#orature

I recently had the lucky opportunity to listen to Professor Mugo about orature and the intangible culture of African collective languages and memories.

The challenges are eclectic as practitioners and storytellers of the African legacy. Naming and relaunching the use of our narratives within a vernacular context focuses on our very own representation of self: our essence.

There is a small geography in every house where history breathes differently. It is not a room on the plans, not a shape on the outside; it is the place where flame meets flesh and language is fed. We call it vatra — the hearth — and to call it that is to call a family into being.

I know my hearth, my fireplace and my wood stove, the way one knows a body. I also grew up with a wood stove, cooking from it, and learning from it. My hands know how to split a log so the flame will take; my mouth knows the rhythm of telling and of tasting; my eyes have learned to read the slow grammar of coals. The hearth has shaped my life the way weather shapes a field. It taught me what it means to be held, to archive presence, to name the things that matter.

The hearth is an archetype. It predates law and temple; it predates the brick and the household register. Where man first took the hot spark from the stone and learned to keep it, a new kind of time began — domestic time, story-time, the time of the family. Around that flame we were more than bodies and seasons; we were a lineage of gestures, names, recipes, and tales that could be repeated and recognized. The vatra is both signal and sanctuary. When an Albanian says the hearth has gone out, the phrase carries a verdict: not only the match is spent, but the living memory has been extinguished, the line is broken.

I have spent years thinking this through, not merely as an image but as a lived process. In my studies of improvised orature and in my phenomenological experiments, I noticed a stubborn, recurring pattern: the mouth is the place where eating and speaking meet. We do not merely sit beside the flame to be warm; we sit with our mouths open to intake and to tell. The same organ that chews transforms narrative into nourishment and nourishment into narrative. It is a pragmatic, biological link that becomes poetic the moment a voice shapes itself to the crackle.

To sit by a fire is to enter a field where memory and imagination trade places. Flames offer a kind of visual grammar — flicker, rise, bow, fall — that asks of the imagination a response in equal measure. When someone speaks, the story is not only heard; it is enacted against that living light. A face appears in the embers; a mountain forms in the smoke; a childhood return in the body's involuntary tightening. Stories do not demand images; they command the flame to become their theater. In my house, there is no television to compete; the fireplace is the screen, and the flicker is the special effect.

This relation between fire, mouth, and story is not merely cultural. It is plausibly older than culture. Humanity taming fire changed us: hunts became communal, nights became safe enough for longer speech, cooking altered our bodies and our brains, and language found a new center — the gathered circle. If we allow for a little mythopoetic speculation, one could say the hearth became part of our inheritance: not a gene, perhaps, but a behavioral architecture written into our habits and sympathies. We are predisposed to gather, to feed, and to narrate where the heat gathers; in that sense, the vatra may be as ancestral as our sense of kin.

For me the hearth is practical and theological at once. I use both the wood stove and the fireplace to cook through winter. We eat by the fire because the flavor is different: the food remembers being on the wood, and so do we. Fat seethes, steam rises, plates darken with soot in the best way. But the hearth's alchemy goes beyond taste. Whatever I look toward — an idea, a fear, a line of verse — rises up in the flames as though the fire were not only translating my thoughts but making them visible. The vision is mutual; I look, the fire answers.

In my Albanian heritage, vatra carries meanings that are blunt and tender. The hearth is the family and the family is the hearth; their synonyms are almost interchangeable. Weddings are blessed by the vatra, arguments are cooled or inflamed at it, and when it goes out the language holds a mourning that is immediate and absolute. An extinguished hearth is not mere absence; it is a public, almost legal statement that a home has died. That phrase’s force is ethical: to keep the flame is to keep a covenant.

This ethic is at work in my artistic project, SDL InnerSpace. I archive gestures: Leo's yawn, the knife's reflection, the pattern of ash in a pan. I photograph the wood piles, the way a log fractures, the dark crust on a pot. These are not decorative studies; they are acts of preservation. We are living in an era where images can be produced in the second by a program with no skin and no hands. Machines make perfect things to sell; they do not, however, breathe. I insist on the trace of human imperfection — the mouse-click scar, the rough cut — because such marks are evidence of an author. The hearth resists erasure, not by being efficient, but by being stubbornly human.

There is another truth I have learned through my work in orature: stories told by the mouth while the body is being fed are different from stories told elsewhere. They carry a rhythm of satisfaction and attention that cannot be manufactured in lecture halls or on stage. A belly half-full and a mouth telling is like a hand that has been trusted with a secret; the speaker has less need to perform, the audience has less need to judge. The tale becomes a practical ritual: it feeds and is fed. This reciprocity is ancient. It likely shaped oral formulae, the cadence of proverbs, even the metaphors we habitually use to speak of truth and warmth.

I am realistic about the danger of losing these practices. Houses are sold, customs migrate, and networks of attention have been colonized by screens. Yet still the wood splits, and embers glow, and there is satisfaction in taking food from flame to mouth. The hearth is simple to dismiss as quaint — until you sit with it, until you record a yawn, until an old joke shifts the room into laughter and you feel solidarity like a pulse at the base of your skull. The vatra is not merely a relic; it is a technique for belonging.

In my art I make a point of turning kitsch and cliché into material, not dross. I cut them, collage them, let them be raw material for a second life. The same goes for the hearth: its images can be romanticized into postcards, or they can be worked as study-material. The difference lies in intention. A postcard says look; a study says remember. I choose remembrance.

Sometimes I push this idea into extremes for clarity. Imagine a world where the hearth is fully outsourced, replaced by invisible heaters that hum with anonymous energy and a screen projects pre-packaged narratives. Imagine a generation that has never seen a log split by hand or a pan blackened by soot. The loss would not be merely tactile; it would be cognitive. We would lose an ecosystem of practice: specific ways of moving, listening, sharing, and imagining that are tied to flame, to feeding, and to mouth. Our metaphors would change; our imagery would fade. Perhaps the most dangerous effect would be that our stories would become more performative and less ancestral, less embedded in the body and more outsourced to commerce. And sometimes, while pushing this idea to extremes, I can also miss the most obvious thing, that it has become reality in the meantime.

But the opposite is also true. The hearth can be radical. In my modest house, while the world outside arranges itself toward expedience and simulation, we choose slowness. We cook slowly, listen fully, and keep lives by the measure of embers. This is not reactionary pietism; it is a deliberate cultural stance. In the midst of technologies that promise omniscience, I set a table for the little knowledge of a shared soup and a shared tale. It is paradoxically revolutionary: to insist on the human method when machines offer speed.

There is a particular joy in how the flame makes thought visible. Many of my essays and poems have been drafted while watching coals realign, while listening to an improvised voice shape itself. The fire does not give content; it offers a projector. The images that appear are not fixed; they are invitations. A story told beside a hearth is permissive: it allows the listener to complete and to alter, to be part of the making. The hearth returns authorship to the room, dispersing it like subtle heat.

If the vatra is a promise, then I am a keeper of it by craft and habit. I feed the stove and the stove feeds us; I write the stories and the stories feed the work I do. Leo yawns. My mother listens. The ash is always used to feed the trees in our garden. I photograph it, annotate it, file it into a repository meant to outlast my impatience with the market’s fashions.

Classical spoken and musical oral traditions, or Orature, span the entire continent of Africa. 

This traditional of African oral literature includes praise poems, love poems, tales, ritual dramas, and moral instructions in the form of proverbs and fables.