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Tour de France, Pley ben, Brittany, July 1939. Photo by Robert Capa. Permission granted by Magnum Photos, Inc.
The Still Pool Forgets
A Reminding from the Yoruba
The Yoruba people of western Africa, one of the largest ethnic populations south of the Sahara, constitute a powerful urban culture. Yoruba cities fostered rich economic, administrative, and religious systems, and it was precisely this society the western slave trade plundered for human wealth: nearly all slaves brought to the Americas came from west Africa, and of these, Yoruba slaves and their descendants became a most significant influence in the cultures of Cuba, Brazil, and other parts of the Americas, including the United States.
These Africans brought with them a deep and practical regard for the arts. In Yoruba cities, sophisticated systems of exchange and distribution had made markets for weaving, dyeing, iron-working, brass-casting, woodcarving, beadwork, leatherwork, and pottery; arts networks grew wide and interdependent. Even Yoruba hunters were said to praise the gifts of those who carve wood or compose song; proficiency in these arts was valued as highly as bravery and warrior skills. Among the social features of Yoruba life were powerful polygamous family systems, and a pre-eminence among older women of magicians and spell-binders. Professional distinction was accorded singers or poets, who were responsible for perpetuating and embellishing the stories of gods and notable mortals, figures such as Shango (God of Thunder), Ogun (God of Iron), and Eshu (God of Fate). In New Orleans and New York today you can find shops in which are sold images of Ogun, god of hunters, warriors, professional circumcisers, all who make use of his metal. From the totemic figure dangle tiny knives and hoes and hammers and machinery-parts; in him many ages meet.
Both gods and men can be appeased. Among the functions of the professional poets is the making of honorific names. Unlike naming in patronymic cultures, Yoruba naming occurs not only at birth or marriage, but throughout one's life. There is the name that comes from circumstances of the birth (the-one-with-the-cord-around-his-neck, let us say); there is the name recording the parents’ (sometimes unsentimental) sentiments about the event (the-straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back). And there is the third kind of name: oriki. These names are a form of pet-naming, praise-naming, poetic name; and though praise names may be assigned at birth, they are earned all through life. A very notable figure may garner many such names, and very great trees, cities, or gods are paid tribute by professional oriki-makers. Ulli Beier (to whose indispensable work I owe my acquaintance with Yoruba poetry) gives, by way of example, the oriki these poets bestowed on the first European explorers in Africa: “a pair of shorts that can worry a large embroidered gown.”6 It is an immediately funny and yet painful reminder of colonial history, in a practically succinct, semiotic garb.
I mean to celebrate the practical premises of Yoruba poems. To the mind of someone brought up on English and American poetry, it seems refreshingly direct—full of humor, wit, and intricate exemplification. Abstraction operates to bespeak, not to outspeak, physical experience. In poems of considerable structural complexity, poems that operate as pulsing signs for human understanding, this ground of Yoruba metaphysics is moving. Yoruba singers and drummers set up powerful long-distance communications (CNN watch out): songs can actually change fates (some 600 gods, after all, are listening; and they can be tickled, pleased, seduced). All the Yoruba gods but one (the unapproachable Olodumare) are variable, mischievous, and yet amusable; and all can kill—there is a god, for example, of smallpox. All are also respected and honored, and there results a peculiar mix of affection and insult that resembles nothing so much as familial relations. Not unlike human beings in their gifts and foibles, Yoruba gods are responsible for love and trouble both.
The Yoruba value generosity as wealth. If the poems to the gods don't seem very pious or predictable, perhaps it is because the gods themselves don't: among the originary stories of Yoruba mythology, for example, the occasional tendency of the gods, like human beings, to drink too much and then make compositional mistakes explains how white people came to be.
Riddles and songs collected from very young Yoruba children suggest how free from prurience are subjects America tends to hold taboo. Beier cites the song told him by a six-year-old girl, used by little girls to drive boys (eight of them, apparendy) away from their play:
Penis penis plays by himself
Vagina vagina plays by herself.
We shall not play with somebody
Who has sixteen testicles.
Two children's riddles for which the answer is “vagina” are: “a small bearded god, whom we must kneel to worship,” and “a little bush becomes a court case.” From infancy to old age, the Yoruba sensibility is tickled with the carnal comedies.
I'm not a scholar of Yoruba language or culture. I can't judge the fidelity of the translations used here (all taken from Ulli Beier's remarkable collection of Yoruba poems, divinations, chants and proverbs), nor offer social or political elaboration on the context. I refer interested readers to Beier's work, and in particular to his descriptions of the pitches and rhythms of “talking” drums. My intention is simply to appreciate a few of the poetic texts Beier has given us, taking the texts as artifacts provocative in (and to) English. What these pieces did to me was strike at the heart of my sense of the poetic; they worked like an antidote to overdose. (I mean the overdose of polite nostalgias and predictable discretions in contemporary American poetry.) These brief Yoruba pieces make an extraordinary contrast to our poetry-magazine-multitudes because of their directness, their practical relation to the material world, their freedom from self-absorption or perennial regret. In them, one senses the force of an efficacious act, and not an art in the process of its own elegizing. They proceed by a kind of structural logic and natural analogy. Human beings seem to be treated as only one form of being among others; there's plenty to learn from plants and animals, as well as from gods, who are (in the Yoruba cosmology) no more fickle than weather (and no less). Poetry itself takes on the patterns of such creaturehood; it mimics, honors, and affects nature. For the Yoruba, far more fundamentally than for contemporary Americans, poetry has daily force as a human form of nature.
Death
I cannot carry it,
I cannot carry it.
If I could carry it,
I would carry it.
When the elephant dies in the bush
something is carried into the house.
When the buffalo dies in the forest,
something is carried into the house.
But when the mouse dies in the house
something is thrown into the bush.
Note here first of all, in the best sense, the beating-around-the-bush. The bush is a literal location, and the poem doesn't metaphorize away a difficult question. It is stunning, immediately, for the directness of its address to the sorrow at hand. Apart from the natural analogical relation that arises between title and body of poem, there is in the poem no direct identification of the repeated “it” as the burden of death itself. Indeed, the virtue of the poem lies entirely
