Salute to the Elephant : Abiola Irele at the Intersection of Disciplines : Part 4 : Ijala, Yoruba Hunter’s Poetry as a Cosmological Imperative and the Achievement of Abiola Irele
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Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Nov 23, 2017, 5:19:49 AM11/23/17
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Odua, WoleSoyinkaSociety, Nigerian Writers ANA, mbariliterarysociety, mb...@yahoogroups.com, josana
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Salute to the Elephant
Abiola Irele at the Intersection of
Disciplines
Part
4
Ijala, Yoruba Hunter’s Poetry as a Cosmological Imperative
and
the
Achievement of Abiola Irele Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring
Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
AbstractInspired by the transition of humanities scholar Francis Abiola Irele on July 2, 2017, this essay
explores his legacy
fram. This enquiry
es
his achievements in terms of his oscillation between individual studies of imaginative works and the
study of imagination in general as a cognitive style in the arts and in the correlation of the arts and the sciences. These expositions are complemented by images and accompanying texts demonstrating these disciplinary convergences. A presentation of his efforts in academic organization and leadership is also made. These investigations are subsumed by a conjunction of his work and lines of Ijala, Yoruba hunter’s poetry, saluting the overwhelming majesty and power of the elephant. Irele’s accomplishments are thus depicted in terms of a concentration of ideational and practical possibility rooted in a particular milieu but the significance of which transcends and unifies time, space and cultures. All links here are active as of the completion of most links on the 12th of September 2017.
Contents
1.
Science and Art
: Conjuncting Irele 3 : Figure 10
2. "Huge as a Hill, Even in a Crouching Posture"
3.
Image and Text : Science
and Art: Images of Infinity 4: The Ekpuk/Nsibidi Spiral: Figure 11
Science and Art
Conjuncting Irele 3
Figure 10
Perhaps the world’s most famous
equation, Albert Einstein's matter/energy equivalence formulation, the concise
beauty of which is shown at top right, is a classic demonstration of the
mediation between modes of being the Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology deity Esu,
represented here by his Voodoo incarnation Papa Legba,
may be described as
embodying. Legba’s depiction in this painting
may be seen as portraying him as a dandy, represented by his stylish hat,
and as a
nonconformist, as evoked by his unclothed torso, thus unifying contrastive
possibilities of social existence, distiller of the refinements of society yet
transcending its limitations, as he roams the possibilities of being
represented by the open field he traverses in the company of his faithful
dog,the hedge in the field dividing the space into two suggesting the various
boundaries,
ontological and perceptual,
Legba crosses and unifies.
On the left is Legba’s supremely elegant veve,
a visual symbol used in inviting the presence of the loa, the spirits of
Voodoo, its intersecting of horizontal and vertical axes, symbolic of various
contrastive but
complementary ontological coordinates,
correlative with the
equals sign in Eisenstein’s equation indicating the unity of matter and energy
in relation to the speed of light, this incidental conjunction
signalling the character of Legba as
embodiment of the crossroads or intersections of being and becoming.
These visual evocations are juxtaposed with a picture of
Abiola Irele, man of the world
and cosmopolitan scholar, connoisseur of fine wines and singer of both Italian
opera and Nigerian popular music, philosopher and critic of the arts, academic
organizer and weaver of multidisciplinary
symmetries, master of various languages enabling crossing
cultural boundaries, in the spirit of Legba’s gobally
comprehensive
multilingualism."Huge as a Hill, Even in a Crouching Posture"
One of
Abiola
Irele’s most
remarkable pieces of writing presents Yoruba philosophy of nature as dramatized
in Ijala poetry, Yoruba poetry of
hunters, in his essay “ Tradition and the Yoruba Writer :
D. O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka”. He depicts this poetry as portraying the forest
as a microcosm of the cosmos and the hunter as the
embodiment of the qualities
vital for navigating the complex represented by existence, a perspective
related to Wole Soyinka’s summation of Ijala in Myth, Literature and the African World, as “celebrating not only
the deity[ Ogun, the pathfinding patron of hunters] but also animal and plant
life, seeks to capture the essence and relationships of growing things and the
insights of man into the secrets of the universe".Irele
's essay
studies this forest literature
in terms of its
grounding in Yoruba oral art and thought. This literature also resonates in the novels of D. O. Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola, and the much later Ben Okri’s
inspired by the animistic universe of classical African thought
The Famished Road, which, though outside the attention of that essay, draws from similar streams. These works, and literature
, may be
appreciated in relation to the
dramatization, through imaginative encounters with the various, often
fantastic denizens of fictional forests,
the creative force of ase
, the Yoruba understanding of pervasive cosmic force enabling material being and its possibilities of
association with consciousness across all forms of existence, from humans to animals to inanimate forms
such as trees to ostensibly non-living phenomena such as rivers, a central idea in classical African thought and closely related to similar conceptions from other cultures.
Awo Falokun Fatunmbi,
referencing the Yoruba cognitive and spiritual
discipline Ifa in “Obatala:Ifa
and the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth”, sums up a perception that
is relevant for other animistic cultures:
The threads of [the] fabric “which binds the universe
together…are the multi-leveled layers of consciousness which Ifa teaches
exist in all things on all levels of being [leading to the understanding] that
it is the ability of forces of nature to communicate with each other, and the
ability of humans to communicate with forces in nature that gives the world a
sense of spiritual unity.
Suggestive of Irele’s
positioning of Esu in relation to
complex patterns of force in nature in " The African Scholar"
, discussed in the third part of this essay,
Fatunmbi describes this idea of communication between humans and forces of
nature as “believed to be facilitated by
the Spirit of Esu, who is the Divine Messenger,” the “Divine Trickster [ who] is a fundamental principle of the structure
of reality”, as he elaborates in “Eṣu-Elegba:
Ifa and the Spirit of the Divine Messenger“.
The pioneering, foundational work on Ijala, Adeboye
Babalola’s The Content and Form of Yoruba
Ijala, does not demonstrate such explicit philosophical orientations,
unless as they may be
extrapolated
from the poetry, perhaps, because, as stated in a
personal communication by scholar of
Yoruba Akin Oyetade, the focus in those early days of scholarship in African
oral literature when the book was published was to establish the existence of
this literature in the first place, in contrast to the then perspective
expressed by some Western scholars that there was “no such mythical beast as
African literature” as Soyinka sums up in
Myth. There might exist later developments
in Ijala scholarship, however, that foreground its philosophical and spiritual
significance but which I am not yet aware of.
One may pursue
extrapolations from Babalola’s work on Ijala in relation to the achievement of
Irele, in order to concretise the scope of Irele’s achievement in memorable images, as I do
below:
“O elephant, huge as a
hill, even in a crouching posture”.
The Irele universe, the ideas
dramatized by his many faceted intellectual activity from the sixties to the
present, from editorship of the journal Black
Orpheus to the editorship of Research
in African Literatures and The
Savannah Review, from his landmark “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer” to his
scintillating “The African Scholar”, from the University of Ibadan to University
of Ghana to Harvard and Kwara State University,
is like a mountain, the peak of which imposes itself one one’s vision
even from a far distance, immense and majestically encompassing, inspiringly
challenging to
circumnavigate as one reaches its base, its foundational forms,
its building blocks.
“O elephant, whom one
sees and points towards with all one’s fingers.”
One cannot point t
o
Irele with one finger, though he is one man. Can identification of his person using one digit
encompass his existence as philosophical builder and expositor in the
history of philosophy, music scholar, literary and cultural critic, his work
spanning Francophone and Anglophone thought and literature, his range of
reference, encompassing the sciences and the humanities, his editorship of
central journals in the development of modern
African scholarship, his work as pioneering publisher of New Horn Press, his
movements of perspective from “ In Praise of Alienation”, his first inaugural
at the University of Ibadan in 1982 to his second “ The African Scholar”
circa 1991 at Ohio State University?
“O elephant, on whose
bulk, majestic in motion the egret has found a home in its
journeys across the world.”
The egret feeds on the
insects on the body of the elephant and takes advantage of the movement of the
much larger creature to nourish itself on the small creatures the behemoth’s
movements dislodge. Through such relationships with animals in their dispersion
across the world, the egret has achieved a cosmopolitan, global spread. Along
similar lines, sustained engagement with Irele’s scholarship in its varying
focus on different subjects, it’s range of
reference and ideational reach demonstrated
by its multidisciplinary and cross -
cultural networking and the excitement
inspired by its stylistic beauty and power, may facilitate a similar
development in the student of this corpus, a cognitive expansion that may go
even beyond the ideational, disciplinary
and cultural geographies Irele addresses
, as one pushes farther and
farther the implications of the projects represented by his oeuvre.
“ The hunter’s boast at
home is not repeated when he really meets the elephant.
The hunter’s boast at home is not repeated before the elephant”.
Great thanks to
Professor Ogo Ufuani, my teacher and later senior colleague at the Department of English and
Literature, University of Benin, for
first suggesting to me the idea of Irele scholarship as a distinctive and admirable activity to which one may
aspire. This led to my discussing the idea of being an Irele scholar with a
former PhD student of Irele’s, who
indicated the challenge of following the speed and scope of Irele’s
publication trajectory.
Mapping and immersing
oneself in Irele Studies, literature by and about Irele, is a challenging but exhilarating task,
opening vistas into broad zones of knowledge within and beyond the thrust block
afforded by his work, propelled by identification with his inimitable
intelligence.
Such a mapping involves
a range of methods of accounting for his achievements. These involve a
chronological listing of his work. It also includes a description of this creative output
in terms of types of publications
, from journal and book editorials to stand
alone articles and essay collections to
public addresses and PhD, M.A. and undergraduate dissertations and other
writings among others emerging from the course of his academic degrees. It is also represented by descriptions of
the configuration of his publications in
terms of subject matter, from music criticism to literary criticism to
philosophy, to cultural, aesthetic and literary theory, among others. It encompasses
the drawing of a picture of the
conceptual and perspectival relationships between his writings and between
these writings and his range of activities as editor, publisher, teacher,
academic administrator and more. Such study also integrates investigations of writings on Irele as well as on the central subjects he addressed and the perspectives he demonstrated so as to better locate him within broader cognitive frames and histories.
What is the centre of
this construct?
How do its radiations emerge in relation to this core?
What are the ideational and other implications emerging in consonance with this structure?
In studying Irele, I
aspire to contextualise him in relation to the development of civilisation,
focusing on emergents at the intersections of the arts and the sciences. In
thus structuring the horizon of understanding
represented by my
conception of Irele scholarship, one’s activity can be described in terms of various
avian metaphors, representing the mental flight evoked by the motion of birds above
the earth and the landscape surveyed from the resulting perspective.
In this study, one may
be akin to a bird poised in mid-air, studying Irele in relation to the current
configurations
of knowledge in various disciplines, investigating those ideas
and issues considered most relevant at the present time within those contexts,
observing already highlighted relationships or developing new ones.
In this exploration, one
may also be like a bird in flight, studying Irele in relation to
the growth of knowledge in various fields, observing the developing
relationships between ideas in particular fields and in relation to expansions in other fields.
In these investigations,
one could resemble a cormorant,
studying Irele in relation to simply following where one’s interests lead, pursuing one’s enthusiasms rather than being guided by
issues and questions posed by others, reorganizing disciplines
around one’s own research
interests and their associated enquiries, like a bird picking bits and
pieces to make a nest composed of various contrastive but
ultimately complementary forms,
complementing this variety by pursuing
depth of understanding through
sustained attention to any one of those bits that interest one most, the variegated nest enabling capacity to
make unusual and therefore interesting and possibly profound connections. The cormorant surveying
the terrain in its flight, its attention caught by an element of particular
interest, positions itself in mid-air, focusing on that element or pursues gradually
developing interests emerging from the flows and counter flows of engaging with
various enthusiasms, a bird flying on high studying the flow of the river and
the movement of fish from river to river, noting the patterns of fish migration over the years.
“If you wish to know the
elephant, the elephant who is a veritable ferry-man”
Language is vehicle and
creator of meaning, the ferry as well as the
passenger of the ferry and the river on which ferry and passenger are in
action. Irele is an ultimate master of the unity of form and content in
language, his expository prose uniquely magnificent in the word cathedrals he
weaves, universes of ideation singing through the cognitive muscularity of
epistemic play.
“O elephant, the vagrant
par excellence”.
The inter-continental scope
of Irele’s career is both expressive of his global significance
and a
demonstration of his work as a victim of the shift in power represented by the
negative transformation of the fortunes of African countries after the earlier
decades following their
independence from colonial rule
. The
foundations of Irele's
scholarship
were laid while he was as the University of Ibadan after his PhD at the University of Paris, a luminary among
classical figures in the study of
African and Caribbean literature and culture, such as Wole Soyinka, Isidore Okpewho, and adding then University
of Ife, Biodun Jeyifo, a constellation that included pioneers in African
philosophy such as Peter Bodunrin and in African historiography, Kenneth Dike, a stellar period in Nigerian
university history which Irele portrays and laments its non-continuity in “The
African Scholar”.
Irele’s leaving Ibadan
to Ohio State University in the US after a long career centred in working in
African universities was done in the spirit of a person fleeing from institutional
inadequacy, the promise of the earlier years of effervescence having collapsed
in the political and economic upheavals demonstrating the growing pains of African nations, truncating the dream
of a pan-African scholarly powerhouse which people like Irele represented with
his mastery of French and English and his working at various times at the
Universities of Ibadan and Ghana. He eventually returned
to Nigeria after moving to Harvard from Ohio and contributed in strategic ways
to Kwara State University, starting the
journal The Savannah Review, his
presence institutionalized in that university by the founding there of the
Irele School of Theory and Criticism and its annual seminars, and the donation
to the university of his massive and many splendoured library. He informed me recently by email that he had
returned to Harvard and I was moved by his reversal of his earlier stated vision of the need to retire home
after a particular point in time abroad, particularly on account of what he described in a personal
communication as the challenging environment of Nigeria, the difference between
the mountaintop represented by Harvard and the foothills emblematised by his
return to his ancestral nation. I
replied requesting to know why he had made this relocation about which I did
not know whether to be happy for him or sad for Nigeria. I wondered why he did
not respond even as my email account became full and could take no more
messages, as I planned to free the box for more activity and contact him, then came the news that the hunter had gone
home.
“Demon who snaps tree
branches into many pieces and moves on to the forest farm”.
Irele’s work can be
divided into the two broad and interrelated areas of criticism and theory. He
is a magnificent expositor of both the imaginative strategies of the writers he explores as of
the ideational universes they draw from and those which they construct. He is
rich on the
context of African philosophy and a major expositor of Négritude philosophy and
literature and very memorable on Yoruba philosophy. He is a thinker in the relationship between
literature and styles of cognition, particularly in relation to Africa, the latter demonstrated most graphically by
his later book The African Imagination.
Irele’s example demonstrates the trajectory of some of the greatest scholars,
engaging both the branches represented by individual cognitive and artistic
explorations and the forest constituted by the teeming world of ideas in which
these branches sprout on colossal trees, forests the expansion of which they
point to as yet embryonic
possibilities.
“O elephant whom the hunter at times sees face to face.
O elephant whom the hunter at other times
sees from the rear.”
Irele is one of those
who laid the foundations in the study of African and Caribbean literature and
culture, and whose work, in spite of the attention it has received so far,
needs to be more broadly and deeply engaged with for the elucidation of its internal power and its capacity to illuminate other bodies
of knowledge. Just like those who study
African literature today and tomorrow and even other non-African literatures
and cultures into which his influence has penetrated are swimming in waters influenced by Irele’s
explorations, so, in studies to come in various fields of knowledge, Irele’s
influence rising to greater heights will constitute platforms of discourse that
contribute to the shaping of what might be new disciplines, an influence
appreciated from its rearward, indirect power, by those who drink of Irele
waters without knowing it and those who drink directly, who eat at the same
table with the master, in direct face to face dialogue with him in the world of
subtle and complex reflection, of expression limpid like gold being smelted in
fire, of striving for knowledge that reaches out to embrace the cosmos from a vantage
point at a particular cultural location.
“O elephant, who single-handed
causes a tremor in a dense tropical forest.”
The creature encountered by Abababalona at the river where all animals come to drink in the Nigerian
folktale named after the hero, and which I learnt about from my mother Jhalobia Ojemu, was so massive the various flying creatures living on its body would
rise periodically into the air, blocking out the sun. "…beyond are the
stars, and beyond them more stars, and beyond and beyond …to depths beyond
depths, where the great galaxies float like clouds…scattering out from one
common point to the ultimate edges of time and distance. …many lives…the beginning and the end, and
all that goes between…in their birth and growing [ Is] it chance or purpose that makes a path for
all life in time and space [?]”- from “Twig” by Gordon Dickson. Irele’s
ideational configurations are the seeds of knowledge that populate the forest.
The life in the arboreal vastness that grows from the seeds. The vibrations of
delight running through the interconnections as they unravel to the mind’s eye.
“My chant is a salute to the elephant.
Ajanaku who walks with a
heavy thread.
O elephant, praisenamed
Laaye, massive animal blackish grey in complexion”.
In the spirit of
creative irreverence that characterises the literature of the Ifa system, the
divine progenitor of the system, Orunmila, the Witness to Creation, embodiment
of all knowledge of human potential from their seeds at the beginning of time,
is known as the little man with a head full of wisdom, the small black man of
Igeti hill.
At my first and only
meeting with Irele, at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in
2004, he struck me as looking like a farmer, though a comfortable one, not what I expected an academic to look like and
certainly not one of his accomplishment and acclaim. There are pictures online
of Irele formally dressed in a sharp suit and also visible online are
various first-hand accounts
indicating a more suave, younger Irele, a connoisseur of fine wines, proficient
in singing operatic lines in Italian, an
accomplished man of the world, but the impression I got from him on that day,
corroborated by other images of him on the Internet, reflect distance between
his stature and his projection of status, perhaps a personality emerging with
time in terms of an ironic relationship with the world, a reprioritisation.
“The sage, indeed, wears
clothes of coarse cloth, but carries within precious jade” states Chineser philosopher Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, as translated by Toshihiko Izutsu in Sufism
and Taoism. Such an individual, as understood in the symbolism of classicall
Chinese
painting, is like a pine tree, its sinuous sturdiness making it
evocative of a person of
“high principles whose manner reveals an inner power”,
like a young dragon coiled in a deep gorge, suggesting concealed creative
potential discreetly held in reserve, as portrayed by Mai-mai Sze in The Way of Chinese Painting.
“O elephant, lord of the forest, respectfully called Oriiribobo.
When we see the elephant, we cannot be content with stating “I saw something pass in a flash”.
We must declare we have seen the tamer of the forest.”
Master who revealed to us
what we really arewho opened our eyes
incomparably to the patrimony from our ancestors the reverberations through
which we may shape present and future.
Thinker astride
civilizations.
Son of Setilu of Ifa,
Setilu,
originator of the 256
storehouses of knowledge,
Setilu,
creator of magnificent networks of cognition
grandson of Olowontuyeye, the ancestor of the myriad living things.
Francis
Abiola Irele! Poised in the sky of thought like a swarm of bees.
If it were possible to defeat the grim reaper,
we would have done so for your sake.Remember us
and
vouchsafe guidance from your new home to us who, in the words of the Kuba celebration of transition to the beyond, still walk the “goat’s earth” as you “touch God’s sky”, as one of
those
whose
“touches are often felt,
whose wisdoms come suddenly to the mind
when
the wisest have shaken their
heads and uttered ‘it cannot be done’ "
,
as your
friend putit in that work on the journey most mysterious
where one may more clearly discern
what we
have all been struggling to understand using the broken tools of our logic and
intelligence.
Science and Art
Images of Infinity 4
The Ekpuk/Nsibidi Spiral
Figure 11
“Good Morning, Sunrise (detail)
Victor Ekpuk, b. 1964, Nigeria,2001
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of the artist
Victor Ekpuk's art is dedicated to manipulating scripts and graphic symbols. His
drawings, paintings and digital images are abuzz with language. The artistemploys invented script as well as signs from Nigeria's ideographic system nsibidi
to create richly textured works. In this painting, the spiral is an nsibidi
sign meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity. Ekpuk's strong
palette of warm reds, deep blacks, cool blues and whites contributes to the
overall sense of animation”.
Text and image source : “Nsibidi” at
the website Inscribing Meaning : Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art .
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