War Poets PDF

# CONCEPTUAL LINK 9 ## LITERATURE AND CULTURE ### Total war ## 9.13 All about the War Poets ### WARM-UP 1. LOOK at the propaganda posters about World War I and discuss the view of the war they reflect. - Poster 1. Poster produced by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee during World War I, 1915...

# CONCEPTUAL LINK 9 ## LITERATURE AND CULTURE ### Total war ## 9.13 All about the War Poets ### WARM-UP 1. LOOK at the propaganda posters about World War I and discuss the view of the war they reflect. - Poster 1. Poster produced by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee during World War I, 1915. - Poster 2. British propaganda poster, 1915. - Poster 3. Military recruitment poster. Women were expected to encourage their men to enlist. - Poster 4. Poster showing a line of soldiers at attention, flanking a sign which reads, 'This space is reserved for a fit man', 1915. ### STEP INTO YOUR PLACE 2. READ the text about the War Poets and complete it with the words below. * lost * soldiers * conscience * doubt * modes * ends * broke out * rough **DIFFERENT VIEWS ON WAR** When the First World War **(1)**, thousands of young men volunteered for military service. Most of them regarded the conflict as an adventure undertaken for noble **(2)**. It was not until the slaughter of thousands of British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, that this sense of pride and exhilaration was replaced by **(3)** and disillusionment. For the soldiers, life in the trenches was hell. Almost from the beginning, the common **(4)** improvised verses which, precisely because they were the **(5)**, genuine songs of the trenches, did not reach the ears of the literate people living comfortably at home. However, there was also a group of poets, who actually experienced the fighting and in most cases their lives in the conflict, that managed to represent modern **(6)** of warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, awakening the **(7)** of the readers back home to the horrors of the war. These poets became known as the War Poets. The most influential were Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg. Some of them moved away from the 19th-century poetic conventions and found new **(8)** of expression in order to convey the harsh new reality more vividly. ### READ the text again 1. Why the youth volunteered. 2. What replaced pride and patriotism. 3. What some soldiers wrote. 4. How the War Poets presented the war. ## Rupert Brooke 1887-1915 ### Biography Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby in 1887 into a well-off family. He soon distinguished himself as a brilliant student and his thesis won him a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. A good athlete of striking physical presence, he was also an active Socialist. He established his initial public reputation as a poet with the publication of a first collection of verse, 24 Poems 1911 (1911), and made friends with important political and literary figures of the time, especially among the Bloomsbury Group of writers [> p. 200]. In 1912 Brooke went through a period of mental, emotional and sexual crisis following his father’s death and the end of his relationship with his girlfriend. To recover from this nervous breakdown, he embarked on long worldwide travels which led him first to Germany, then to the US, Canada and the Pacific. Confused and hesitant about his future prospects when the First World War broke out, he was personally encouraged to join the Royal Navy by Winston Churchill. Sent on a mission to help the Belgians in October 1914, Brooke witnessed the siege of Antwerp and composed his famous set of five war sonnets, 1914 (published in January 1915), when he was home on Christmas leave. At the end of February 1915 the poet sailed with his naval division for the Gallipoli expedition against the Turks, but one month later he contracted sepsis and died of acute blood poisoning on 23 April, on a ship in Skyros. ### Themes and Style Rupert Brooke started writing during his Cambridge years and produced a number of popular poems that perfectly captured the mood and character of England before the outbreak of the first world conflict. Like that of the other poets of his generation, Brooke’s early verse was mainly focused on the themes of love and nature and projected an idealised, pseudo-pastoral view of the placid landscape of rural England. The poems he wrote during his later wanderings in the South Seas also revolved around the same themes, mixing idealistic descriptions of the exotic scenery of faraway lands with his fond appreciation of the tranquil sensuality of the Pacific islands. Only his war poetry, however, achieved immediate and undisputed acclaim and secured Brooke an eternal place in English literary and cultural history. Written between December 1914 and January 1915, his set of sonnets effectively expressed the hopefulness and enthusiasm of the early months of the conflict. In a perfect fusion of style and content, the traditional structure, smooth imagery and gentle rhythms of the five poems included in 1914 combined the sentimental attitudes of the home front with the patriotic mood of the troops, and were therefore actively exploited by official propaganda to spread the idea of virtuous self-sacrifice among civilians. * Peace and Safety revolve around the themes of war as a joyful opportunity for a young generation whose existence has so far been useless, and of death as a safe shelter from the pains of the body. * Similarly, The Rich Dead, the third and fourth sonnets of the set, celebrate the noble reward of dying for one's own country as well as the frosty peace that is secured by that kind of death. * The Soldier, Brooke's best-known and best-loved poem, aptly concludes the sequence with its appealing combination of high-sounding patriotism and rapturous identification with the native homeland. The poet's death only three weeks after The Soldier was read in St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915 rapidly turned him into a hero. Winston Churchill himself wrote a touching obituary for Brooke in The Times and official postcards reproducing the poet's handsome looks were soon printed and circulated, boosting his long-lasting reputation as an inspiring symbol of youthful courage and fearless sacrifice. ### Summing up 1. What was Rupert Brooke's cultural and educational background? 2. When did he write his war sonnets? 3. How and where did he die? Whose fate did he share in the end? 4. What were his early poems about? 5. What are the main themes of Brooke's 1914? Is its style conventional? 6. Why and how did he become a national hero? ## The Soldier **THEMES AND STYLE** The Soldier is the concluding sonnet of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 collection. Composed while the poet was at home on Christmas leave, the poem expresses the patriotic enthusiasm of the early months of the conflict and offers an idealized view of war as a noble adventure and honourable enterprise, as well as a means of achieving glory and immortality on the soldiers' part. In its smooth images and melodious iambic pentameters, the sonnet revolves around England's personification as a generous mother requiring her sons' sacrifice. In the first stanza, the poet exorcises the horrors of death by depicting the soldier's decaying corpse as a physical extension of his homeland enriching the foreign field. In the second stanza, the sonnet celebrates the blissful state of those who die in battle, whose souls will now become part of a greater, immortal being. ## Wilfred Owen 1893-1918 ### Biography Wilfred Owen was born in Shropshire in 1893. Owen was always a devout Christian and for a time considered taking Holy Orders; in 1911 he started to work as a lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden, Oxfordshire, coming into contact with sickness and poverty and developing those feelings of compassion and pity which were to characterise his later verse. In spite of financial problems, he managed to attend classes at Reading University College and immersed himself in Romantic poetry. To get away from the cold English climate and improve his bad health, he spent two years in France between 1913 and 1915 working as a language tutor. After visiting a French war hospital, Owen decided to go back to England and enlist in the British Army. He sailed to France and fought in the famous Battle of the Somme in 1916. Although full of high spirits at first, the horrors of trench warfare soon traumatised him. Shell-shocked, he was sent home on sick leave the following year. He was treated at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he made friends with important war writers such as Robert Graves, Robert Nichols and Siegfried Sassoon. The latter’s pacifism, in particular, would greatly influence Owen’s writing and encourage him to develop his own voice as a poet. He was posted back to France in the late summer of 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross shortly afterwards for his courage and determination in seizing a German machine-gun and using it against the enemies. Owen died in action on 4 November 1918, exactly one week before the signing of the armistice. Owen's collected poems, which he was preparing for publication at the time of his death, were published posthumously in 1920, edited by his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon. ### Themes and style Wilfred Owen’s poems written before the summer of 1917 were modelled on the Romantic poets. Accordingly, his early themes were typically those of loneliness and isolation, beauty, disillusionment and unrequited love; most of them were conventional love lyrics, which followed the established tradition as far as form, imagery and diction are concerned. World War I had an enormous impact on Owen's mature verse. It was only after he had personally experienced what trench warfare was really like that his writing style finally moved away from his previous derivative models. The first-hand experience of conflict provided his poems with a sense of realism, and encouraged him to develop a distinctively personal voice in terms of theme and style. As he himself explained in the Preface for his collected poems, the subject-matter of his later verse was not the glory of dying for one's own country nor the celebration of fearless sacrifice, but the actual reality of the conflict – the brutality of front-line fighting, the atrocities of trench life, the meaningless waste of human lives, the horrors of death, permanent injuries and their psychological aftermaths. In poems like Dulce et Decorum Est, The Sentry, Strange Meeting and Futility, he recreated snapshots of the Western front in vivid detail, sparing the readers none of the cruellest aspects of everyday combat and death so as to warn against future futile conflicts. Owen’s attitude was always one of compassion and pity, but occasionally slipped into anger at the wilful blindness of the British public. Encouraged by Sassoon to abandon the conventions and express himself in more colloquial language, Owen, too, became an important technical innovator experimenting with half-rhymes, alliterations, assonances and onomatopoeia within traditional poetic forms. In this way, he managed to give his poems a disturbing and dissonant quality that could not but reinforce his message of protest and criticism against the senseless slaughter. ### Summing up Say if the following statements are true (T) or false (F). Then correct the false ones. a. Wilfred Owen took Holy Orders in 1911 before volunteering to fight in WWI. b. He worked as a language tutor in France for a few years. c. The poet Siegfried Sassoon encouraged him to write and edited his posthumous collection of verse. d. He disliked Romantic poetry, but appreciated Victorian authors like Tennyson and Browning. e. Owen’s early poems were typically focused on idyllic descriptions of rural English countryside. f. His war poetry is written in a colloquial, realistic style which vividly describes the horrors of trench warfare. g. Unlike Rupert Brooke's, the subject of Owen's mature verse is not the glory but the pity of war. ## Dulce et Decorum Est **THEMES** The poem was drafted in August 1917 and probably finished about one year later. In its unrelenting realism and shocking exposure of the ignominy of death in modern warfare, it aimed at dispelling the glamorised image of the war promoted by the jingoistic verse most people were familiar with at the time. The poet's bitterness was targeted at first at the journalist and writer Jessie Pope, whose three volumes of patriotic poems had kindled enthusiasm for the world conflict. The poem’s original dedication, however, was finally removed in order to address a larger readership as a warning for all future generations. **STYLE** In the first stanzas, Owen's company of soldiers, fatigued, injured and almost deaf to the falling gas bombs, is slowly retreating from the front and marching back to its muddy post. Taken by surprise, the soldiers hastily put on their gas masks, but one man is too slow and dies horribly in front of the speaker’s eyes. The high-sounding quotation from the Roman poet Horace celebrating the glory of patriotic deaths ('It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country') is skilfully undermined by Owen's grim accumulation of the dreadful details of a gassed soldier's agony in the last stanzas. Mustard gas, massively used by the Germans during WWI, destroyed not only exposed skin but, above all, the tissues of the inner organs, thus causing death by choking and internal bleeding. The shocking vividness of Owen's images is as effective as his diction. The graphic language and sound effects of the poem capture both the soldiers’ tribulations and the speaker’s outrage, and strikingly contrast with the blameworthy serenity of the Latin epigram. ## The Modernist revolution and its aftermath The early years of the 20th century were characterised by a will to reject past systems of belief and to question the very essence of Western knowledge. This was largely due to the devastating effects of the World Wars, which engaged those who survived in a quest to find new meaning within a world now perceived as confusing and unstable. ### A new perception of reality **THE VICTORIAN LEGACY** Some of the seeds of this transformation in the perception – and, therefore, in the representation – of reality had already been planted in the Victorian era. Charles Darwin’s scientific observations, for example, had led to his theory of evolution by natural selection (On the Origin of Species, 1859), according to which all species, including humans, are products of self-evolving natural forces acting over millions of years rather than the result of divine creation [› Unit 1, p. 23]. This played an important role in the progressive loss of faith in a divine design and the belief in a world order established by an omnipotent creator, a concept explored from a philosophical point of view by thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche. The German philosopher’s ‘God is dead’, proclaimed by the character of Zarathustra in his philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (published between 1883 and 1891) was indeed a declaration of the death of religion as a moral compass. Religious authority and the validity of the existing social and moral laws were also questioned by the economist and sociologist Karl Marx, who described religion as ‘the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself’. This illusory sun, he believed, is a powerful means of social control over the working classes on the part of the ruling élites, hence his well-known definition of religion as the ‘opiate of the masses'. In his Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx also challenged other structural aspects of Victorian social order – especially its strict class division and warned against the destructiveness and dehumanisation of capitalist civilisations. **THE DISCOVERY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS** The legacy of these theories extended to the first half of the 20th century, a time when many concepts once thought to be fixed and objective were increasingly recognised as constantly shifting and subjective in nature. The growing interest in psychology, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, led to a new emphasis on the internal reality of individuals and on the idea of the alienation of the self in modern society. Freud’s work contributed enormously to recognising the importance of the unconscious in accounting for human behaviour. The mind, Freud maintained, is like an iceberg: the most prominent part is not the one that emerges from the waters, but the one that is hidden underneath. According to him, the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ lies in the interpretation of dreams, since they offer important clues as to how the mind works when not operating vigilantly (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). The founding father of psychoanalysis also introduced innovative views of the centrality and complexity of sexuality in the human psyche. ### A NEW AWARENESS OF TIME AND SPACE Freud’s work was highly influential for 20th-century intellectual life in general and for art and imaginative literature in particular. Indeed, together with the theories of the French philosopher Henri Bergson and the German physicist Albert Einstein, his ideas form part of the intellectual basis lying at the core of Modernism. The relevance of Bergson is primarily connected with his conceptualisation of ‘duration’ and the relation between time and individual states of consciousness. Indeed, he theorised the distinction between temps – i.e. the mechanistic time of science – and durée – i.e. time as a flow, the real vital force of existence, evolving creatively and understandable only through intuition. In Bergson’s understanding, time is therefore personal and depends entirely on a person’s intimate experience of it. For Einstein, too, time could no longer be regarded as an absolute concept, independent of the perception of the single observer. In his theory of special relativity, the scientist further challenged traditional understanding of time by introducing the notion of a space-time continuum and maintaining that time and space cannot exist separately. The word ‘relativity’ here is key: in the first half of the 20th century the belief in a fixed, objective, external reality was crumbling, paving the way to a world of personal, subjective and indeed relative perception. ### Imagism and Vorticism In 1912, a group of poets and artists led by American-born Ezra Pound founded the Imagist movement in London. It was inspired by the thought of the English author and literary critic T.E. Hulme and advocated the centrality of clear, precise images in poetry. In their manifesto, the Imagists underlined the need to use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word'. They had a preference for free verse, better suited to expressing the individual mood of each poem – ‘a new cadence means a new idea', they believed – and responded to what they perceived as useless verbosity in traditional poetry by producing highly-economical compositions, in many ways similar to Japanese haikus (17-syllable poems with usually only two juxtaposed images). They also believed in absolute freedom in the choice of poetic subject. A typical example of an Imagist poem is Pound's In a Station of the Metro (1913): The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough. In the following years Imagism developed into Vorticism (1914), another movement founded by Pound himself with writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. While many traits remained similar, Vorticism was more visually and verbally violent and, similarly to Italian futurism (despite the fact that Pound denied any affiliation and was critical towards Marinetti), it expressed an enthusiastic celebration of the dynamism and speed of the modern world. Both movements were short-lived, but their revolutionary approach to words and images had an enduring influence on Modernist art and literature. ### War poetry If, generally speaking, a lot of poetry written during World War I was characterised by a relatively positive, heroic and somewhat naive representation of conflict (think of Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet The Soldier > p. 210), the verses of Siegfried Sassoon [› Digital Book], Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and other 'war poets' mark a shift towards a more brutally realistic portrayal of the same theme. The expression 'war poets' does not simply denote the central topic of their production, but is also a reference to the fact that these authors were themselves soldiers. ### THE LITERARY SCENE In sharp contrast to the romanticised rhetoric of patriotism that originally fuelled the country’s military effort, their poetry denounces the physical and psychological torments that every soldier had to endure. Rather than the honourable moment in which a man could sacrifice his life to the nation, war was now depicted as a source of horrors, mutilations, traumas and death. For this reason, these poets’ production could easily be labelled defeatist and initially fell victim to the strict censorship of the time. War poetry was innovative in the way it treated the subject matter, but despite some signs of stylistic innovation – such as the use of raw colloquialisms – it remained rather traditional in form and did not share any of the features of Pound’s iconoclastic revolution. ### Modernist literature The term Modernism is crucial in the discussion of early-20th-century literature. In its broad sense, it refers to various authors’ attempts to investigate and represent man’s place and role in a modern world, a world which had witnessed the gradual dissolution of all religious, social and ethical certainties. Because it is a label used by literary critics rather than an organised movement, its contours are quite loose and can expand to accommodate a number of different expressions and interpretations. However, it can be said that Modernist works are characterised by a tendency towards experimentation in narrative techniques, a lively interest in the workings of the individual’s consciousness, a renewed interest in anthropology and myth and a revolution in the representation of time – a concept whose traditional understanding had recently been questioned in science and philosophy. The novelists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and the poet T.S. Eliot are generally considered the towering figures of Modernist literature. **THEMES AND TECHNIQUES** As Virginia Woolf wrote in her novel Orlando (1928): ‘An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.’ * Modernist authors are interested in this profound discordance between external clock time and the time of an individual’s inner consciousness, between the fixed, conventional notion of traditional temporality and the fluidity and dilation of intimate perception. The theories of the French philosopher Henri Bergson played a crucial role in the disruption of the 19th-century conception of time as a linear, chronological succession of events. * Another important influence was the development and growing popularity of the new medium of the cinema. With their elliptical montages, flashbacks, close-ups, etc., films – besides being a means of mass entertainment - certainly played a part in the innovation of contemporary narrative techniques. * In Modernist literary works, meaning is constructed through the ‘myriad impressions' – to borrow Woolf's words again - that the world leaves on one's consciousness rather than through the mere lining up of facts. Furthermore, much of the narrative force of Modernist texts is constructed around how these impressions, often fleeting and insignificant to an external spectator, can turn into moments of insight and revelation and have a lasting impact on the mind of the characters. Joyce called these moments of sudden revelation ‘epiphanies’, whereas Woolf coined the phrase ‘moments of being’ to refer to those instants of heightened sensitivity in which one becomes aware of the effect of external experience on the inner self. **DEFINIZ. 1-2-3** * On the page, the refraction of the world’s impression on a character’s consciousness was rendered primarily through an unprecedented resort to interior monologues, also known as the ‘stream of consciousness’, through which a person’s thoughts are represented as a disorganised, uninterrupted flow, similar to the way they really occur in the mind. Dorothy Richardson, the long-neglected author of the monumental novel Pilgrimage (comprising 13 volumes published separately between 1915 and 1938, with the exception of the final volume published after the writer’s death in 1957), was the first to tell a story relying heavily on this specific technique. However, the stream of consciousness is more generally associated with the work of James Joyce, who refined it and took it to extreme levels of sophistication. When Joyce recurred to this narrative device, he went so far as to completely abolish the (external) voice of the novel’s narrator. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, preferred to represent the flux of her characters’ consciousness by resorting to free indirect speech, thanks to which her characters’ thoughts are filtered through the third-person voice of an anonymous narrator. * Overseas, the narrative techniques that mostly defined British Modernism in those years were absorbed by the American author William Faulkner and became central to his production. Indeed, in his most celebrated novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), the connection with Modernism is manifest in his masterful command of the stream-of-consciousness technique, in his interest for different narrative perspectives and non-linear storytelling, and in the interplay of past and present events. * **MODERNIST SETTINGS** The external space of Modernist works is often the urban setting of the modern city: London for Eliot and Woolf, Dublin for Joyce. The urban dimension perfectly embodies all the extremes and contradictions of the modern world: on the one hand, its fast pace and constant movement offers endless possibilities and the excitement of the new; on the other, the anonymity and impersonality of city life is also a source of loneliness and alienation, a space in which the disintegration and fragmentariness of contemporary society is mirrored by the sense of estrangement, a failure to truly connect. However, the primary space of narration in Modernist literature is in fact the characters’ mental landscape. Indeed, there is in these texts an unprecedented urge to look inside the minds of individuals, and the events occurring in the outer world acquire sense primarily, if not exclusively, in the way they influence a person’s inner dimension, especially at the level of the unconscious. The impact of Freud and psychoanalysis here is clearly visible. It can therefore be said that the main setting of Modernist works is the inner space of the characters' mind. **ANTHROPOLOGY AND MYTH** In Modernism, ancient myths and anthropology came to be increasingly regarded as privileged repositories of meaning, projecting onto contemporary society the order and structure it lacked. In his 1923 essay on Joyce’s Ulysses (Ulysses, Order, and Myth), the great poet T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. [...] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. [...] Psychology [...], ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.’ 5. List the main features of Modernist works. 6. Which features of cinema and film-making played an important role in the development of new narrative techniques? 7. How did Woolf’s and Joyce’s use of the stream of consciousness differ? 8. Which features of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury reveal his connection with Modernism? 9. What is the relationship between the outer world and the inner dimension in Modernist literature? ### FOCUS ON ## The Bloomsbury Group The name ‘Bloomsbury Group’ refers to a circle of liberal, progressive intellectuals who, in the first half of the 20th century, met regularly in the Bloomsbury district of London. Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Virginia’s sister Vanessa, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist and art expert John Maynard Keynes and the novelist E.M. Forster are just some of the many talents that gravitated around the group. United by a firm rejection of prudishness and bigotry, the ‘Bloomsberries’ were decidedly unconventional and in many ways ahead of their times. Theirs was not an institutionalised movement, but rather an informal association of like-minded people, mostly members of the upper-middle class, who felt ill at ease within the conservative establishment and yearned to break free from old-fashioned conventions, both socially and artistically. Generally speaking, they considered themselves agnostics, pacifists and feminists and refused traditional conceptions of marriage and monogamy. They also embraced homosexuality at a time when it was still illegal. Their unconventional attitude is also reflected in the group’s artistic production, a crucial contribution to the development of Modernism. Much of their literary output was published by Hogarth Press, the independent publishing house that Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up in 1917. They published all of Virginia Woolf’s books, works by authors such as E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Roger Fry and Clive Bell, as well as the first English translations of Freud’s works and the first edition of T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922). like-minded: che hanno le stesse idee e gli stessi gusti ill at ease: a disagio What he called ‘the mythical method’ was one of the defining features of his own poetry, and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (the most famous edition includes 13 volumes published between 1906 and 1915) – an anthropological exploration of folklore, magic and religion, with a special interest in fertility rites – was one of the main influences behind The Waste Land [› p. 221]. Indeed, Eliot’s five-section poem, a juxtaposition of evocative images where past, present and future coexist and overlap, is pervaded by references to anthropology, legends and ancient beliefs: from Frazer to Jessie Weston’s essay From Ritual to Romance (1920), from the legend of the Fisher King to the Holy Grail (the poem’s pivotal image), from Buddhism to the Upanishads. Generally speaking, references to ancient or so-called ‘primitive’ civilisations became a recurring trait in the art world of these years. This is especially true of Cubism, for example, where the aesthetics of fragmentariness and multiple viewpoints go hand in hand with the tribal masks of traditional African rituals.