Timbuktu Praise Poetry Performances (Mali)

• Originating in the ancient city of Timbuktu, a historic hub of Islamic scholarship and trans-Saharan culture, praise poetry performances are oral recitations honoring ancestors, scholars, rulers, or spiritual leaders. Delivered by griots (jeliw), these performances blend melodic orature, dramatic gesture, and improvised theological commentary. More than performance, they are acts of remembrance and invocation, grounding the self in history and the cosmos.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In The Care of the Self, Michel Foucault explores how ancient ethical systems—Greek, Roman, and later Christian—focused on the cultivation of the individual as an aesthetic and moral subject. But for Foucault, care of the self is not narcissism; it is the work of making the soul reflect its place in the world. Praise poetry in Timbuktu embodies precisely such a care-structured existence, where subjectivity is shaped by ancestral and divine memory.

Each griot’s performance is a ritual of subjectivation: by voicing the name of the ancestor, the griot enacts the past into the present. To speak the past is not merely to remember it but to re-inscribe it into current relations of self and other, individual and society, heaven and earth.

Foucault's concept of "technologies of the self" finds a vivid counterpart here: the griot uses rhythm, tone, and narrative not to dominate others but to build ethical selves through affiliation, exemplarity, and genealogical reverence. The praise poem functions as an ethical mirror—those who are praised become models of balance between spiritual duty, scholarly discipline, and communal leadership.

But this is no static tradition. Praise poetry is also an act of parrhesia—courageous speech. Griots sometimes weave veiled critiques into their performances, using metaphor to gently question political power or moral decay. This subtle parrhesia allows for ethical critique in societies where direct opposition might not be permitted.

Moreover, Timbuktu’s praise performances, grounded in Qur’anic scholarship and Sufi metaphysics, form a counterpoint to Western individualism. The self is not an isolated monad, but a living conduit of collective memory. Foucault’s idea of ethics as aesthetics of existence is here realized through voice, lineage, and embodied grace—a public self formed through praise, humility, and rhythm.