Oral tradition and Rural Libraries

On Thursday, 25th June, the students of the course 'Oral and Ethnic Literatures' with their professor Elías Rengifo de la Cruz, from the Higher Universtiy of San Marcos, invited our brother Alfredo to talk about the Rural Libraries Network of Cajamarca and literature of oral culture.

Alfredo explained how the rescue and publication of the oral tradition began without having a predetermined model. On the contrary,  the Peasant Encyclopedia Project  of the Network was developed  as a result of observation, humility, absolute respect and having  the peasant populations  as main actors, producers and executors of their own knowledge.

This way of proceeding did not come from external models that are largely invasive and that from the outside recommend what to do or how to do it, reproducing a model according to which it considers that rural people have little capacity to have or respond to their own existence. Here it is not a question of "being the voice of those who have no voice"; it is a question of letting be and letting it be said, because the origin of the whole project is the community, from and for the community and, above all, with the community.

He also highlighted that the richness of our traditions is in its diversity, its dynamism and its universality. "The story is a living and life-giving germ."  We do not rescue the tradition to freeze it, but to heat it; to enhance it through the book, which becomes a warehouse. Rescue is not enough, then: books have to be fertile seeds. The word has been kept fresh, without losing the liveliness of the speech when  converting it into written text. In this way the story speaks without losing the strength of the orality that made it possible."