Odun: Discourses, Strategies, and Power in the Yoruba Play of Transformation (review)

Cristina Boscolo’s work is an insightful contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Yoruba performance studies. She situates her work in the context of an in-depth discussion of the current state of Yoruba performance criticism, while breaking new interpretive grounds in the study of odun (festivals). Boscolo provides a context-sensitive understanding of the multiplicity of meanings and aesthetic dimensions that can be attached to a given performance as she focuses on odun Edi (Moremi’s festival) in Ile-Ife and odun egungun, the festival in honor of the ancestors.

The study begins with a perceptive and well-informed presentation of different strands of scholarly discourse on Yoruba festival traditions. From a metacritical standpoint, the author dissects the power structures that have shaped critical discourses on Yoruba performing arts. The hegemony of Western academic discourses, questions of power and marginalization in academia, and issues such as access and non-access to publication have privileged some discourses (i.e., English-language written academic discourses), while marginalizing others (e.g., critical discourses in the Yoruba language). The influence of Western critical models is evident in conventional classifications of Nigerian theatre (as in Yemi Ogunbiyi’s Theatre and Drama in Nigeria, 1981), and has shaped the long-standing debate on whether to classify specific genres as ritual or as (traditional/modern) theatre/drama. Literary discourses in the Yoruba language as well as oral in-performance criticism (see Opefeyitimi) have been marginalized.

Boscolo suggests studying Yoruba festival traditions within their eco-environment, which can be described in terms of Yoruba history, society, politics, and Yoruba aesthetics (see xxv). Odun is at once etutu (ritual), ere (play), and iran (spectacle) (see 86). In aesthetic terms, odun appeals to concepts of external and internal beauty, hence the relevance of the culturally salient notion of iwalewa, i.e. “being is beautiful, character is beautiful” (136).

The path toward understanding odun, Boscolo argues, lies in exploring the complex links that both odun Edi (Moremi’s festival, celebrated in Ile-Ife) and odun egungun set up with underlying itan (histories, stories, myths). The festivals convey aabo oro—half words—that allude to and thereby selectively activate memories and images of itan, while also introducing departures (306). Boscolo draws on Margaret Thompson Drewal, who in her book on Yoruba Ritual: Performance, Play, Agency (1992) not only highlights that each re-performance of a ritual contains within it change and critical difference, but also a transformative capacity. It is here that Boscolo’s important understanding of odun festivals as plays of transformation comes into play. Odun Edi, which celebrates the heroic contributions of a woman, Moremi, to the history and survival of the people of Ile-Ife, is a festival in which the Moremi legend (itan) is re-enacted in selective and fragmentary ways. The performance creates, Boscolo argues, “images, remembrances, recollections” of the story behind Moremi (178), thereby transforming and manipulating underlying itan in order to comment on and transform the contemporary socio-political landscape of the town, for example, by expressing loyalty to or criticism of the town’s present rulers. Boscolo’s study continues with an equally thoughtful discussion of the transformative power of odun egungun, masquerade festivals that celebrate the power of the ancestors in the life of the living (191), and egungun alare, performances that are rooted in the power of ancestors, but focus on entertainment. Through layers of meanings created by the interplay of masques, changing attires, dance movements, musical styles, and poetics texts, these performances simultaneously hide and reveal, silence and disclose a multiplicity of meanings, selectively engage with the past, thereby effecting a multiplicity of transformations. These range from the transformations a performer undergoes when he is invested with the power of the ancestors, the transformations that an egungun alare performer undergoes as he swiftly manipulates the different layers of his clothes to change into a multiplicity of identities, to the transformations of actual...