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1. A Hero’s Many Worlds: The Swahili Liyongo Epic and World Literature

Chapter of: Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation(pp. 47–82)

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Metadata
Title1. A Hero’s Many Worlds
SubtitleThe Swahili Liyongo Epic and World Literature
ContributorClarissa Vierke(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0405.01
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0405/chapters/10.11647/obp.0405.01
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightClarissa Vierke;
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2025-01-31
Long abstractThe most reputed hero of the East African coast is Fumo Liyongo. Stories and songs attributed to the invincible warrior-poet Fumo Liyongo are the most ancient Swahili texts of which we have evidence. But they are not merely a tradition of the past: the oral traditions have been readapted over and over again, finding their way into handwritten manuscripts, school-books, and children’s books, stage performances, and YouTube videos. My aim in this article is to zero in on the changing form of the ramified Liyongo tradition and the worlds it has generated in an attempt to question some narrow notions that have dominated discussions of world literature. My account questions the teleological view of Western literary and written influence as the all-pervasive force that rendered hitherto inert forms of oral literature increasingly obsolete. There was no fundamental, earthquake-like shift brought about by Western modernity, which does away with anything pre-existing. Rather, my focus on mediatized orality, i.e. orality adapted to a new medium suggests that fundamental shifts happen all the time. All of this reminds us of the complexity of literary configurations, which is not particular to African contexts but to all verbal art, once we move away from defining a literary work nar-rowly by its author and the printed pages between book covers, or as literary history as mov-ing merely in one direction, as has too often been done in the context of world literature.
Page rangepp. 47–82
Print length36 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Clarissa Vierke

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4167-7451

Clarissa Vierke is Professor of Literatures in African Languages at the University of Bayreuth. She is an expert of Swahili poetry, Islamic manuscript cultures and has written on texts travelling the Indian Ocean to East Africa – both in Anglophone Kenya and Tanzania and Lusophone Mozambique. Her most recent publication is a poetry anthology “In this Fragile World. Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau” (Brill, 2023), which she co-edited with Annachiara Raia (Leiden) and the poet. Together with colleagues working on Francophone and Lusophone literature and film, she is currently running a research project on literary entanglements in the Indian Ocean across boundaries of nations, languages and media. She is principal investigator of the Cluster of excellence “Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies” and the spokesperson of the research section Arts and Aesthetics. Together with colleagues from Leipzig and Cologne, she set up the project “Recalibrating Afrikanistik” funded by the Volkswagen foundation with the aim to critically consider the future of the study of African languages and literatures.

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