Thursday 12 March 2009

OLOKUN AND IYANLA

Olokun Ajetiaye, Alagbalugbu omi
Ajawo okoto
Afailorogun pariwo
See see ni gbede

[Olokun ]the inexhaustible sea, immense water,
Roaring eddy of sea shells,
Querulous, though she has no rival
Vibrations from the deep.


This is Babatunde Lawal’s translation of a praise poem to the Yoruba orisha or deity Olokun. He describes “vibrations of the deep” in terms of an allusion to the world of values suggested by another poem, reproduced below, in evoking the “mystery associated with the female genitalia”. The previous poem he refers to celebrates the female deity Yemoja as:

Iya olo yon oruba
Onirun abev osiki
Abobo fun ni l orun bi egbe isu.

Which Lawal represents as

The pot breasted mother
With much hair on her private parts;
The owner of a vagina that suffocates like dry yam in the throat

These two poems, understood in their relationship with Lawal’s translation and interpretation, could be said to emblematize the tension evident in traditional Yoruba thought between various images of the feminine, particularly as these are expressed in relation to conceptions of the metaphysical significance of feminine physiology and its associated psychological expressions. These poems represent images of majestic power, as in that of the water deity and in the Yemoja characterization, the conjunction of reassuring image of motherhood in the maple breasts with taboo images of the mother’s genitalia culminating in the evocation of its deadliness. Endogenous Yoruba conceptions of the feminine could be said to operate in relation to the characterizations evoked in these lines and in terms of the biological characterization the lines delineate.

In interpreting “vibrations from the deep” in terms of “the mystery associated with female genitalia” Lawal relates imaginatively to the poem in terms of it’s subliminal symbolism that provokes correlations between ideas of space, procreative and spiritual power, in relation to nourishing fluids, water and by extension blood.

The evocation of ideas of power, the tumult of sound/creatively discordant sound suggested by the mighty waters if the sea, which Lawal translates as querelousness, of sound that reaches out from immense depths, and developing these images in terms of the characterization of a numinous figure who represents the characterisation of the world’s waters as an entity/personality/unified personality calls to mind the sense of mysterious power suggested by the depths of the sea which describes in his characterisation of Olokun, as evocative of zones of being beyond the full comprehensibility of human knowledge/cognition/cognitive powers and relates to the Ifa poems correlation of Olukun and the primary Odu

Why does Lawal move from characterisations of a water goddess, to conceptions /to correlating images which could be understood tom simply evoke the awesome depths of the sea with what he describes as the “mystery associated with female genitalia”. This correlation could merge from his response to the interttextual resonance that he perceives in the poem, where images of depth, of mysterious power, are associated with female figures, both divine and human and as reinforced by poems such as the second one he quotes where these images are transposed from the majestic to the taboo, conjoining the material and the erotic and foregrounding the sense of dread that such transgressive conjunction evoke in the characterisation of the vagina, which as bearded yam as it is sometimes called, can be sweet to eat but in certain contexts as in this one, could prove suffocating.

Lawal’s interpretation could also be drawing upon his research into edan ogboni, the figurative sculpture of the Yoruba ogboni cult group, where he describes one of the depictions of female figures in the cult as engraved with concentric rings which suggest transformative power. The correlation of transformation with the feminine in turn evokes the sense of the transformation of life at various stages of biological growth, from conception to pregnancy to birth and the nurturing of the child into adulthood. This notion of biological transformation emerges in turn in relation to Lawal’s evocation, in relation to the coastal Yoruba, the movement of the sea is a reverberation of the drumming, dancing, and feasting going on in the rambling palace of Iyan Nla at the bottom. Hence the popular sayting; gbo iluni mbe l’okun,olkun dseniade asfilkilupe,oba omi (all kinds of drumming occur beneath the sea, olokun seniade the one who wakes up to the rhythm of drums, lord of the waters)as the mother of all, she receives and entertains visitors all day, all night-the orisa, spirits of the newly dead, spirits of plants and animals, souls of thousands of children waiting to be born into the earth, and souls of “returning” abiku, all flock around her as she dances through her huge reception hall dressed in immaculate white cloth and decked in white coral beads welcoming one group after another. As one informant put it, Iya Nla likes music and dance so much that she can celebrate for weeks without caring for food”.

This image communicates more meaning when correlated with a similar image in Kingshley’s The Water Babies where a Mother Carey, a similar underwater freamle figure who relates to the process of life is portrayed:

A white marble lady, seating on a white marble throne. And from the foot of the throne there swam away, out and out into the sea, millions of new born creatures, of more shapes and colours than man ever dreamed. And they were Mother Carey’s children, whom she makes out of sea water all day long.
He expected, of course¬-like some grown people who ought to know better-to find her snipping,piecing,fittinmg,stitching,cobbling,basting,fiuling,planning,hammerimng,turning,polishing,moulg=ding,mneasuruing,chiselling,clipping,and so forth, as men do when they go tom work to make anything.

But, instead of that, she sat quite still with her chin upon her hand, looking down into the sea with two great grand blue eyes, as blue as the sea itself. Her hair was as white as the snow-for she was very old-in fact, as old as anything which you are likely to come across, except the difference between right and wrong.


It is also made more meaningful when juxtaposed with the opening of Okri’s Famished Road, which seem to be drawn from the same imaginative tradition:

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out into the whole world.
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no boundaries. There was much feasting, playing and sorrowing


The “vibrations from the deep” could also be understood as expressive of the transformative powers at work in the sea where life forms are transformed from one sate to another, with the growth of plants and animals from one stage to another, which could be related to the theory that the first life forms emerged from the sea, a processes of biological transformation evoked by iconography often associated with Iya NLA ,THE Great Mother, who represents the totality of the world and who therefore, of whom Olokun is an expression and who participates in the qualities of her children[lawal],the concentric circles which are not only evocative of the tremendous power of the whirlpool, as expressive of the “expansive power of Olokun” but of transformative processes.

The notion of transformation could be understood as central to endogenous Yoruba conceptions of the feminine. This notion is interpreted in two contrastive but complementary terms as either negative or positive but another interpretation emerges in the conception of this by the philosopher of Yoruba tradition, Susanne Wenger as suggesting not positive or negative qualities but an understanding of the ambivalence and danger attendant upon magical creativity.

This notion of transformative powers associated with the feminine operates in terms of a spectrum of interpretations, which could be understood as a transposition of the transformative powers represented by the capacity to conceive a life, nurture in uterine space, bring it into the world through the biological passages unique to the female and nurture it through the unique biological qualities represented by the life of the female body represented by breast milk. The invocation of the transformative powers associated with these unique abilities is understood to s demonstrate capabilities to shape the lives of children to whom they are intimately related, in the children who have been brought to life and nurtured through these biological qualities, an effect that could be positive or negative, depending on how it is directed by the mother.

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