My Father, Myself and the Ancestors : Engaging Bruce Onobrakpeya's Thanksgiving Dance
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Abstract
A journey through the associative possibilities of artist Bruce Onobrakpeya's Thanksgiving Dance, (plastocast relief, 2015), in relation to the theme of ancestor relationships viewed in terms of my personal experience and across varied world views in imaginative literature and spirituality.
Contents
The Celestial Sanctum Between Expansion and Emptiness
I found Ohomina's assertion odd. My father and I had not been close for much of my life, our bond in my childhood, strategic to the love of reading and learning my mother and himself were fundamental to inspiring, a culture we enjoyed together, had given way to a difficult separation mitigated by intermittent interaction and his profound gratitude at the presence of my sister, Ameto, and myself, at his bedside at his last illness.
Given this background, I wondered why Ohomina was making a claim about my father guiding my steps. He had not been directing them since I was sixteen, so why would he be doing so now, in my thirties, and after he had left the physical world we both shared?
Years later, however, while studying in England, far from Benin-City where that divination was conducted, my father began to appear regularly in my dreams after I deliberately made peace with our joint history, dream encounters so vivid, I could ''smell'' his individuality, his living essence.
I took those dreams seriously, encounters that meant I now became closer to him in death than when he was alive. One day, as I went to bed, I called out passionately to him for guidance about the direction of my life. That night, I had a vivid dream of visiting my maternal grandfather in Imoga, the village my parents come from.
I had once been required, as a child, to live in my grandfather's house in our village, as a means of protection from the causes of the recurrent illnesses I suffered, his house understood as a spiritual bastion those negative forces could not cross, a strategy I am told worked. I have no memory of that time, however, and had hardly interacted with my grandfather as I grew into adulthood.
Though he has long departed from the world, my mother continually recalls my grandfather's achievements and character, a particularly significant one in this context being his commitment, when it was still new in Nigeria, to Western education for his children, including my mother, at a time when educating women was seen in that village, and perhaps a good part of Nigeria, as an unnecessary expense, an initiative that eventually made all the difference to my mother's life, that of my father, and us, their children.
In the dream I met my grandfather seated, flanked by two people. He held in his hands what looked like a sheet of paper, which I understood as detailing my life's progression.
He asked one question, the only interaction between us, upon which the dream concluded.
What is a book? Is the answer determined by its physical form or by its contents? Beyond the emergence of digital books, can the understanding of a book be taken further to include a website or even an email?
Can it be a collection of social media posts constituting the chapters of the book? Can it be a sequence of images, with or without verbal text?
Can the use of digital media in integrating pictures, video, sound and verbalization not provide a more inclusive experience of organised information presentation within definite organizational parameters than even the conventional digital text or the print book?
These are questions I engage with as I work towards taking advantage of the full spectrum of information organization technologies in the creation of robust systems of knowledge, integrating complementary approaches to the concept of a book.
The imagery of light, with its associations of cognitive illumination, amplified through its conjunction with the reference to motion from constricted to expanded space suggested by the idea of moving through a passage to encounter light at its end, the correlation of that light with unusual knowledge and subtle guidance from invisible personages, sums up various conceptions of the inspirational force of ancestor relationships, interactions with beings described as living in a non-material dimension but one which intersects with the material world so intimately their inspiration can be experienced in the material universe, at various levels of keenness and subtlety .
Marion Zimmer Bradley's novel The Forbidden Tower develops this subject with poignant force in terms of a journey of consciousness into the past to encounter an ancestor whose influence has decisively shaped the present the voyager ventures from, in order to gain from that ancestor knowledge lost in the voyager's time (4).
Bernard Bromage's adaptation of an imaginative technique from Tibetan yoga exemplifies this:
….most
of us have a particular fondness for some inspirational voice of the past, some personality whose echo comes down to us along the avenues of time to
uplift and sustain.
What better practice
than to contact this silent friend in his own haunts? It is not particularly
difficult to see the Buddha under the bo
tree or Ignatius Loyola wrestling with his soul at Manresa.
…
We can, then, if we will, make friends with the great psychic figures and scenes of the past. And we shall realise at the same time that, in the world of the spirit, there is no absolute past, present, nor future but one glorious sustaining Now. This why help is so ready to our hands when we take the trouble to ask for it from “ mythical” personages we have come to venerate : we are conferring with forces so near to us that they can be said to be at our very ear.( 6 )
The devotee salutes ''Kalatapanamayi - He who set time on fire; Visnudevamayi- He who expanded himself, taking up the whole of space; Prabhakaradevamayi - He who became a star called the sun; Tejodevamayi - He who became the light which was speeding over all space, creating space itself''.
The allure of such expansive conceptions is magnified through association of ancestor figures with structures and dynamism of cosmic progression or with superlative natural phenomena. Western esotericist Dion Fortune extends the concept of ancestors to pre-human predecessors of humanity who have evolved into constituting the structural foundations of the universe ( 7 ).
Elizabeth Haich's Initiation sums up the thrust of these conceptions of hidden ancestral teachers in her account of a description of humanity's history by a prehistoric seer:
…there will be reincarnated Sons of God working secretly within humanity. They'll find places to live in the high mountains, in caves, or in other remote regions where, undisturbed in their retreats, they can send forth extremely high forces into the atmosphere of the earth.
People who have already developed to such a point that they can receive these spiritual waves will automatically establish spiritual links with these Sons of God, and work together with them.
Often they will not even be aware of this spiritual link. On the contrary, for all they'll know, they will merely be acting on the basis of their own "inner conviction", not knowing that this "inner conviction" is divine power transmitted from the Sons of God.
In this way some highly developed people will transmit and proclaim to all humanity the teachings which the Sons of God will bring to earth from time to time.
Although the masses won't
be able right away to understand these high truths, they'll feel the love and
power inherent within them, and for this reason they'll believe in them.
That is how religions will come into being from the divine teachings of the
Sons of God [ through people interpreting these teachings] differently depending on the
characteristics of their race and their degree of development. (10)
Thanksgiving Dance ( plastocast relief, 2015), however, recalls for me descriptions of those once-human identities as existing in a universe of their own, a richly insightful cosmos which yet intersects with the material world, subsuming and transcending the human universe in which they once lived.
Thanksgiving Dance ( plastocast relief, 2015) is one of the latest in a series of explorations of the same subject by Onobrakpeya, as an online search demonstrates, complementing the artist's account of the evolution of this motif in his art (13).
Various versions of this subject are dated 1970 (deep etching) and 2020 (plastocast painting), while there are three versions dated 2015- (1) painted plastocast relief on board (2) plastocast on board and (3) plastocast relief. I am yet to get a dating for other versions visible online, designated metalfoil plastocast and a similar example.
Onobrakeya's article presents even more versions, demonstrating his explorations of the same subject using diverse technical forms, thereby actualizing various possibilities of the creative vision represented by the concept, [actualizing the ] ''artist’s relentless pursuit of creativity as he goes from idea to two-dimensional drawing, to near-sculptural metal foils [ and, in come cases] to actual sculptures'', as observed by the Hourglass Gallery.
Another variant pairs the dancing figures with stylized humanoid forms poised above the dancers, the scriptic background evident but dimmed, as in plastocast painting, 2020. In plastocast relief, 2015, all these images come together in terms of the combination of horizontal composition, for the dancers, and vertical organization, for the figures pioised in space, against a densely scripted background, all images in the work achieving visual prominence, ''a fully resolved visual impact'', adapting Alisa La Gamma from a different context (14 ).
In Thanksgiving Dance this distinction between upper and lower sections is projected in terms of a sense of spatial elevation in the upper region, an impression of upward motion as well as of suspension in space. Poise and timelessness are evoked, as if the figures positioned in space seem to exist in a different temporal continuum from the abstracted forms of the dancers below, the shapes of the dancers both lyrical and frenzied, stylized to project the energy and power of their dynamic motions.
Samer Akkach describes an experience incidentally suggestive of the sense of upward motion, of elevation and poise within a mysteriously glorious universe, alive with strangely intriguing presences, visually compelling and psychologically uplifting, dramatised by the Onobrakpeya work:
When I was a little boy I used to love the snowfall in Damascus. Playing with friends in the street was fun, of course, but the real joy was in the gazing trick I had discovered and thought no one knew.
Raised on a couch placed under the kitchen’s window that opens onto a large light well, I used to stand up motionless gazing at the snow flakes silently and gracefully falling down. In a magical moment, as I concentrated hard on the falling motion, the situation switched: the snow flakes suddenly became still, and I began to rise.
I knew it was a mere illusion, for the moment I blinked I was immobilized and had to start again, yet the sensation of rising was still real and exhilarating. For hours I used to play this gazing trick. The heavier the snow fell the faster I rose, and the harder I concentrated the smoother my ride.
In some long stretches of concentration, as the rising sensation sank deep into my body, the ascension felt monotonously endless, as if I were silently floating in an infinite space. I often wished it were real. I was curious to know what lies beyond the sky, the beautiful blue border of my world. I had a suppressed desire to take a look at God’s fearful yet, surely, wondrous land. I wanted to see where God lives! I knew my gazing trick would never take me there, but I was sure that where God lives was a different world.
Many years later, as I became interested in premodern cosmology, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that my childish reveries were not all baseless fantasies. The world might have been much larger than what my little mind could comprehend, but for premodern cosmologists it was still a bounded world. Not only that, but beyond the known bounds another unfolds, one everlasting with wondrous landscape, luminous structures, and spiritual beings.
Through architecture I found myself able to explore the complexities of the bounded universe—its design, order, and meanings— and to examine how cosmological thinking mediates human acts of making and space ordering. (17 )
Ilé-Ifè led the charge, beginning in the eleventh century, to reconceptualize the community of orisa [ by “building on the legacy of [ Yoruba] deep-time cosmological and theogonic thought’’ a] process [that included translating those deities that had regional appeal into a system of filial relationships… and using them as parallel mirrors for viewing and reflecting on … everyday social lives.
The light bouncing from these everyday lives, to borrow the lingo of optical physics, created the infinity effect on these parallel mirrors—the orisa pantheon. The orisa offered…multiple angles to view everyday lives in a series of reflections that receded into an infinite distance.
It would take deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret these reflections. And, inasmuch as…everyday life is not static, the pantheon could not be static. New deities (new parallel mirrors) were therefore created from time to time to capture and account for these new everyday experiences. (18).
Onobrakeya could be seen as suggesting, through the evocative force of this powerfully realized work in two dimensions, a view of the cosmos depicting the universe in terms of the union of the conventionally known three dimensions with a fourth dimension, where non-human, non-animal forms of consciousness intersect with the human, a cosmology dramatizing the human capacity to conceive possibilities beyond the immediate, as described by Tonukari of the classical Urhobo universe:
The Urhobo pantheon features a fascinating and diverse array of divinities. The pantheon is dazzling in its breadth, encompassing voluptuous river spirits, maternal nurturers, exalted wisdom figures, compassionate healers, powerful protectors, cosmic mothers of liberation, and varying forms of female goddesses.
In Urhoboland, deities preside over childbirth, agriculture, prosperity, longevity, art, music, love magic, and occult practices. There are deities who offer protection from epidemics, snakebite, demons, curses, untimely death, and every mortal danger. There are also gods who support practitioners in their pursuit of knowledge, mental purification, a higher rebirth, and full spiritual awakening.
Deities occupy every echelon of the divine hierarchy, from nature spirits embedded in the landscape to cosmic figures representing the highest truths and attainments of Urhobo tradition. Variously beatific and wrathful, tender and fearsome, serene and ecstatic, they represent the energies, powers, and beings that surround and suffuse human life.
They also reflect the inner depths of the human spirit, embodying qualities that may be awakened through spiritual practice. Thus, they are envisioned at once as supernatural beings who minister to those enmeshed in worldly existence, as potent forces that may be invoked through ritual and as models of human aspiration ( 23 ).
The sense of enigmatic meaning in Thanksgiving Dance is amplified by the mysterious script against the background of which the contrastive but seemingly complementary actions of ascension/stasis and frenzied dancing take place, a sequence of graphic forms running across the entire surface of the space against which all the figures are placed, as if evoking a continuum of meaning, a progression of understanding or a potential for knowing represented by symbols as humanity's primal forms of abstracting and projecting meaning.
Hindu thinker Abhinavagupta centralizes relationships between consciousness and meaning, in the form of a tradition of religious scholarship and practice, in celebrating his guild ancestors, his teachers, grounding them in the deities of his school. The image of the lotus is recurrently evoked as indicating the unfolding of consciousness and the cosmos cognized by awareness:
I bow to the flash of consciousness, the consort of Bhairava, the Divine Mother who has assumed the form of the spokes of the wheel of creation as also of the petals of the lotus of the essential constitution of the individual.
I praise the Supreme Goddess, Parā Devī, the creative inspiration of Consciousness, the yogic consort of Bhairava, who has made her abode the lotus-and-trident-throne, its prongs the subject, object and means of knowledge, knower, knowing, and known.
Honor finally to Parapara, the radiating trident of gnosis that destroys the triple enslavement of humans and can annihilate all obstacles on the path to truth.
May the ancient teachers triumph. Glory to the first masters shining like precious pearls in the river of spiritual tradition to which Tryambaka gave his name, stainless helmsmen, unfailing pilots who guide us in the turbulent ocean of the guru’s scriptures effulgent with waves.
Glory to the work performed by the great Utpaladeva from the teachings of the glorious Somananda, who emanates from supreme Consciousness like a perfume spreading everywhere.
We salute the bee-like mind of the Master Laksmašagupta, its enchanting resonance intensified by its total immersion in relishing that Lotus, his teacher Utpaladeva.
Everything I could desire was taught to me by the venerable Cukhulaka, eminent master, the best of teachers, who, having traversed the entire purport of the scripture, rests in perfect bliss. Instruct me in what I desire to learn.
May Śambhunātha be victorious! He who, together with his consort, can elevate the entire universe — he who, by the enlightening rays of his instructions, has made this path of scripture clear to me although profound and hard to grasp. ( 25)
Every [ philosophical ] question was met head on, yet seen in the context of Western thought since the pre-Socratics, a living tradition that was in the room with us like a presence. There were invisible participants in every conversation: it was as if Plato, Hume, Kant and the rest were taking part in our discussion, so that everything we said had naturally to be referred to them, and then back again to us for our critical and often dissenting responses. ( 26 ).
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These constructs evoke the combination of elementary structuring and visual power of the frontal stance of standing figures in edan ogboni, central visual symbols of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order which Onobrakpeya uses with such immense force in his Oracles multi-media series (28).
May they embody the view of the cosmos as a ''three-tiered structure, consisting of the heaven [s] above, the physical world and the world beneath [ each of these] inhabited by different categories of beings'' as Tonukari describes Urhobo cosmology ?. ( 30 )
Could the humanoid forms dramatize these cosmograhic conceptions in terms of a pattern of equilibration akin to the Yoruba Ifa creation story in which cosmic conditions are embodied by awo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa in which ''There-were-no-living-things/ Was the [awo] on earth/ That-which-was-suspended / But-did-not-descend/ Was the [awo] in the otherworld/ All-was-just-empty-space/ With-no-substance/ Was the [awo] of Mid-Air [in] Earth and the otherworld/When they both existed/ With no inhabitants/ In the two empty shells''? ( 31).
The Celestial Sanctum
Between Expansion and Emptiness
....Onobrakpeya's metaphors [demonstrate a] capacity [ for evoking ] new meanings … despite time and age [remaining] forever renewable [ a ] rejuvenation of meaning in every new encounter with the work of art that [ is both playful and engages] the human spirit in the quest for knowledge [ actualizing] The work of art [ as] always remaining open] to be thematized...into... different constellation [s] of meaning for as long as it [is] encountered by all peoples of all times. ( 33 )
References
They are both great explorers of classical African spiritualities. Soyinka, largely those of his native Yoruba, but also correlative with other African systems. Onobrakpeya at the intersection of the spirituality and arts of his Urhobo ancestry with the cognate Yoruba, Edo and Fulani cultures, along with enagements with Ghanaian Adinkra and perhaps other African forms.