Voices from the cordel: a reading practice and a case of oral poetry

Abstract

Brazilian northeastern popular literature in verses, today known as Cordel literature, is discussed in its relations with orality. In most cases, the narrated poems are memorized, known by heart and only read when memory fails. Both iliterate and those who read the poems and memorize them configure themselves as “book men” and “book women”, for they sort out certain stories, identifying themselves with such stories to the point of offering their own bodies as a cover for those titles. There are some people who are kind of “living libraries” of such literature, actual representives of the Brazilian immaterial heritage. This is a research-in-process on the subject and has been gathering sparse experiences throughout decades of observation and sound and audiovisual recordings.