Motivation:
Setting out, these were my most compelling motivations:
• The pain arising from the difficulty of retrieving and/or recalling vital data on account of the loss of our family archive and my childhood memories is topmost, and what does the future hold for averting this for others?
• The second being a general curiosity on the nature of narrative, across genres and the ages, particularly because stories and narratives rule and govern the world in the context of struggles of interests;
• The third being the arrival of a daughter in the family and the keen observations on her all through the processes of conception, gestation and delivery by the parents.
I come into this conversation in hopes of understanding the future of narrative, as such, including the auto/biography, and it is in this sense a work-in-progress. I am bothered by the limitations imposed on the source(s) of narrative and the agency of their unravelling which have largely invested our earliest narrative forms as a zone of masculinist preserve in its performance and poetics in contemporary literature. I am also excited that this might be of interest to my students and the community of scholars in Nigeria, perhaps even in the West Africa corridor where we share similar cultural traits in gnosis, ontology, myth, literature and their poetics.
To aid this process of unravelling the earliest forms of narrative I have had to dig into the oral narratives of the Yoruba and other cultural templates as an exercise in comparative literature, perhaps also for having been beaten by the bug of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Productive as this exercise has been it does appear that more insight could be yielded to scholarship if attempt were made to track a little farther back, and this has led me to reflect deeper on other potential technologies of memorialization —beyond the scribal, photographic, and their analogue associates. In other words, this promises to be a trans disciplinary initiative that hints at the intersection of biology (as an informing, originating principle, and as trope), technology (as pertains to digital wombs), and society (of oraLiteracies of the broad humanities). And I knew that I would have to heed the warning of Houston Baker on a needed “improvisatory flexibility” in the handling of method here. Towards this end, and with the support of colleagues from the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, I commenced my research seeking to combine textual inquiry for interpretation with an ethnographic approach on the narrative forms that mothers engage in during the process of a child's formation from conception to the stage of birth. What, for instance, are the narrative strategies of mothers on, and to the unborn child, even directly to these foetuses. I also seek knowledge on the cultural reaction to this process by both the child, and the mother, in the aftermath of birth, if the pregnancy were captured in an ultra-sonographic digital environment. What are the potential implications of this for the future narrative, of, and by the child on her earliest beginnings? What is the future of the auto/biography, even the African auto/biographical novel in the context of conceptual ‘Unborn’? Might this ‘recall text’ have initiated some kind of ‘new humanity’ with the capacity to revise, even reverse, but ultimately propel narrative sequence(s) with a qualitative shift of certitude of past(s) beyond our earlier experience? And do not get me wrong, this isn’t some bypass, no easy alleys here. By ‘Unborn’ I speak not just of the foetusbut also the very core of silence, silenced discourses of the myriad underserved individuals and communities in our life; name them: the working class, the national and ethnic minority, the victim of every-drop-of-white-superior-to-you, all, including the creative and psychological minority, sexuality victims, all running from institutions of containment!
So, this research takes off by drawing connections between our settled notions of narrative and the impulse of technologies to aid us in hinting at potential emergent narratives and their poetics. It examines narrative through the oral, written and digital electronic responses to the dynamics of literary and cultural production in the context of probable, possible, and preferable Futures. The research suspects an urgent need to revisit the characterisation of literary values; why are we so mute on the literary value of intra uterine ‘conversations’ of the mother-child stimuli-response, for instance? Or, even worse, is not the story of literary beginnings always commencing in media res? All narratives with in media res beginnings have something yet undisclosed. Furthermore, why is the gender-unique lullaby not of great literary value but the folk song and the epic suddenly are? What gender populates this narrative space the most? Coud this have been no other than the preferential gestures of a nomenclatural elite and its stag power structure on literary valuation? This research is increasingly becoming pertinent to the West Africa narrative space because the trend of ageism too, and engendering in African narratives and epistemic traditions has endured for so long and created a power base within a literary tradition in which griots and men often become the custodians of a communal knowledge system, albeit based on the old rhetorical tradition and the process of socialisation. The context of memory practices, therefore, was not fully dissimilar to memory practices within the field of rhetoric as captured in the myth of Simonides within the Western tradition. As a work in Futures Studies, this research is designed to explore the intersections of culture and narrative within the field of digital humanities.
Broad outline of the argument
• How the woman or/and feminine is the primal narrator, creator of the encultured womb
• What are the potential implications of this for the future narrative of/on/by the child if the pregnancy were captured in an ultra-sonographic digital environment from the moment of conception?
• Identify the distinctive features of narrative in-utero in relation to our current practice of the media of self-representation.
• With postorganic birth, is the woman empowered or otherwise in playing agency in autoethnography?
Thinking theory, or theoretical framework:
Narrative Theory: My preference for narrative theory stems from its potential to be adaptive to a transdisciplinary environment of work and knowing. In this regard and in addition, two adaptations became helpful: Cultural Stem Cells developed by Mark Nwagwu, 2023, and the 1999 Wombiture Model developed by Sola Olorunyomi. This 2025 forthcoming is a six-chaptered book on the Futures of narrative in the context of postorganic humanity, and here is my sense of the outline:
Talking Futures with Culture as Wombiture
a. Orí as Primary Media/lity
b. Welcome, Tertiary Orality
c. Foetal Subjectivities and the Agency of Unborn
d. The Future of Narrative and the Auto/Biography In-Utero
e. Memory, tense and aspects
f. Conclusion
Three Yoruba conceptual multimedia categories:
These categories have helped me greatly if prefiguration. My main thesis is that the postorganic media introduced to the female body or/and the digital womb has foundationally shifted the structural pattern of narrative as we have known it, but also calls for a robust ethical debate. I am proposing that in spite ofits being futuristic, it has equally rebirthed a Bájúbámúbárí, of the Orí inú/Orí ìta debate but also exceeded it via a discursive omniscient-like personae in literary characterization, and in cultural materialist sense of the interconnectivity of the senses lodged in the Orí, as the physical head. In a broader sense, the Orí is far beyond the five multimedia senses represented here, and the hermeneutic practice of its discourse quite varied. I argue that the new media is aspiring to the conditions already articulated as Primary Medialit(y)ies in the illustrations to follow overleaf, and in which the essence of the intuitive and the cognitive are embedded. These two concepts below are only a few examples of how language can project Futures in an integrated cognitive-intuitive sense:
Wí-Hàn of the Okun and Central Yoruba dialects
1. Wí-Hàn
2. Bájúbámúbárí
3. Illustrated here as 3, but Bájúbámúbárí only amplifies 2, shows Orí (Head) as Primary Medialit(y)ies
Research Colloquium
Tuesday, 12th of November 2024
2:15 pm, University of Bayreuth, Building GW I, Room S 93
Sola Olorunyomi, PhD
Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Institute of African Studies
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria