The Crow - literacy and oral communication - Brief Article

The Crow is a mouthpiece for thinkers with individual and strong views. This month, the role of The Crow was taken by David Norton.

THE CROW family: collectors of fascinating trinkets, portents of doom; symbols of spirituality, emissaries across the flood. And if THE CROW should make wing to the rooky wood, then the world will be turned on its head. To see which way the wind blows, keep your eye on THE CROW.

OH, MY WORD!

The march of literacy, says THE CROW, is at the expense of oral communication -- and can lead to troubling societal dangers.

Literacy seems to be widely accepted these days as a marker of a regime's enlightenment. From basic skills and the 'Year of Reading' in the UK, to the Sandinistas lauded record of reducing illiteracy from over 50 per cent to 13 per cent, it is a benchmark of egalitarian social progress. Undisputed. So why then was Claude Levi-Strauss compelled to conclude that 'the only phenomenon which always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing...is the establishment of hierarchical societies, consisting of masters and slaves'?

There is certainly a profound argument to support the assertion that all so-called great civilisations were founded on inequality. But that is another thread: that is the warp and this the weft. What concerns me here is not the historical emergence of hierarchical societies, but the present propagation of hierarchies of societies. It seems clear that the whole question of literacy must be mediated by context. The perceived need for literacy depends entirely on what it is not: illiteracy (deficiency), or oralcy (proficiency).

In other words, the whole notion that it is better to be literate is drenched in the assumption that literature is superior to illiterature, aka orature. The English language being what it is, a child of the alphabet, precipitates this view: we can be more certain of what is literally so than of mere hearsay. My Latin dictionary informs me that the root word litteratus means erudite, elegant, accurate and critical.

Wherever we go, we consistently give greater weight to the written words of absent strangers than to the immediate communications of present companions. Do we despise each other's company so much? The letter of the law becomes the law of letters. By extension we imply that cultures which write are superior to those which don't: more evolved, more civilised. Yet the most literate country in the world in the 1930s was Germany. So much for civilisation.

It is a peculiarly Graeco-Abrahamic prejudice born of the twin tyrants of logos and the Word of God, fattened on the linear thinking of reductionism and set to work for the greed of empires. An arrogant ignorance which has caused severe grief and injustice where word-memory based cultures are concerned; for if 'people create stories create people', then ascribers of lesserness to words of the mouth are demeaning entire societies. The absence of writing and particularly of written deeds was also one of the cornerstones of legitimising land theft during the colonial era. (Is such a thing really possible: a written deed?)

Let us pause here to remember that the oratory was once a place of prayer, that Teutonic Sagas, Celtic, Greek and Roman myths, The Torah, The Gospels, The Quran, and the tales of Homer and Shakespeare all began life as orature, or recalled narrative. The foundations of literary culture are not literal at all -- but having consigned the role of remembering to print, we have lost the ability to recall. Ironic that writing, devised as a brilliant aid to memory, should have atrophied it by stealth.

Fortunately there are still some cultures (un)developed enough to value the art of the untrapped word: most notably in the Songlines of Australia and the Griot tradition of West Africa (with her many diasporan descendants). The burning question is: for how long can people resist the inevitable brain repatterning that results from learning to read? The celebrated Malian historian Hampate Ba once said 'each old man who dies is a library razed': a truth whose shadow looms large in the cold grey glow of our solitary screens.

I am not, of course, anti-writing: it is my chosen medium for this tale. Nor am I against literacy programmes, on which I have worked. But the human tragicomedy can be better understood if we examine our heroes' flaws.

That way resolution lies. As we stand on the brink of a new literacy revolution every bit as dramatic as the last, we could do with a little honest reflection.

At the end: a tale.

An unnamed Indian tribesman attended a meeting to organise resistance to the Narada dam. These non-literate people were fighting to protect their ancestral homelands and their way of life. Someone at the meeting suggested that they write letters of complaint to various officials. The unnamed man stood up and spoke: 'The moment we write anything down, we have already lost.'

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