Literacy Entrances Everyone It Touches

by Barry Sanders

For the past ten years, I have been on safari. My aim was to explore the two largely uncharted domains of orality and literacy. I have found it difficult enough to grasp the latter, the one in which I spend a great deal of my time, but that other one, so remote and strange, and yet marked by the most familiar of activities – speaking and listening – has eluded me. It may be impossible to enter a world that has been untouched by print. Like a safari, my pursuit was probably wrong-headed, dangerously out of touch with the real action on the ground. I do not know. But I do know that a huge chasm prevents me, a creature of the Book, from seeing over to that far side, where even most experts have a hard time detecting the categories and qualities of primarily oral peoples.

I have been forced to get out of my Range Rover in search of something slightly less stringent but in the end much more realistic and more important for the study of literacy today: I want to uncover the power of the word within the context of an alphabetized world. The invigorated word, simply spoken, deeply uttered, intrigues me. For me, the entire project of literacy rests on such speaking.

I have been forced to get out of my Range Rover in search of something slightly less stringent but in the end much more realistic and more important for the study of literacy today: I want to uncover the power of the word within the context of an alphabetized world. The invigorated word, simply spoken, deeply uttered, intrigues me. For me, the entire project of literacy rests on such speaking. just loves to jam the world of letters into that old redoubt of orality – storytelling – just to see what kind of chaos he can unleash.