under the same God. Whereupon the English officer in attendance replies, in effect: “Very good. We'll send in missionaries to educate you.” It is a moment of pure hubris on the part of the English, a moment in which one can't help wincing at their self-absorption, their indelicacy.
Though one can imagine the ways a merely moralizing reader might dismiss the barks-butts-fucks propositions as crude, and never detect the poem's fundamental subdety and humanity, the last few lines of this Yoruba poem “Quarrel” are as acute, as refined and refining, as any I know. It's a young man's poem to the old, remember, and the address that was begun in lines 5 and 6, with “you old people of this world / don't be my enemies,” now reaches its culmination in “Forgive me, don't fight, / and let me taste the world.” This young man, though flashing his fighting form, is eschewing battle, and asking the elders’ blessing on those other energies of youth (barking, butting, fucking, in full fettle, finest feather—asking a blessing, that is, not on death-dealing but life-loving acts, acts of argument and sport and love). The last two lines (“and let me taste the world / like the fly that interprets the wine”) enact a powerful shift of scale. Like the trail in “Death” that led from tragedy of elephant to comedy of mouse, this poem's thrust includes a sudden turn: after waving red flags, brandishing blues, and generally making much young-male bravado, it comes down to a refinement all the more endearing for taking place on a fly's lip: the molecule of wine the sipper savors (and, in savoring, considers) is, though tiny, yet significant. And the word “interprets” is a gorgeous translatorial move; it takes on added elegance for referring to a feature of the poetic (and readerly) caretaking going on even as we read. The poem, like the world, keeps being remade, fresh and actual, in the senses of its interpreters.
The poem's claims on us are finally funnily disarming, for the speaker who had preened and charged and strutted through the poem turns both as refined as a wine-taster and as humble as a Musca Domestica. It is the wine of the world that is celebrated finally, and that emphasis establishes the true spirit of the poem. Consider the disinclination of so many contemporary American poems either to comedies of bravado or to the savor of a joyous carnality, and you realize why Yoruba poems can so much refresh us. To the extent that they are most interested in private emotion and personal nostalgia, our poets have forgotten how to move; and to the extent that they've lost that capacity to transport and to be transported, lost trans-generational contact, they've forgotten how to swing beyond the singular, and sing.
It is revealing to examine the kind of proverbs the Yoruba people tell. Some Yoruba proverbs have a lot in common with the sayings of European elders. (After all, there is a community of experience in the body of old age, and sometimes elders resemble their counterparts in other societies more than they do the young ones in their own.) It might as well be Yiddish, the Yoruba saying “He who shits on the way will find flies on the way back.” But there are characteristic Yoruba proverbs that seem, on the other hand, refreshingly unEuropean in their moral motions: “A person fetching water from a pool says he saw somebody wearing a mask. What will he say who fetches water from a stream?” The art of Yoruba masquerade has its own formulaic tradition, but the universal logic of this riddle already richly suggests the reflective comparison between still and running water, and asks the agile mind to consider, in the manner of the Zen koan, the reflection to be had when one draws one's image not from holdings, but from flowing and change.
Or consider this: “The thinking of a wolf is enough to kill a sheep.” It is one of those translations one loves the more for its double reading, for both the subjective genitive (the wolf's thought) and the objective genitive (the sheep's thought about the wolf) work to make the proverb's points: in the former case, the wolf's power goes beyond tooth and claw, and in the latter case, the point is about the victim's complicity in his own demise: for fear can cause its own heart attack. In either case, the proverb reminds us that the mind can be the sharpest weapon, whether you use it to attack another or to attack yourself.
The one I love best, I guess, because it has the signature Yoruba twists in it, from raucous outburst to wry insight, is this: “The worm is dancing, but that is only how he walks.” Yoruba poems as a genre seem forthright, going straight to the dance of the matter; skeptical about human nature, not so full of themselves they fool themselves.
Tricks
The star is trying to outshine the moon,
the frog is preparing a trick to get wings,
the one who wears a cotton dress pretends to wear velvet,
the one who is wearing velvet pretends to be a king.
We all try to do
what God never intends us to do.
Watch out: “We shall catch and kill”
is what we cry when we go to the battlefield.
We tend to forget that we shall meet another man there
uttering the same cry…
It is this capacity to see things from the other perspective suddenly that puts the best kind of nation in imagination; it is an integrating capacity one might call love, if love in English didn't seem first and foremost narrowly self-interested. Yoruba children's songs are full of this dance of ironies and empathies, right from the beginning. Keep in mind that what the cow is to the English, the yam is to the Yoruba, and lend an ear to the happy yammer (no cower) of this children's song:
Yam
Yam, yam, yam,
You are of pure white.
You have a gown of meat,
You have a cap of vegetables,
You have trousers of fish.
Yam, oh yam, oh yam.
Or, in the same connection, but in another poem, consider the fledging generosity, forgiveness and rueful natural knowledge involved in the following children's song about the hapless baby, Lagbada:
Housetraining
Lagbada shits in the house
We do not blame him
Lagbada pisses in the house
We do not blame him.
But the flies will give him away.
The flies will give him away.
Transgenerational conversations frequently enrich Yoruba songs and poems. Here is one that demonstrates many of the poetic idiosyncrasies I've highlit in other poems: it is full of the analogical and parallel structures we've seen elsewhere, yet also full of irrepressible expansiveness, lucid mysteries.
Memory
Whatever I am taught,
let me remember it.
When the big fish comes out of the water
we can see the bottom of the pond.
When the big toad comes out of the water
we can see the bottom of the well.
When the kingfisher dives into the water
his brain becomes clear.
