. (2001). The Strength in the Song: Muslim Personhood, Audible Capital, and Hausa Women’s Performance of the Hajj. In: Hodgson, D.L. (eds) Gendered Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09944-0_4
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