Griot

Quick meaning: Griot is a noun meaning A West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.

Meaning

A West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.

More Meanings

1. (cooking) A Haitian dish of fried pork.

Example Sentences

Yet the critics of writing weren’t entirely wrong. In oral cultures, bards carried epics in their heads; griots could reel off centuries of genealogy on demand.

Griots may be the chroniclers of an important family or of a group of people — like the Bambara hunters’ griot — or itinerant poets and musicians who extol the praises of the person who has hired them for a special festivity.

I decided that it would be better for a griot to take us back into the legend, rather than me, a contemporary man. Griots have deeply marked me. I already narrated my first film, Ta Dona, in the same way that a griot would have.

When ethnographers are asked to read their works to gatherings of Songhay, elders, they, too, are considered griots. Ethnographers, however, usually consider themselves scholars, not griots. They prepare themselves for their life's work in a manner altogether different from that of the griot.

Word Forms

• griots

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include raconteur, storyteller, troubadour, anecdoter, raconteuse, jongleur.

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