What is a griot?
Griots are storytellers. They are the oral recordkeepers of many African communities and kingdoms. They use carefully crafted words and music to share the history and values of a people in a way that is communal and intimate. I say intimate because if you’ve ever been to a concert or listened to a musician live and felt an almost religious experience that is not only experienced by you, but you feel everyone else in the room, you understand there is something unique about the way stories can be told through song.
I re-encountered1 the word griot when watching this Instagram post by marilyn.madlion, talking about Ryan Coogler’s use of the word for Shuri’s AI in Black Panther II. Her explanation struck a chord for me because I had recently been finding it difficult to explain why I feel audiobooks are such a great way to experience a book and are slept on by those who swear by physical books alone. I got back into reading in 2023 through audiobooks using Libby and have not been able to stop reading since. I felt transported to another world through the narrator’s incantation of the author’s words. That willingness to give up a bit of agency and let your auditory senses teach you something your eyes alone could not with words on a page is something special. This gave me the internal language as to why I felt connected with literature in a different way listening to it being read rather than just reading it.
How do I plan to carry on that tradition?
Now, I do read literature in both ways. I have an ever growing collection of books, the number of unread outpacing read. I’ll even after finishing an audiobook I loved, make the effort to purchase that book in the physical form to solidify the moment I had with the work between those sheets of paper (I recently did this with Sky Full of Elephants. An amazingingly intimate read if you can wrestle with the premise).
These ideas of what a griot is and what they can do inspire me to personally tell my own stories. In middle school and high school I often wrote poetry and fell in love with poetic rappers like Chance, Common, and Noname. These evolutions of the griot carry on the practice, telling not only our history but expressing our shared fears, traumas, hopes, and dreams through their captivating bars.
I don’t plan on dropping an EP or mixtape anytime soon, but I do plan on writing stories and providing readers with an interactive medium to experience them. This I think will first look like a novel or series of stories that are paired with a videogame that I will develop. It’s an opportunity to tap into my creative side and perhaps explore a niche within software development that will breathe life back into the craft for me.
I’m excited to begin this—what feels like—long-awaited journey. I’m stepping into a part of myself that I need, and I believe the world needs more now than ever. We need those of us who are willing to imagine a world we can truly be excited for, not giving into the bleak reality that we are told inevitable. Spoiler, the future is ours to shape!
Footnotes
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I believe I first encountered the idea of griot through a 60 Minutes interview with Sona Jobarteh, a Kora player from Gambia who was the first woman in her family to carry on the tradition. She now teaches the playing of the Kora tradition to the next generation in Gambia, instilling pride in their culture, teaching them music and academic studies. To gain additional understanding of the significance of the Kora in Griot tradition, I recommend watching Why is a Griot so Important in the Black Community | PBS Documentaries. I’ve started down a rabbit hole while writing this, so I’ll return with more thoughts on this later, lol. ↩