Meaning of griot | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.
2. A Haitian dish of fried pork.
   countable, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“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.”

“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.”

“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⟳.”

“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⟳.”

CEFR level