The Wisdom Of Painting One's Nose While Cutting it Off : Shortsightedness in Relation to Yoruba Conceptions of the Feminine

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

and

Earth, Humanity, Cosmos

In the course of my explorations of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, I have tried to post on USAAfrica Dialogues two essays on the manner in which the sculpture of the group addresses female genitalia , and on both occasions, I have been informed by Prof. Falola that I must remove the word 'clitoris' from the title before the post can be allowed on the group. He stated some people have sent complaints to him and have even lodged a complaint with Google. In the first case, I was advised by Falola to change the posting title, which I did, on which the essay was immediately posted on the group as "The Monarch in Pink : Explicit Evocations of Female Sexuality in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order : Description of Work in Progress".

I am currently facing the same challenge in relation to another essay "Clitoral Majesty and Arcane Power in the Art of the Yoruba Origin Ogboni Esoteric Order : An Intercultural Dialogue".

A situation in which painful laughter congeals in the blood.

Why is the title 'clitoris' referring to the female sexual organ devoted solely to pleasure and described as often central to female sexual orgasm, in the title of those essays?

Is it there to signal the pornographic content of the essay, a sequence of clitoral titillations dragging the private into public space?

No.

The word is in the title to signal a discussion about techniques used by the only classical Yoruba institution known to me that comes close to giving women the honour due to them without any negative qualifications.

The four major classical Yoruba institutions to which a conception of the feminine is centred, to the best of my knowledge, are Gelede, Ogboni, Ifa and the Institution of Royalty. I refer here to ideas about human women, primarily, not to the idealizations represented by Goddesses, from Oya to Osun to Iya Mopo, among others.

Running through these conceptions, as Taiwo Makinde has rightly observed in "Motherhood and the Empowerment of Women in Yoruba Culture" ( Nordic Journal of African Studies,13 (2) 164-174, 2004) , is a correlative valoristic and denigrative interpretation of the feminine.

Female spiritual power is understood as central to Yoruba royalty, is celebrated in Gelede, underlies Ifa in a less than prominent but strategic form, but this power is depicted as that of a group of people described as both creative and destructive in ways that are not fully predictable, who need to be appeased through Gelede performances, so that their unpredictable destructiveness will not be unleashed on society, characters who hardly play the role of central characters in ese ifa, Ifa literature, perhaps the largest and certainly the most prestigious of Yoruba literary genres, figures whom, when they are appear as prominent characters in ese ifa, are too often marked by such irrationalities as decreeing that other women must not behold them, on pain of death, as is told of Odu, a wife of Orunmila, both Odu and Ifa underlying the Ifa knowledge system, this story being foundational to women's being being described as barred from the highest levels of Ifa initiation in a significant scope of Yorubaland, that highest level being 'looking into the pot of Odu', or they are described as constituting the dreaded aje, whom Orunmila ferried from orun, the zone of primal origins, to Earth in his stomach, and who repaid this goodwill by feeding on his intestines, the Great Mother in Gelede is celebrated as killing noiselessly, including killing her own husband in order to take a title...these are the horrific depictions of women inescapable in these institutions.

Such irrationality and bloodthirsty destructiveness is particularly concentrated in the conception of aje, an understanding of female centred spiritual power broadly understood in classical Yoruba thought as pervasive in women, with an ese ifa quoted by Rowland Abiodun in 'Women in Yoruba Religious Images' declaring Osun, a primordial divinity and a woman as aje, as 'all women are aje'.

Male deities such as Ogun and Esu also depicted in ese ifa in terms of destructiveness that is either irrational, or difficult to rationally understand, but are not described as representative of men in general, as aje are depicted as representing a quality, a mentality and its associated creative and destructive power, a destructive force, often inhumane and irrational, inherent to women.

The male centre of Ifa, Orunmila, on the other hand, unlike that canonical image of Odu, is always depicted as the epitome of reasonableness, of humane interaction, even with destructive forces, negotiating with and gaining their friendship, making combat against them unnecessary.

The literature on Ogboni is alone in avoiding such denigrative ambivalence. The feminine is not referred to in terms of any negativities, her spiritual power is depicted as balanced in a controlled manner within her frame, potent but creatively channeled, forming with the male potency a unified force, critical to social well being. There is no mixture of celebration and denigration.

Beyond that, Ogboni sculpture of the feminine is striking in the global history of art, from the pre-historic rock art of Africa and Europe, to all the major periods in art history, from Asia to the Americas to Europe to Africa and other continents, up to the present, in its sensitivity to female sexuality, amplifying this sensitivity through a conjunction between the erotic and arcane, as mediated through a correlation between the feminine and nature in its wild, animalistic state, this range of reference subsumed within the seamless beauty of the aesthetic order of the human form, evocative of a steady equanimity of mind.

How does Ogboni sculpture achieve this?

Through a discreet but prominent depiction of the clitoris in naked female figures, thereby evoking the erotic, by placing horns on the heads of these naked figures, thereby suggesting the combination of wild, animalistic power and female sexuality in the self referential character dramatised by the clitoris which has nothing directly to do with procreation but everything to do with female sexual arousal and orgasm, a potential that, through masturbation, can be activated without reference to a man, and evoking the convergence of these erotic and wild potencies in terms of the modelling of a calmly centered female form as suggested by the figure's features and the expression they project, her stance, her bodily contours and the evocative value realized through the relationship between all aspects of her form.

I am not aware of any artistic form that achieves this scope of convergence of evocative valuations in relation to the feminine, from the art of the Hindu Mahavidya, in which the combination of female sexuality with a range of spiritual potencies and metaphysical significance has been taken to great conceptual and imaginative heights, enabling their conceptions embody all possibilities of existence, from the most mundane to the cosmic, to the plethora of evocations of Sakti, the superordinate female principle in Hinduism, to Buddhist Tantra, where the feminine in the form of the dakini, the 'traveller in [metaphysical] space' and the feminine as mother of foundational metaphysical possibilities, is prominent, to the feminine valorisations of modern Western Paganism and modern Western witchcraft, these being the central spiritualities where a similar range of conceptions of the feminine as that evident in Ogboni have been developed to a high level in writing and so demonstrate information that can travel easily across cultural borders so that people like me who are geographically distant from those cultural environments can be informed about them.

Africa has developed powerful conceptions of the feminine spirituality but the existing literature does not do adequate justice to them since the transmission from orality to literacy has not been adequately representative.

This is the gap I am trying to fill.

Why be squeamish about the world 'clitoris' in the title of an essay demonstrating how a Yoruba origin institution celebrates this primary affirmation of the feminine, when in the same Yorubaland there still exist acute superstitions and cruel sexism leading to the mutilation of women by cutting off all or part of their clitoris in the name of sexual discipline by reducing the pleasure they get from sex or to prevent harm to children in childbirth since its believed the child will due if their head touches the clitoris or that cutting off the organ enables safe delivery?

Can you imagine the physical and psychological trauma women are being exposed to in the culture where Ogboni art and thought are shining a light of civilization into a barbaric practice yet there is objection to a mention in the subject line of an email to a central feature of this creative illumination meant to combat such outrage that may sexually and even in terms of their health, cripple its victims?

Is that not equivalent to painting one's nose while cutting it off?