The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Orality, Scripture, and Embodied Performance

This article explores the relationship between texts and materiality in Islam by examining the songs of the initiated dozo hunter Dramane Coulibaly.^{Footnote 1} For decades, Coulibaly sang to other dozos at dozo funerals in the majority-Muslim region of Odienné in Northwestern Côte d’Ivoire. Because most dozos there practice Islam, a dozo receives Muslim burial rites for his soul (ni) within twenty-four hours after his death, followed seven, then forty days later, and finally a year afterward by memorials accompanied by Qur’anic readings. After his burial, after months or even years, he then receives another funeral intended to placate that aspect of his person that lingers among the living after death: his “shadow” or ya, in Wonjɛnɛkakan, the Manding language of Odienné—his double.^{Footnote 2} Dramane therefore sang, in part, to enable dozos to inhabit, simultaneously, the realms of Islam and dozoya—“what dozos do”—by managing the doubles or “shadows” of dead dozos. He used his verbal and musical artistry to close the gap between the Qur’an’s Arabic text and the secondary funeral practices in which dozos engage by provocatively calling the harp that accompanied his songs the dozos’ “Qur’an.” His songs, along with the dancing and other actions that accompany them, were intended to move a dead man closer to final judgment.

Killing Game Loudly with His Songs: Dramane Coulibaly’s Hunting Aesthetics

One night in the village of Nienesso, Dramane explained to me in his family compound why songs are so important to dozos (see figure 1):^{Footnote 11}

Figure 1. Dramane Coulibaly and the author in Dramane’s compound (lu). January 24, 2009.*

*I have chosen photographs taken in daylight to offer clear images of the people and elements present at kozis. Kozis occurred only at night.

I had never hunted in the United States by the time of my fieldwork, and I became a reluctant, ambivalent, and unaccomplished hunter in Côte d’Ivoire. Dozos interested me because of their songs, which, Dramane assured me, were inseparable from killing game, and vice versa. I understood Dramane to mean that words are as crucial to hunting as killing game, that his songs inspired dozos to hunt, and that songs and bodies—both animal and human—became conjoined through his words. I now draw on Dramane’s performance in the village of Kombèdougou on April 13–14, 1995 to show why this is so.^{Footnote 13} The original recordings of the song excerpts presented here are accessible online at the following link: https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.142

The Grateful Dead: Dozo Organology, Comparative Religion, and the Aesthetics of Emotion

Dramane usually sang at a kozi funeral performance from about eight o’clock p.m. until fayiri (fajr in Arabic), the next day’s first Muslim prayer at dawn. His dozo apprentices accompanied him as a chorus on the dozo harp, the ngɔnun, a calabash-based, bridge-harp with six strings arranged in two parallel, vertical rows (see Charry Reference Charry2000:69–80; see figure 2).^{Footnote 14} The strings anchor to each end of a wooden neck at the bottom of which is affixed a calabash resonating chamber cut across the top and covered with duiker or goat skin in order to support a bridge for the strings with the help of bamboo supports. The harp plays a pentatonic scale in non-equidistant steps. Musicians strum each row with their thumbs and forefingers, usually holding the harp like a guitar or banjo with one hand held lower along the strings to play one row and the other hand held higher, playing the other row. Dramane rarely played the harp publicly, but he played well in private.

Figure 2. Dramane Coulibaly, Yacou Koné, Abou Touré, and Managnouma Alpha Koné, the former chief dozo of Nienesso, from left to right, heading to the dozos’ ritual area, the dangun, to make a sacrifice to Manimory, the dozos’ tutelary spirit. Abou, Dramane’s senior apprentice, plays the ngɔnun while Dramane plays an iron rasp, or kɛnkɛnyɛn, January 20, 2009.

Dramane sang at kozis to goad dozos to kill game. The bravest promised to slay an animal that night, even predicting the kind of game they would kill and where. Gifts of meat to the dead man’s family calmed the spirit of the dead man as dozos temporarily took his place and cared for his family in his absence.^{Footnote 15} Such work often involved expelling a force called nyama from felled game by using incantations and/or medicinal plants to prevent the nyama from infecting the slayer, his wife, their as yet unborn children, or anyone coming into contact with the meat, which could otherwise make them ill (Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:53, 92). The dead man’s presence would then fully leave the world of the living to await the final judgment. Otherwise he might sicken his family’s livestock, ruin their crops, or spoil the hunt for hunters out of spite. Dramane’s songs thus accomplished Muslim ends, moving the whole of a dead man towards the afterlife and assuring his family’s well-being. At the start of the kozi in Kombèdougou in 1995, Dramane even called the dozos’ harp, “the Qur’an”:

Dramane linked his career as a dozo singer to both hunting and Islam. When he sang, he put his hand into both the “animals’ bass drum” and the Qur’an. Just as drums bring people to life, prompting them to dance, he implied, the dozos’ harp excites animals to action when dozos hunt them. His Qu’ran had a double identity, bridging Islam and dozoya. Never far were God and his Prophet, Muhammad, to whom Dramane dedicated himself as a singer. He also invoked the protection of Kombèdougou’s local forest spirit (dugu da jina), legitimizing the religious pluralism of Odienné’s dozos. When Dramane’s apprentices plucked the ngɔnun’s strings, and he sang, they turned the pages of the Qur’an—while pounding a venatic drum. Dramane also called his harp a kitabu, from the Arabic kitab, meaning “book.” In Arabic, the Qur’an is “the book,” al-Kitab, or Kitabullah, “the book of God.” For Dramane, his songs were a book of God, too, which helped secure salvation for dozos.

Another dozo from the Odienné region, Mory Diakité, echoed Dramane’s claim. He told me that killing game was a form of almsgiving that wins God’s favor for dozos at their last judgment and for their dozo apprentices at theirs (Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:83). Islam was, in fact, a dozo preoccupation, and dozoya, “what dozos do,” was a valid one for Muslim dozos. Dramane claimed, for example, that Manimory, the first dozo, had descended from Abraham through Ismael, in Islam’s prophetic line, through a man named Enzu: Esau, the hunter of the Book of Genesis (Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:118–19). But such details appear nowhere in the Qu’ran, only in dozo lore. Dramane effectively conceived of his songs as Muslim texts in his own Manding language (see Derive Reference Derive1983) about the dozo prophet, Nabi Enzu, just as the Qur’an tells stories of Muslim prophets in Arabic.^{Footnote 17}

In Côte d’Ivoire, however, followers of the eighteenth-century reformer ibn Abd al-Wahhab condemn the initiatory sacrifices dozos make to Manimory as shirk, or apostasy. Al-Wahhab enjoined Muslims in his treatise, the Kitab al Tawhid (Wahhab Reference Wahhab1992), to avoid associating any power with God in a way that might compromise the Muslim community’s submission to Him (Hellweg Reference Hellweg2006:465).^{Footnote 18} Dramane is aware of such critiques. “I cannot know their business,” he told me vaguely when I asked him about Salafi Muslims, “but they do not appeal to me.”^{Footnote 19} He challenged the very basis of their criticisms—dozos’ alleged failure to know and follow Muslim scripture—by provocatively comparing dozo orality with Muslim literacy. I understood Dramane to say that his performances were a form of what Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (1990) have called “entextualization,” a way of objectifying oral texts that opens them to critical reflection, making them memorable beyond their original performances: the “process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. A text . . . from this vantage point is discourse rendered decontextualizable” (Bauman & Briggs Reference Bauman and Briggs1990:73–74).

At the same time, Dramane’s performances grounded his songs in their embodied, emplaced, and material contexts (see Connerton Reference Connerton1989:102). His lyrics referenced the events at which he sang, anchoring his songs in their hunting-related settings. His songs therefore emerged from within and then moved beyond their contexts as much as they imposed meaning upon them. Ruth Finnegan (Reference Finnegan2007) has highlighted such “multi-modal” aspects of African “orality,” such as the dances, objects, sounds, and allusions to the written Qur’an that accompanied Dramane’s ostensibly “oral” performances.^{Footnote 20} His “oral texts” were more than oral, more than texts. They were enacted word problems that required action to solve, like the “exams” to which he compared them.

His songs, for example, often contrasted living dozos unfavorably with dead ones:

In this passage, Dramane nostalgically and implicitly compares a heroic dozo—who allegedly killed ninety-nine elephants—to living dozos for whom such exploits, Dramane insinuates, are impossible because they are less competent hunters.^{Footnote 21} His turns of phrase, joined to the rhythms and melodies of his chorus and to dancing by dozos, gave his words more than occasional importance; they “naturaliz[ed]” the “intertextual relations” he asserted between dozoya and Islam (Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Bauman1992:158), between hunting and the divine, between a dozo’s death and salvation. His performances gave his words a lasting, ethical life capable of molding dozo character well beyond the kozi, into the forest, and, beyond death, through Islam.

These remarks would have raised the eyebrows of Walter Ong (2013) and Jack Goody (Reference Goody1977), who argued that writing has a permanence orality lacks, that non-literate people have less capacity for critical thinking than literate ones since oral texts are transient (Ong 2013), and that writing intervenes where mediated social interactions prevail over face-to-face relationships (Goody Reference Goody1977). Writing, for Goody and Ong, was more or less permanent because of its material trace, which, they claimed, allows authors and readers to contemplate ideas at a critical distance.^{Footnote 22} Whereas Goody and Ong minimized orality the potential to entextualize, Dramane asserted it. Although the Qur’an gave dozos little chance to legitimize their hunting in Muslim terms, Dramane’s songs made space for dozos in Islam, extending dozoya’s reach beyond its hunting contexts. Whereas the Qur’an shapes dozos’ lives as Muslims, Dramane let their lives as hunters shape his Muslim songs. His songs therefore challenge invidious distinctions between so-called “world religions,” with their global, literate populations—a category invented to model non-Christian practices awkwardly after Christianity (Masuzawa Reference Masuzawa2005)—and “indigenous religions,” those more “local” practices that reputedly lack the geographical reach and literary corpus of their supposedly more cosmopolitan counterparts.^{Footnote 23} But if Dramane’s songs reconciled dozoya and Islam, and if most dozos in Odienné were Muslim, then Dramane preached Islam in songs to his kozi audiences as much as any imam in Odienné did to Muslims at large in his sermons. Dramane, however, drew on far more than words to do so.

Let’s Dance: The Place of the Body, and Bodies Emplaced, at Dozo Funerals

Dozos danced throughout the night to Dramane’s songs in a counterclockwise circle around a central fire in or near the dead dozo’s compound. They moved at an ambulatory pace as if in search of quarry and to the lilting syncopation of the iron rasp (kɛnkɛnyɛn) that Dramane played. Near the end of most of Dramane’s songs, he accelerated the rasp’s tempo, and dozos burst into a rapid dance in small groups as if in hot pursuit of game, leaving the dance circle and moving toward Dramane and his apprentices wherever they had removed themselves to make room for the dancers.^{Footnote 24}

When I asked Dramane why a dozo’s eyes sometimes changed as he danced with such vigor, he replied, “His eyes become red. His heart . . . is pained . . . It is as if, your eyes, you and an animal have seen each other again.”^{Footnote 25} Dozo singing and dancing thus evoked and mimicked hunting as a way to excite dozos to kill game. Each dozo often danced with his gun, Dramane explained, because “it is with that that he kills game.”^{Footnote 26} Funerals evoked joy as well as sadness because dozos came to kozis in part to express through dance the pleasure they feel while hunting: “The happiness you have from the things you do in the bush, you dance that in the village,” Dramane said, presuming a close, cyclical relationship between the motivation to hunt generated by music and dance at a kozi, the joy dozos feel on the hunting that follows, and the exuberance they later express for hunting by dancing at the next kozi.^{Footnote 27}

Dramane and his apprentices were not the only ones who made music on these occasions, however. Dozos commented appreciatively on Dramane’s songs, blowing their hunting whistles with which they called for help in the forest. Other dozos fired gunpowder volleys from locally handmade, muzzle-loading muskets, emitting sonorous booms. Women clapped and sang. The result was a thick, sonic underbrush through which dozos trekked and ran, invoking the forest and the hunt within the village in order to bring together those troubled by a dozo’s death. Together, dozos and women re-embodied the moral connections sundered by the demise of the dozo who once personified them so he could leave for the afterlife, reassured.^{Footnote 28} The kozi’s sounds (clapping, musket volleys, the metal rasp, and dozo harps) indexed the various participants (women, dozos, and dozo musicians, respectively) whose moral interrelations the parties reconstituted after a dozo’s death. The texts of Dramane’s songs emerged from within and around the material imperatives of these relationships, not over and against them, especially with regard to Islam.

Textual Feeling: Context and Audience in Dramane’s Compositional Style

When Dramane sang at kozis, he sang throughout the night, superimposing one song over another, as it were, exploring multiple facets of being a dozo with melodic content that differed from song to song, reflecting different lyrical content in a set of structural contrasts that would have made Lévi-Strauss sing. The result was a musical portrait of dozoya to which dozos enjoyed both listening and dancing. Most songs identified distinct components of the dozo role, from the heroic to the vulnerable to the mortal. Songs followed one after the other, clarifying the dozo role and how dozos should respond to the deceased man’s death. Dramane deployed a melodic menagerie to distinguish the attitudes, skills, and preoccupations by which he and other dozos defined themselves in relation to non-dozos at the funeral.

One song, “That Which Some Know, Others Do Not” (Dɔ ye dɔ lon, dɔ ma o lon), models good character for dozos, who rely on sorcery and friendship to kill game:^{Footnote 29}

These lyrics highlight the importance of humility. My friend, Drissa Koné, who first introduced me to Dramane, also helped me to record his songs, transcribed them into Manding for me, and translated them into French (Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:18–21). Drissa told me that dozos who vaunt their hunting prowess do so at great risk. Competitors may use sorcery to “cut” them—ka o tɛgɛ—that is, to prevent them from killing game. Other dozos confirmed Drissa’s assertion. A display of humility to a dozo powerful enough to counteract such sorcery—likely a more senior colleague—might help solve the problem.^{Footnote 30} For Dramane, sorcery could undo such constraints that might prevent dozos from freeing a colleague’s spirit for the afterlife by killing game. Dramane therefore inflected sorcery with Muslim purpose, or at least a neutral cast beyond apostasy, construing it as a tool, like a gun, useful for hunting with ethical ends in mind.

The musical features of “That Which Some Know” complement its lyrical content, especially in the way that Dramane’s voice interacts with the voices of his chorus who sing the song’s refrain.^{Footnote 31} Dramane ornaments his voice with great tonal variety, singing the syllable lon as a melisma—drawing it out over several different tones—as if reciting the Qur’an or the Muslim call to prayer (adhan) (Skinner Reference Skinner2015a:25; Skinner Reference Skinner2015b).^{Footnote 32} This is no coincidence. West African singing reflects the vocal styles of North Africa and the Middle East due to cultural interactions fostered by the trans-Saharan trade. Although Charry (2000:23) writes of the influence of Qur’anic recitation on Mandé jeli or “griot” music, he might have mentioned dozo music too:

Dozo music is, correspondingly, both monophonic and highly ornamented. Dozo vocalization reflects and/or has facilitated a history of interaction with Islam.

Amulets on the protective shirts that dozos wear for their ritual activities do the same. They may contain Qur’anic verses or their numerological representations (see Mommersteeg Reference Mommersteeg and Webb2010:97–116). Dozos need not be Muslim to wear them, but even then such amulets inject Islam into dozoya.^{Footnote 33} Dozos also use the word saraka from the Arabic, zadakat, or “alms,” to denote the offerings they make to Manimory and to dead dozos at kozis (Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:81). If amulets exemplify the appropriation of Islam by dozos, and if dozos compare their offerings to Manimory with alms destined to God, then Dramane’s comparison of his harp to the Qur’an is as unsurprising as the melismas that appear in his songs—indications of a more pervasive assimilation to Islam. Indeed, dozo songs themselves, and the dances that they inspire, are components of the alms meant to produce good feelings at dozo funerals in order to calm the dead man’s spirit (see Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:94–95). In “That Which Some Know,” the result is a series of ostinato parts that return cyclically to the full refrain, Dɔ ye dɔ lon, dɔ ma o lon, which bounces back and forth between Dramane’s call and his accompanists’ response, so much so that it becomes unclear at points who is calling and who responding, indicative of the oneness to which participants at dozo funerals aspire. Dramane interjects other content, like the line, “I say everyone is not the same,” for contrast.

A resultant musical “complementarity” (Kafumbe Reference Kafumbe2018:47, 56, 60) infuses Dramane’s songs. Whereas he and his chorus sing in simple 2/4 time, a syncopated compound meter of 6/8 prevails in the instruments, creating a hemiola, most audibly in the rasp that Dramane plays. The outcome is a regular, danceable meter (see Agawu Reference Agawu2003:79–86; Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:185) characterized by a tension between its duple and triple phrasings, a result that Steven Friedson (1996:169) describes as inducing possession trance in Tumbuka healing in Malawi by invoking spirits called vimbuza:

Since Tumbuka dancers can only induce possession through music, by which they call on spirits, the “tonal” reality of spirit possession is all-encompassing. The hemiola is the existential ground of the shifting ontological experience of Tumbuka spirit possession. Music is the material medium in which corporeal transformation occurs. Such “musical structure” is “a mode of being-in-the-world” (Friedson Reference Friedson1996:168).

Dramane’s metrical complementarity similarly reflects dozos’ ability to shift adroitly between Islam and dozoya. Dramane additionally brought dozos together as a group in order to separate them by challenging them to excel as individual hunters. As the dozos danced, the excitement of moving from a slow to a rapid pace accomplished the desirable transition between inaction and hunting, notably when dozos displayed the “red eyes” and “pained heart” that Dramane mentioned. By singing, he aimed to make each dozo say to himself, “tomorrow [before the end of the funeral], I will kill game . . . to the point that if God wants it, it will die. [And even] if God doesn’t want it, it will die” (emphasis mine).^{Footnote 34} Although Dramane recognized Islam’s compatibility with dozoya, he acknowledged tensions between them, compelling him to make their complementarity explicit. Hence his songs moderate the boundaries between dozoya and Islam as much as they bring them together, “suppress[ing and] . . . foregrounding intertextual gaps between them” (Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Bauman1992:158).

The interlocking lyrics, meters, and concerns—both dozo and Muslim—signal the importance of collaborative if competitive ties among the funeral’s participants and their contrasting but equivalent loyalties to dozoya and Islam. “That Which Some Know” distills a situation in which dozos rely on each other to expel a dead man’s spirit and try to outshine one another by providing meat for his family. Their embodied, material imperatives at the funerals where Dramane sang shaped the form and content of a song that reflects their multivalent dozo identities (see Feld Reference Feld1984:405). Juxtaposed duple and triple meters echo dozos’ twinned but discrepant natures as dozos and Muslims. The transfer of the song’s refrain between Dramane and his chorus signals an interdependence between each dozo and dozos as a whole in placating the dead by killing game. And the acceleration from an ambulant to a swifter pace—initiated by musicians and followed by dancers at dozo funerals to this day—enacts a dozo identity that ideally stimulates participants to kill game in the forest. The song locates key features of dozo identity at the intersection of dozoya and Islam.

Figure 3. Red monkey (sura wulen), rock hyrax (farabanun), and cane rat (kɔnyina) meat in Nienesso after a hunt, January 20, 2009.

Other songs do so too, with even more specific reference to Islam, such as “Wait for me, God” (Ala N Makɔnɔ):

Between the song’s refrain, which asks God to “wait” for Dramane while he greets dozos at a funeral, come recurrent images of dozos as “bad power-objects,” that is, repositories of arcane expertise; “pants wearers,” dangerous men you should avoid, who “wear the pants,” so to speak; and “sorcerers.”^{Footnote 35}

Typically Dramane greeted dozos at the edge of the village or compound where they arrived for the kozi. These dozos may have hunted along the way, possibly using sorcery. Many arrived wearing amulet-covered dozo shirts and holding power objects. In moving to greet them, Dramane moved toward the morally ambiguous realm of the forest and dozoya, away from Islam; yet his words confounded reformist condemnations. He depicts dozos as moving between their esoteric power and God rather than away from either one. Dozos can hunt their Islam, he seems to say, and eat it too. When dozos use sorcery to kill game, they give the game they kill to a dead dozo’s family as alms, protecting Muslims from hunger and moving a dead man toward judgment, fulfilling dozo and Muslim expectations at once.

If Dramane reconciled dozoya with Islam, then surely his songs resemble the Qur’an. Although hunting may not be among Islam’s five “pillars,” Islam is a pillar of dozo hunting, at least for Dramane, who makes this clear in his song, “A Good Person’s Death Is a Sign from God,” in which he depicts Islam and dozoya as inextricable from each other:

If God decides the time and place of each person’s death, as most Muslims in the Odienné region believe, then every person’s death, including a dozo’s, is a sign from God, literally a “trace” or “print” (nɔ) of God’s presence. In this song, Dramane invoked, by nickname, two dead dozos, “Tall Brahima” and “Tall Zumana,” whose hunting exploits were worth commemorating in song. He memorializes them as “good people” (mɔgɔ bɛrɛ), morally upright persons who, as dozos, made alms-like gifts of game meat (saraka, from the Arabic, sadakat) to others throughout their lives (see Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:81).^{Footnote 36} Songs like this make the dozo’s harp a Qur’an because they portray hunting as a form of Muslim piety, a way to be closer to God. Dramane praises living dozos for their hunting in his song’s final line because, by hunting, they aspire to salvation, following in the footsteps of their illustrious dead colleagues. Although Dramane acknowledges differences between dozoya and Islam, he argues that hunting can achieve sanctity for dozos.

Eine Kleine Dozo Nachtmusik: Shifting Targets for Musical Performance

In other songs, however, he focused on more specifically dozo identities: for example, on (1) dozos whose hunting reputations he contested, (2) dozos who have lost their first wife and child, as Manimory is said to have done, and on (3) dozo blacksmiths, or numu, in Manding.^{Footnote 37} While most of his songs featured distinctive refrains shared with his chorus, Dramane sang these kinds of songs without refrains, further proof that he composed and sang in response to his performance contexts. His song, “Blacksmiths” (Numu), for instance, praises dozos whose worth transcends killing game per se:

When Dramane sang, “Blacksmiths,” he sang alone—unlike for most of his songs—without chorus or refrain. Only dozo blacksmiths danced, present at every dozo gathering I attended since smithing, a profession inherited in certain clans, produces the knives, hunting axes, twelve-gauge rifles, and muskets with which dozos hunt (see McNaughton Reference McNaughton1988:3, 159).^{Footnote 38}

Dramane opens the song with a greeting, followed by three successive couplets.^{Footnote 39} The first starts with the word, gban (“forge”), which begins each line of the first couplet. The first lines of the second and third couplets begin with the word, kata (“since”), followed, in each case, by a line that expresses Dramane’s misgivings about the state of the world. These couplets give the song its structure without a refrain, displaying a form and reusable content that enabled Dramane to adapt to the occasion, as with his reference to renowned dozo, Mozonba.

The song portrays dozo blacksmiths as formidable because they work without pause—happily or not—making hunting tools. Without blacksmiths, Dramane fears, hunting would end, a thought that recurs at each kozi. When a dozo dies, something of the hunt dies with him, requiring a funeral and its songs to reinvigorate the hunt over and against the potential mischief wrought by the dead dozo’s spirit (see Hertz Reference Hertz1960). Dramane’s songs provoked dozos to hunt in the dead dozo’s place. They also responded to circumstances at dozo funerals more generally. When Dramane sang for dozos as a whole, his chorus accompanied him and alternated with him in singing verses and refrains. When Dramane sang for particular kinds of dozos, however, such as blacksmiths, he sang alone, without refrains, just as dozo blacksmiths danced alone without other dozos. Bringing dozos together therefore also meant distinguishing them from each other, just as forging links between dozoya and Islam meant noting their differences (see Briggs & Bauman Reference Briggs and Bauman1992:158). Dramane altered the lyrical and musical features of his songs accordingly, tailoring his words to the diverse characters of funeral participants who included more than dozos.

For women he sang songs such as “Pity” (Nanyumani), addressed to the wife or wives, sisters, and daughters of the dead dozo, usually while Dramane stopped in the dead man’s compound at the door of the home or room where these women had gathered for the night. For this song, dozos refrained from dancing, and Dramane highlights the vital roles women play—like blacksmiths—in dozos’ lives. Women prepare the game dozos kill, and dozos may confide hunting secrets to their wives or daughters, who can then transmit them to future husbands, sons, or other men (see Hellweg Reference Hellweg2011:68, 114–15). Dramane regularly provoked tears among women with this song; I have also seen dozos weep in response:

The song bemoans a dozo’s death with repeated reference to the theme and refrain, “pity,” echoed in a separate, second part of the refrain that appears either in two lines, sung between Dramane and the chorus, or in a single line sung by the chorus alone, “Pity, oh, a dozo has fallen, eh” (dozo byɛna e). Metaphors for a dozo’s death—a dozo falling and a dozo lying down—follow, followed, in turn, by the word, “pity,” then by the image of a dog lying down, another metaphor for a fallen hunter. Then comes the longer line of the refrain, “Pity, oh, a dozo has fallen.” The subsequent line sorrowfully calls attention to the “mothers” assembled at the kozi; they are as “good” (bɛrɛ) in their roles as the dead dozo was in his (see “A Good Person’s Death Is a Sign from God” above). This song stands out not only because of its two-line refrain but also because it shows, once more, how Dramane adjusted his compositional style and poetic content in the face of various audiences and performance venues.

Even the Score: Taking Note of Meter and Melody in Dramane’s Song “Pity”

How then did Dramane use the specifically melodic and rhythmic characteristics of his songs to reflect his compositional relationship with his audiences? I now turn to these features, using his song, “Pity,” as an example. Below appears a transcription of the song’s nine opening bars, in order to display their sonic characteristics visually for the purpose of analysis (see figure 4). In the transcription, the top line is Dramane’s; the bottom is that of the chorus.^{Footnote 40} While no transcription can adequately represent musical sound, I intend this one as a heuristic around which to build a discussion.

Figure 4. Transcription of Dramane Coulibaly’s song “Pity.”

I begin with what ethnomusicologist Damascus Kafumbe (personal communication), has called “the rhythmic heart of the piece”: the figure comprised of an eighth note followed immediately by two sixteenth notes—DAAH dah-dah—which permeates the song, most often attached to the word, nanyumani (“pity”). It first appears in the second bar of Dramane’s vocal line, starting on a rest. He and the chorus sing it together in the third and fourth bars, after which the chorus repeats it in the fourth. It comes next from Dramane in the fifth, then staggers between both lines in the sixth, and in the chorus’s again in the seventh and ninth. The figure therefore jumps between Dramane and the chorus, including a brief overlap by the two early on to vocalize the night’s collective grief. The resulting tension is a creative one, about when and if a musical resolution will occur, sustaining a rhythmic suspense that matches that of the evening, over when and if dozos will hunt and kill game that night.

A similar oscillation occurs with the word, nanyumani, itself. Dramane sings the word first in the second bar. He and the chorus sing it together in the third and fourth, overlapping rhythmically. From then on, though, only the chorus sings the word in the sixth, seventh, and ninth bars while Dramane sings short verses in between, in bars five, six, and eight. While the pattern here is not one of call and response, it is nonetheless conversational. Dramane and the chorus contribute two interlocking parts of the same song, taking turns or coinciding vocally, conveying musically the collaboration needed from their audience for the night to end in the consensus that will release the dead dozo’s shade into the afterlife.

Vocal ornamentation is another of the song’s striking features, along with the use of dramatically sustained notes, particularly around the sound, we—an onomatopoeic lament, reminiscent of human crying—and the exclamation, e. Whereas the plaintive we opens the song and next appears as a dotted eighth note in the fourth bar for Dramane, it appears as a three-note descending melisma at the same moment for the chorus. It then shifts between the chorus and Dramane in the seventh and eight bars, respectively. The exclamation, e, appears as a half note in the fifth and eighth bars from the chorus. Such details again call to mind the vocal ornamentation and suspension of Qur’anic recitation and the call to prayer, sources of stylistic inspiration that permeate Mandé music. Dramane’s use of these features is hardly unique to dozo singing in Northwestern Côte d’Ivoire, but they make his claim that his harp is the dozos’ Qur’an all the more, not less, remarkable, given the long history of integrating Muslim elements into Mandé cultural practices.^{Footnote 41} Dramane’s work then is emblematic of, rather than exceptional to, Islam in West Africa.^{Footnote 42}

Coda

In sum, the poetic and musical elements of Dramane’s songs—their content, melodies, meter, the presence or absence of refrains, and the way they target particular audiences—echo the moral interdependence that dozos cultivate with multiple parties and influences. These connections with each other, the dead man’s family, and the dead dozo serve to assure his transition—body, soul, and spirit, dozo and Muslim alike—to the afterlife. Melodic differences between songs index distinctions as well as links among participants: dozos vs. non-dozos and dozos in general vs. particular kinds of dozos. And, within each song, rhythmic and melodic patterns reiterate these continuities and contrasts.

With changes in audience come changes of style and content; with changes of style and content come changes in audience, revealing Dramane’s deictic or indexical compositional process. The structure and content of his texts depended intimately on their embodied, emplaced, and performative contexts. His textual references to sorcery and other arcane practices would have been blasphemous without serving the broader, Muslim aims of dozo funerals. His Muslim allusions stand out, consequently, as necessary to sustain dozos’ dual identities as both Muslims and hunter-sorcerers. The dozos’ “Qu’ran” is therefore impossible to “read” without taking account of its performative, material environments. While Dramane cites the Qu’ran in his songs, he had no need to read it. Dozos inherit their Muslim identities through vocational descent from Manimory and, through him, via Esau and Abraham. Their hermeneutic principle is the hunt itself, because it assures a dozo’s journey to the afterlife, an important concern in their lives as Muslims. There is no contradiction here, only convergence.^{Footnote 43}

In short, the embodied, emplaced conditions of Dramane’s performances are the poetic and musical structures of his songs. His lyrical, metrical, melodic, and compositional techniques follow from the moral relations that participants at dozo funerals aim to recreate and sustain. To the extent that these entextualized features of Dramane’s songs achieve Muslim ends by playing on textual gaps between Islam and dozoya, they are the dozos’ Qur’an: a series of Muslim texts that encompass the complexity of dozos’ hunting roles, dozos’ relations with each other and their wives, and the parallels and differences that dozos perceive between dozoya and Islam, with special regard to each dozo’s death, his lingering spirit-double, and his final judgment. These preoccupations and the conjoining of dozo ritual with Muslim soteriology risk eliciting tendentious responses from some Muslims, especially reformists. Yet, Dramane’s songs make it possible to both distinguish and integrate dozoya and Islam into a single, if multifarious, identity, attuning dozos to Islam while tuning Islam to the key of dozoya. Dramane’s words derive from dozos’ understanding of their bodily connection to two invisible energies: their soul and their double, which depend upon Muslim and dozo rites, respectively, for an auspicious departure from the living. Because dozos and their families already engage physically and materially with both Islam and dozoya, Dramane’s songs express the theological complementarity that participants chart between the two at each dozo funeral.

The dozos’ Qur’an, then, is very much a Qur’an for dozos. Dramane’s songs and the dozo harp raise Muslim pluralism to the level of critical, ethical thought, justifying participants’ continued engagement as Muslims with dozoya. If the harp is the dozos’ Qur’an, as Dramane sang, and if dozos interpret Islam on the landscapes they traverse and on which they dance and sing, then scholarship that weighs such claims and dispositions exclusively in terms of Arabic scripture does Muslim dozos little justice, amounting to no more than fundamentalism.

Supplementary Material

To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2018.142