Quintessence of Yoruba Aesthetics : A Very, Very Short Annotated Selection
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Quintessence of Yoruba Aesthetics
A Very, Very Short Annotated Selection
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Rationale for this Compilation and Criteria for Selection
Looking back over years of exploration of a subject, one may wish to sum up what one is learning or to highlight the most striking, the most impressive examples of what one has encountered.
I am also interested in providing something that could equal some of the striking anthologies regularly produced on Western aesthetics and critical theory in which such great works as German philosopher Immanuel Kant's section on the Sublime in his Critique of Judgement are placed alongside texts by other masters of European thought.
The selections here were made both for the significance of the message being communicated as well as for their power of expression, the quality of communication they demonstrate, because the manner in which an idea is projected is strategic to how the idea is understood.
I'm also interested in writing as an art form as well as an intellectual instrument, a means of thinking as well as of communicating thinking.
I hope one day to publish the selections below as a book, followed by another selection, a selection of such remarkable texts drawn from work relating to other parts of Africa or to Africa as a whole, such as Olu Oguibe's "El Anatsui : Beyond Death and Non-Nothingness, " African Arts, Vol.31, Issue 1,1998, Chinua Achebe's ''The Igbo World and its Art," the foreword to Herbert Cole and Chike Aniakor's Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos, 1984 and Norma Rosen's "Chalk Art in Olokun Worship," African Arts, Vol.23, Issue 3, 1989, 44-88.
Selections
1. Rowland Abiodun, ''The
Future of African Art Studies : An African Perspective'' in African Art Studies : The
State of the Discipline. Washington: Smithsonian, 1987, 63-89.
The best summation of Yoruba aesthetics known to me. Passionate, ideationally rich and lucid. Maps Yoruba aesthetics in terms of an intersection of metaphysics, an enquiry into the nature of existence, and ethics, explorations of how best to live.
2. "The Yoruba World," the first chapter of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989, is superb on relationships between central concepts in Yoruba metaphysics and Yoruba aesthetics, investigations of art and of beauty, as these correlations are demonstrated by Yoruba art.
Powerful illustrations, insightfully organized within the text for maximum effect, further foreground the discussions of relationships between ase, creative,
cosmic force, and individuality of the self, ori, within the matrix represented
by the convergence of material and spiritual worlds, aye and orun, an
understanding particularly strongly realized in the distinctive cognitive and
artistic cultures of the Yoruba institutions Ifa and Ogboni, richly represented
here through few but powerful examples of their visual art, carefully
discussed by the authors.
The images at the copy of that chapter in the link above are impressive but do not come near the clarity of those in the complete book, a magnificent visual feast across its thick breadth.
3. Babatunde Lawal, “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art," The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2001, 498-526.
Magnificent on ideas of perception and recreation of perception in relation to the nature of the self as understood in Yoruba thought.
Encyclopedic on a miniature scale as the author draws in a broad range of references in the Yoruba philosophical and historical cosmos in developing his thesis. Richly illustrated with pictures of works of art and of people representing the essay's ideas.
4. Rowland Abiodun, “Verbal and Visual Metaphors: Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori .” Word and Image 3/3, 1987: 252–70.
This is an infinitely rich essay on intersections between human and divine creativity within a cosmogonic and terrestrial frame. The essay displays Abiodun
at his best in oscillation between Yoruba literature, Yoruba art and
expositions in English.
Cosmogonic evocations are brought alive in terms of
both cosmic grandeur and human personification in
philosophizing through poetry on the roots of human reflective and
expressive powers.
The essay is significantly shaped by some
of the best examples and English translations anywhere of Yoruba
literature as represented by ese ifa, literature of the Yoruba origin Ifa
system of knowledge.
This
essay is reworked as the first chapter of Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language:
Seeking the African in African Art, 2014, where it is further
developed in terms of a theory of the Yoruba expressive concept oriki unifying
the entire book, the book itself a summation of Yoruba aesthetics from
Abiodun's perspective.
In correlating human and divine creativity, the essay be better appreciated in comparison with Lawal's ''Àwòrán'' and ''Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics,'' Literature & Aesthetics 15 (1):161-174 (2005).
5. Wole Soyinka, "Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype," " Drama and the African World View" and "The Fourth Stage" in Myth,Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
A uniquely individualistic journey through the origins of drama in ritual as the human being tries to make sense of the cosmic context of his existence through imaginative action within space.
The focus of examples is on Yoruba literature in its philosophical and spiritual significance, in comparison with references to Diaspora African, Western and Asian cultures. Soyinka combines wonderfully ideational exposition with evocations of personal response to the wonders of the ideas and experiences he describes. Contains various memorable sentences demonstrating Soyinka's inimitable poetic force.
6. Ọlabiyi Babalọla Yai, "In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1993, 29-37 and in The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Edited by Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal, and John Pemberton III, pp. 107-115. Washington: Smithsonian, 1994.
Yai's best published essay known to me. The essay is beautiful in its manner of conceiving and expressing ideas, demonstrating the epistemic range, the capacity for developing broad ranging knowledge, of Yoruba expressions, in a manner that unifies metaphysics, history and aesthetics.
This essay is complemented by another Yai masterwork, his review of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989 (African Arts,Vol. 25,No. 1, 1992, 20+22+24+26+29 ) and by Yai's ''Tradition and the Yoruba Artist,'' African Arts , 1999, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, 32-35+93).
Those other essays help make clearer Yai's discussion of the relationship between the Yoruba concept of the self, ori, as applying to all entities, animate and inanimate, as individual and social entities, the multi-artistic evocation of the expression of the self, oriki, and the exploration of these expressions within narratives mapping these dynamisms within space and time, itan, as Yai's descriptions of these concepts may be summed up.
7. Rowland Abiodun, "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase," African Arts, Vol. 27 (3)1994: 68–103“Àṣẹ:Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art,” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 24, 4, 1994, 309-322.
These two essays, along with the ''Ase: The Empowered Word Must Come to Pass," a chapter in Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language where both essays are reworked, are the only in depth examinations known to me of this particularly strategic concept of àṣẹ in Yoruba thought.
They are complemented by the introductory but ideationally and visually superb presentation of the subject in the first chapter, "The Yoruba World," of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989.
These works are also better appreciated in comparison with Ahmadou Hampate Ba on the metaphysics of language among some African peoples in his "The Living Tradition," in The UNESCO General History of Africa.Vol.1: Methodology and Prehistory. Ed.J.Ki-Zerbo. Heinemann, 1981,166-205.
"Understanding Yoruba Art and
Aesthetics" is particularly rich in expository scope and dazzling wealth
of visual illustrations, visualities which are better accessed through the JSTOR link rather than the University of Amherst
link above.
Across both essays Abiodun's characteristically luxuriant grasp of the evocative sonorities of the Yoruba language is at play, carefully rendered in the original, translated with sensitivity to both imaginative power and communicative force, expounded in English both precise and poetically sensitive. The essays are pillars of Yoruba aesthetics and philosophy. I hope a book of this calibre or greater, dedicated to this subject, will emerge if it has not already.
8. Babatunde Lawal, "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni,"
( African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100) is the
most important essay known to me on the Yoruba origin esoteric order,
Ogboni.
The essay is summative of a vast subject and yet profound in that compression of breadth. The ideational power and aesthetic potency of
Ogboni thought and art shine through in Lawal's intellectually powerful prose, at times soaring into incantatory force as he tries to get to the heart of the glorious ideas he grapples with. The superb images, exquisitely arranged in various sizes within
the text, dramatize some of the lived experience of those whom these ideas represent, the Ogboni.
This is another encyclopedic essay from Lawal, in which a breadth of ideas providing a perspective on Yoruba thought in general is brought to bear on a subject examined in careful detail in a manner demonstrating its imaginative and ideational power.
9. Richard Olusegun Babalola's "Architectonic Interregnum," INTBAU, is a splendid discussion of Yoruba architectural theory and practice in terms of the relationship between Yoruba metaphysics and spatial and social order.
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Quintessence of Yoruba Aesthetics
A Very, Very Short Annotated Selection
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Personal Historical Background and Rationale for this Compilation
Looking back over a period of exploration of a subject, perhaps over years of enthusiastic but unsystematic engagement as with my interest in African thought to which Yoruba aesthetics belongs, one may wish to sum up what one is learning or to highlight the most striking, the most impressive examples of what one has encountered.
Aesthetics is the study of art and of beauty. It examines imaginative expressions and aspects of reality that relate to the material world but can't be adequately understood in material terms.The concept is Western and the discipline is best known in terms of how it has been framed in its centuries long history in Western thought before and after the development of the concept in German scholarship.
The Western construction of the
discipline may be very helpful, however, to efforts to understand how similar
ideas have been developed in other cultures, as long as one keeps in mind the
significance of both cultural differences and similarities.
I first came across the subject of aesthetics in the 1971 edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, a series of deeply inspiring
volumes providing entry into summations of the entire range of
Western scholarship, placing these within reach of my hungry eyes and restless page
opening fingers in its ready access in my family's library in Benin-City, an
initiation into high quality scholarship foundational to my self
education.
I was intrigued by such bold thought as North African Christian thinker St. Augustine of Hippo's description of harmony as the essence of beauty and the archetype of this harmony as being the symmetry represented by the Christian understanding of the divine Trinity, itself an ultimate reality to which the unity in diversity of the human mind was analogous.
Augustine was African, but in terms of the history of knowledge he belongs within the international system represented by the Roman Empire, a system that did not include Africa beyond its Northern zones, a network through which Augustine became strategic to European thought.
I dont recall any reference to African, talk less Yoruba aesthetics in that
Britannica, although it had a superb essay on African literature by Ulli Beier
and Gerald Moore, two perennially significant figures in African literature and
with Beier, African culture in general, an essay at least one poem of which I
remains indelible in my memory though I have forgotten how many decades ago I
read that article, so rich the poem was, a translation of an Igbo divination
poem by Romanus Egudu who would would later become my teacher at the University
of Benin.
That same edition of the Britannica, however, which I was reading in the 80s,
had an article on ''Dance'' which highlighted Western dance, and
another for ''Primitive Dance,'' where African dances were discussed, and which had a memorable image of a dance in the ''Valley of Seven Hills, Kwazulu Natal,'' as those resonant words remain in my memory.
They may have been there but I don't recall a discussion of dances from
other continents, such as Asia.
The investigations of African
aesthetics represented by the essays referenced in the list below had not yet
been published as of the time that encyclopedia was produced in 1971. The
authors were still finding their way through the world of academic education
and of positioning within the academy.
Eventually I began to encounter the
publications referenced below, beginning with Wole Soyinka's Myth,
Literature and the African World, published in 1976 and which I read in 1985 at
which point it initiated me decisively into the study and
practice of Yoruba philosophy and spirituality, helping to
catalyze my henceforth voracious engagement with African thought and
art.
I am also interested, in this very brief selection, in providing something that suggests equality of cognitive power, of analytical and speculative force, with some of the impressive anthologies regularly produced on Western aesthetics and critical theory in which such great works as German philosopher Immanuel Kant's section on the Sublime in his Critique of Judgement are placed alongside texts by other masters of European thought.
The selections here were made both for the significance of the message being communicated as well as for their power of expression, the quality of communication they demonstrate, because the manner in which an idea is projected is strategic to how the idea is understood.
I'm also interested in
writing as an art form as well as an intellectual instrument, a
means of thinking as well as of communicating thought, thinking perhaps in terms of different kinds of logic and perhaps organizing these diverse expressiveness into an overriding harmony, some or all of which qualities are demonstrated by the works listed here.
These selections do not represent the fruits of systematic study, of an effort to cover the field meticulously, as in Jacob Olupona's exemplary essay "The Study of Yoruba Religious Tradition in Historical Perspective," ( Numen, Vol. 40, No. 3, 1993, 240-273).
Instead, this piece is an effort to appraise my keen interest in the field fueled by reading anything that struck my interest. The selection aspires to describe what I have found most engaging within that context. Along those lines, though, I am also responding to my significant scope of acquaintance with the publications of the authors referenced here, they being among my favourite writers. I hope to proceed from unsystematic though somewhat broad ranging study of this subject to more systematic investigations.
I aspire one day to publish the selections below as a book, followed by another selection. This would be a choice of such remarkable texts drawn from work relating to other parts of Africa or to Africa as a whole.
This would include Olu Oguibe's "El Anatsui : Beyond Death and Nothingness, " African Arts, Vol.31, Issue 1,1998, Chinua Achebe's ''The Igbo World and its Art," the foreword to Herbert Cole and Chike Aniakor's Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos, 1984 and Norma Rosen's "Chalk Art in Olokun Worship," African Arts, Vol.23, Issue 3, 1989, 44-88.
The blue highlighting indicates essays that can be freely downloaded.
Selections from Masterworks of Yoruba Aesthetics
1. Rowland Abiodun, ''The
Future of African Art Studies : An African Perspective'' in
African Art Studies : The State of the Discipline. Washington: Smithsonian, 1987, 63-89.
The best summation of Yoruba aesthetics known to me. Passionate, ideationally rich and lucid. Maps Yoruba aesthetics in terms of an intersection of metaphysics, an enquiry into the nature of existence, and ethics, explorations of how best to live, within the context of positioning classical African thought in relation to the study of African art.
2. "The Yoruba World," the
first chapter of Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton III and Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art
and Thought,1989, is superb on relationships between central
concepts in Yoruba metaphysics and Yoruba aesthetics as these correlations are
demonstrated by Yoruba art.
Powerful illustrations, insightfully organized within the text for maximum effect, further foreground the discussions of relationships between ase, creative,
cosmic force, and individuality of the self, ori, within the matrix represented
by the convergence of material and spiritual worlds, aye and orun, an
understanding particularly strongly realized in the distinctive cognitive and
artistic cultures of the Yoruba institutions Ifa and Ogboni, richly represented
here through few but powerful examples of their visual art, carefully
discussed by the authors.
The images at the copy of that chapter in the link above are impressive but do not come near the clarity of those in the complete book, a magnificent visual feast across its thick breadth.
3. Babatunde Lawal, “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art," The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2001, 498-526.
Magnificent on ideas of perception and recreation of perception in relation to the nature of the self as understood in Yoruba thought.
Encyclopedic on a miniature scale as the author draws in a broad range of references in the Yoruba philosophical and historical cosmos in developing his thesis. Richly illustrated with pictures of works of art and of people representing the essay's ideas.
4. Rowland Abiodun, “Verbal and Visual Metaphors: Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori .” Word and Image 3/3, 1987: 252–70.
This is an infinitely rich essay on intersections between human and divine creativity within a cosmogonic and terrestrial frame. The essay displays Abiodun
at his best in oscillation between Yoruba literature, Yoruba art and
expositions in English.
Cosmogonic evocations are brought alive in terms of
both cosmic grandeur and human personification in
philosophizing through poetry on the roots of human reflective and
expressive powers.
The essay is significantly shaped by some
of the best examples and English translations anywhere of Yoruba
literature as represented by ese ifa, literature of the Yoruba origin Ifa
system of knowledge.
This
essay is reworked as the first chapter of Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language:
Seeking the African in African Art, 2014, where it is further
developed in terms of a theory of the Yoruba expressive concept oriki unifying
the entire book, the book itself a summation of Yoruba aesthetics from
Abiodun's perspective.
In correlating human and divine creativity, the essay is better appreciated in comparison with Lawal's ''Àwòrán'' and his ''Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics,'' Literature & Aesthetics 15 (1):161-174 (2005).
5. Wole Soyinka, "Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype," " Drama and the African World View" and "The Fourth Stage" in Myth,Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976.
A uniquely individualistic journey through the origins of drama in ritual as the human being tries to make sense of the cosmic context of his existence through imaginative action within space.
The focus of examples is on Yoruba literature in its philosophical and spiritual significance, in comparison with references to Diaspora African, Western and Asian cultures. Soyinka combines wonderfully ideational exposition with evocations of personal response to the wonders of the ideas and experiences he describes.
Contains various memorable sentences demonstrating Soyinka's inimitable poetic force.
A great book.
6. Ọlabiyi Babalọla Yai, "In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space,'' Research in African Literatures, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1993, 29-37 and in The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Edited by Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal, and John Pemberton III, pp. 107-115. Washington: Smithsonian, 1994.
Yai's best published essay known to me. The essay is beautiful in its manner of conceiving and expressing ideas, demonstrating the epistemic range, the capacity for developing broad ranging knowledge, of Yoruba expressions, in a manner that unifies metaphysics, history and aesthetics.
This essay is complemented by another Yai masterwork, his review of Drewal, Abiodun and Pemberton's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989 (African Arts, Vol. 25,No. 1, 1992, 20+22+24+26+29 ) and by Yai's ''Tradition and the Yoruba Artist,'' African Arts , 1999, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, 32-35+93).
Those other essays help make clearer Yai's discussion of the relationship between the Yoruba concept of the self, ori, as applying to all entities, animate and inanimate, as individual and social entities, the multi-artistic evocation of the expression of the self, oriki, and the exploration of these expressions within narratives mapping these dynamisms within space and time, itan, as Yai's descriptions of these concepts may be summed up.
7. Rowland Abiodun, "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase," African Arts, Vol. 27 (3)1994: 68–103 and “Àṣẹ:Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art,” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 24, 4, 1994, 309-322.
These two essays, along with ''Ase: The Empowered Word Must Come to Pass," a chapter in Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language where both essays are reworked, are the only in depth examinations known to me of the particularly strategic, unifying concept of àṣẹ in Yoruba thought, abstract and yet related to the specificities of human experience, cosmic and localized, intimately related to consciousness and to the numinous in nature and human spiritual activity, correlative with efforts to understand aspects of the material universe and its relationship with the human mind as the Indian concept of Shakti, the European understanding of the Sublime, exemplified particularly by Kant, and Rudolf Otto on the numinous.
"Understanding Yoruba Art and
Aesthetics" is particularly rich in expository scope and dazzling wealth
of visual illustrations, visualities which are better accessed through the JSTOR link rather than the University of Amherst
link above.
Across both essays Abiodun's characteristically luxuriant grasp of the evocative sonorities of the Yoruba language is at play, carefully rendered in the original, translated with sensitivity to both imaginative power and communicative force, expounded in English both precise and poetically sensitive. The essays and the book in which they are integrated are pillars of Yoruba aesthetics and philosophy.
I hope a book of the calibre of these essays and book chapter or greater, dedicated to this subject, will emerge if it has not already, relating it to other African expressions of the same idea and the migration of these ideas to the Americas as well as its intersections with similar and related ideas from other cultures, including ideas on animism from older cultures and the ongoing re-examination of animism within Western philosophy, along with perhaps the author's own encounter with and reflections on ase and related phenomena.
Abiodun's writings on the subject are complemented by the introductory but ideationally and visually superb presentation of ase in the first chapter, "The Yoruba World," of his book with Drewal and Pemberton, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989.
In his his exploration of ase in relation to verbal expression, Abiodun's work on ase is also better
appreciated in comparison with Amadou Hampâté Bâ on the metaphysics of
language among some African peoples in his "The Living Tradition," in
The UNESCO General History of Africa.Vol.1: Methodology and Prehistory. Ed.J.Ki-Zerbo. Heinemann, 1981,166-205.
8. Babatunde Lawal, "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni,"
( African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100) is the
most important essay known to me on the Yoruba origin esoteric order,
Ogboni.
The essay is summative of a vast subject and is yet profound in that compression of breadth. The ideational power and aesthetic potency of
Ogboni thought and art shine through in Lawal's intellectually powerful and yet lucid prose, at times soaring into incantatory force as he tries to get to the heart of the glorious ideas he grapples with. The superb images, exquisitely arranged in various sizes within
the text, dramatize some of the lived experience of those whom these ideas represent, the Ogboni.
This is another encyclopedic essay from Lawal, in which a breadth of ideas providing a perspective on Yoruba thought in general in its specificities and architectonic harmony, is brought to bear on a subject examined in careful detail in a manner demonstrating its imaginative and ideational power.