Ulahi

Ulahi
14 x 9 inches, oil and gold acrylic on canvas, 2018

Ulahi is heard cutting sago, a staple for the inhabitants of the mountainous Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea. It's a work song. Indeed singing makes work go faster, makes it easier, less tiresome. The cutting of the food becomes rhythmic as if it were a game. As a new mother Ulahi carries her child with her wherever she goes. When she has to work, the baby must be set aside. The baby cries, Ulihi sings, the baby stops crying.

Avdo Međedoviƈ

Avdo Međedoviƈ
14 x 9 inches, oil on canavs, 2018

Avdo Međedoviƈ (1875-1953) was an illeterate epic balladeer from Montenegro, part of the Ottoman Empire and later Yugoslavia. His repertoire included several poems that counted well over 1,000 lines, similar in length to Homer's (9th century BCE, Greek) Iliad and Odyssee. The British Homeric scholars Milman Perry and Albert Lord in the 1930s, seeking to find credble evidence of their hypothesis that Homer's works were the result of oral transmission (of much older traditions,) found in Međedoviƈ living evidence on the memory capabilities of illeterate communities, and their sustaining traditions. The  now fast disappearing tradition of oral poetry was in the twentieth century still found and recorded in parts of eastern Europe and in Anatolia. Despite numerous academic approaches to reconstruct how Homer would have sounded almost three-thousand years ago, I believe the Međedoviƈ recordings come much closer.