Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Interactions between Oral and Written Traditions in Different Cultures: An Intricate Dance of Storytelling and Knowledge Transmission
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

The Voice Is a Body, the Book Is a Ghost: What Happens When Stories Learn to Sit Still

There’s this thing that happens when you try to explain why you loved a story your grandmother told you as a kid. It falls apart. It’s like explaining a dream: the more you talk, the less it means. You remember the texture—the way she leaned in, how her voice dipped like it was hiding something—but not the plot. The words? Maybe. The rhythm? Definitely. And that’s the trick: oral storytelling isn’t about the story. It’s about the moment. The breath. The wetness of language before it gets embalmed in ink.

And then, one day, you read Beowulf.

Or Homer, or The Epic of Gilgamesh, or some other reanimated fossil of a tale that once lived—loud, communal, spine-prickling—and now sits there like a corpse in MLA format. And you wonder: what happened? What did writing do to stories? Did it save them or kill them?

This is a messy question. No tidy binaries here. It’s not that oral traditions are wild and pure and written ones are cold and civilized. That’s a TED Talk waiting to be canceled. The truth is way more interesting—and honestly, kind of hot—in its complexity. Oral and written storytelling aren’t rivals. They’re frenemies. Lovers who steal each other’s clothes. Your favorite queer-coded nemeses.

Let’s get into it.

Oral Tradition: the original real-time content engine

Before books, before scrolls, before even cave drawings (which were, let’s be real, proto-Instagram captions), stories were told with bodies. With mouths. With gesture, smoke, hunger. The griots of West Africa didn’t just tell stories—they performed identity. Ancestry. Cosmology. Think Shakespeare in a village square, but with higher stakes. You mess up a lineage, you don't just lose plot coherence—you erase a person. Or piss off a spirit. Or both.

These weren’t bedtime stories. They were currency. Law. Medicine. Gossip. Magic. The truth coated in rhythm, because memory clings to beats better than to facts. A story was a relationship—not a commodity. You couldn’t pirate it, copy-paste it, or skim the last paragraph to get the vibe. You had to be there. You had to listen.

Contrast that with written tradition, which is so proud of its permanence it forgets how fragile it is. (Raise your hand if your hard drive ever died more brutally than your attention span.) The act of writing a story down turns it into a thing. It gets edited. Owned. Studied. Bound. And somewhere in the process, it loses its breath.

The intimacy paradox

But here's the wild part. Writing didn’t just domesticate the wild oral beast. It recorded it. And in doing so, created a new kind of intimacy—one that doesn’t require physical presence. Think about how creepy and beautiful it is that you can read a 12th-century Persian poem and feel like the poet is whispering in your ear. Even if you don’t speak Farsi. Even if they’ve been dead for 800 years. Writing lets us hear ghosts.

That’s powerful. That’s dangerous.

Because when something can survive without a community—without ritual, or context—it can be twisted. Misread. Repackaged. Canonized. Suddenly, an oral myth meant to be performed in a circle around a fire becomes a “world literature” case study in a climate-controlled seminar room. Stripped of accent. Of laugh breaks. Of the sly way a storyteller raises their eyebrows before delivering the punchline.

It’s not that one tradition is more “authentic.” It’s that they operate on different frequencies. Oral storytelling is live jazz. Writing is the studio album. They need each other—and they undermine each other. Constantly.

The remix gene: culture is theft, and that’s the point

Let’s talk about remix culture, because honestly, oral tradition invented it.

Western academia loves originality. You know, “cite your sources,” “no plagiarism,” etc. But oral cultures are like: we all know where the story came from—it came from us. So go ahead, tweak the ending, add a joke, make the heroine queer. The point isn’t fidelity to some ur-text. It’s resonance. Use the story however you need to. Make it slap.

The Odyssey? Was fanfic of The Iliad. The Ramayana? Has like seven regional versions with totally different vibes. Inuit and Sámi storytelling? Built on adaptation, improvisation, weather reports.

But the moment these stories hit the page—especially under colonial pressure—they get pinned like butterflies. Fixed. Declared “accurate” or “incorrect.” And you start seeing those sterile museum labels: “authentic,” “traditional,” “original version.” Like storytelling is a math problem. Like it didn’t evolve in real time with audience feedback.

That’s when oral culture becomes exoticized. Frozen. Studied. And let’s be real: often erased.

Literacy is a weapon—but so is orality

Here’s where it gets spicy.

Colonial projects weaponized literacy. Europeans arrived with Bibles, printing presses, and legal systems built on written contracts. Indigenous people around the globe had oral laws, histories, and identities—none of which translated cleanly onto paper. So they were dismissed as “primitive.” Erasable. This wasn’t just epistemicide—it was a reformatting of reality.

And yet—orality survived. It adapted. The Harlem Renaissance? Oral rhythms re-entering print through jazz-inflected poetry. Black Twitter? Oral culture going digital, looping back to the communal fire in the form of meme threads, call-and-response riffs, storytelling as reply chains.

The line between oral and written is not linear. It’s a spiral. Stories move across formats, slip between tongues, glitch in translation. They get lost and reborn. Just like language.

Reading like you're eavesdropping

This is why some books feel more alive than others. It’s not just the plot. It’s the voice. When you read Zora Neale Hurston, you’re eavesdropping on a porch conversation. When you read Arundhati Roy, the text loops and murmurs like someone telling a secret they’re not sure you deserve to hear. Ocean Vuong writes like someone whose mother tongue was sound.

Books like these remember their oral roots. They don’t just inform—they seduce. They hum, they interrupt themselves, they don’t care about proper syntax. They make you read with your whole body.

Compare that to the kind of prose that’s been workshopped into oblivion. That’s afraid of rhythm. That thinks clarity means stripping away all music. You get writing that’s technically flawless—and emotionally inert.

Let’s not pretend this is neutral. The “literary voice” taught in most Western schools is an aesthetic shaped by whiteness, colonialism, and the lie of objectivity. It tells you that emotion is indulgent, that dialect is unprofessional, that stories should be linear and tidy. Oral tradition laughs in its face. Then improvises a better ending.

What TikTok knows that academia forgot

Ironically, TikTok might be the most oral-tradition platform of our time.

Think about it: stories told face-to-face (okay, screen-to-screen), filled with gesture, rhythm, repetition. Duets, stitches, retellings. Everyone remixing each other. Credit is fluid. Emotion is central. Context is everything.

And isn’t that how most of us actually process the world? Not through essays. Not through footnotes. But through overheard stories. Voice notes. Playlists. Threads. Things that move like breath.

Which is why it’s not enough to preserve oral traditions in books or databases. You have to live them. Speak them. Let them shapeshift. Otherwise, they’re just relics. Pretty bones.

So what now?

We’re at a weird crossroads. AI is writing novels. Audiobooks are more popular than print. Podcasts are basically oral literature in the age of Bluetooth. Literacy itself is mutating—less about grammar, more about navigating multimodal chaos.

This isn’t a crisis. It’s a remix.

The goal isn’t to pick sides. It’s to stop pretending they’re separate. The oral lives inside the written. The written aspires to the oral. It’s a feedback loop, not a hierarchy.

Maybe the question isn’t “Which is better?” but “Which feels more alive right now?” And how can we write—or speak, or post, or whisper—so that someone else hears it and feels their blood stir a little?

Because that’s what stories are for. Not preservation. Not prestige. Transmission. A voice moving through a body. A body becoming a voice.

The page can’t contain that.

But maybe it can remember.