Faithful griots - storytellers in West Africa - Column

Christian Century, March 15, 1995 by Martin E. Marty

At five A.M. I get up and at 5:59--hoping to catch my wife's attention before the 6:00 A.M. bad news over National Public Radio begins to ruin the day--I turn on her light and read from Moravian Daily Texts. This book pairs two "watchwords" from scripture with two hymn verses. Each entry closes with a well-crafted prayer.

The book, given to us annually by Otto and Sue Dreydoppel, Moravian friends from Pennsylvania, is now in its 265th edition. Earlier versions inspired John Wesley. In its German form, Losungen (1,000,000 copies printed annually), the book of readings helped shape the anti-Nazi witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his seminarians-in-hiding. What's good enough for them is good enough for US.

Some mornings we are a bit dazed and our eyes are glazed as we try to concentrate. On February 2 we read the prayer, "Help us to be faithful storytellers, griots, narrators and teachers, Lord. Amen." Amen! If the Moravians say we should want to be something, we will. But what do we want if we want to be griots?

We suspected that this was a typographical error (even the Moravians are not inerrant). Could this have been tigor or IGOR T (presumably from an opera of the same name)? Tigor is itself a misspelling and IGOR T brought his own problems. Maybe the word before it got dropped, except for the last letter, as in "help us to be living riots." Moravians are many wonderful things, but few of them or their actions are real riots.

We groped for the dictionary in the semidarkness of 6:05 A.M. Certainly the Oxford, English Dictionary would be able to inform us. We do not pretend to know all the words in the OED, but we thought we should know most that the Moravians expect Losungen buyers to understand.

We were not as ignorant as we thought. "Griot" is not in the OED or its Supplement. We next turned to the American Heritage Dictionary, beneficiary and agent of multicultural trends. There we found it: "Griot: A storyteller in West Africa who perpetuates the oral tradition and history of a village or family" Pronouncing the "t" is optional. The lexicographers think the word comes from the French guirot, or the Portuguese criado, a domestic servant. West Africans suspect a Latin root, creatus, meaning "one brought up or trained."

I teach in a divinity school where narrators, narratologists, Africanists and historians of religion failed to teach me the word griot. It's not in the 16-volume Encyclopedia of Religion that we helped produce. I also asked circles of lunch and dinner mates, and found them equally in the company of cultural laggards. But I can't tell you how happy I am to add the word to my vocabulary, as a teacher, editor, writer, lecturer, "village-and-family" member, devotionalist and believer. Yes, a "griot" is what I'd like to be when I grow up.

Proof of this pudding about the value of storytelling? You'd have forgotten the word as quickly as you heard it had I not put it in a sort of story.