Broken English: Poetry and Partiality

The Still Pool Forgets: A Reminding from the Yoruba

The StillPool Forgets A RemindingfromtheYowba The Yoruba people of western Africa, one of the largest ethnic populations south of the Sahara, constitute a powerful urban culture. Yoruba cities fostered rich economic, administrative, and religious systems , and it was precisely this society the western slave trade plundered for human wealth: nearly all slaves brought to the Americas came from west Africa, and of these, Yoruba slaves and their descendants became a most significantinfluence in the cultures of Cuba, Brazil, and other parts of the Americas, includng the United States. These Africans brought with them a deep and practical regard for the arts. In Yoruba cities, sophisticated systems of exchange and dstribution had made markets for weaving, dyeing, iron-worlung, brass-casting, woodcarving, beadwork, leathenvork, and pottery; arts networks grew wide and interdependent. Even Yoruba hunters were said to praise the gifts of those who carve wood or compose song; proficiency in these arts was valued as hlghly as bravery and warrior skills. Among the social features of Yoruba life were powerful polygamous family systems, and a pre-eminence among older women of magicians and spell-binders.Professionaldistinction was accorded singersor poets, who were responsible for perpetuating and embellishing the stories of gods and notable mortals , figures such as Shango (God of Thunder),Ogun (God of Iron),and TheStill Pool Foyets 29 Eshu (God of Fate). In New Orleans and New York today you can find shops in which are sold images of Ogun, god of hunters, warriors, professional circumcisers, all who make use of his metal. From the totemic figure dangle tiny knives and hoes and hammers and machinery-parts;in him many ages meet. Both gods and men can be appeased. Among the functions of the professional poets is the making of honorific names. Unlike naming in patronymic cultures, Yoruba naming occurs not only at birth or marriage , but throughout one's life. There is the name that comes from circumstances of the birth (the-one-with-the-cord-around-his-neck, let us say);there is the name recordingthe parents' (sometimesunsentimental ) sentiments about the event (the-straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back). And there is the third lund of name: oriki.These names are a form of petnaming , praise-naming, poetic name; and though praise names may be assigned at birth, they are earned all through life. A very notable figure may garner many such names, and very great trees, cities, or gods are paid tribute by professional oriki-makers.Ulli Beier (towhose indispensable work I owe my acquaintance with Yoruba poetry) gives, by way of example, the oriki these poets bestowed on the first European explorers in Africa: "a pair of shorts that can worry a large embroidered gown."6 It is an immediately funny and yet painful reminder of colonialhistory, in a practically succinct, semioticgarb. I mean to celebrate the practical premises of Yoruba poems. To the mind of someone brought up on English and American poetry, it secms refreshngly direct-full of humor, wit, and intricateexemplification.Abstraction operates to bespeak, not to outspeak, physical experience. In poems of considerable structural complexity,poems that operate as pulsing signs for human understanding, this ground of Yoruba metaphysics is moving. Yoruba singers and drummers set up powerful long-distance communications (CNN watch out): songs can actually change fates (some 600 gods, after all, are listening; and they can be tickled, pleased, seduced).All the Yoruba gods but one (the unapproachableOlodumare) are variable, mischievous, and yet amusable; and all can kill-there is a god, for example, of smallpox. All are also respected and honored, and there results a peculiar mix of affection and insult that resembles nothing so much as familial relations. Not unlike human beings in their gifts and foibles,Yoruba gods are responsible for love and trouble both. The Yoruba value generosityas wealth. If the poems to the gods don't seem very pious or predictable,perhaps it is because the gods themselves don't: among the originary stories of Yoruba mythology, for example, the occasional tendency of the gods, like human beings, to drink too 30 Broken English much and then make compositional mistakes explains how white people came to be. Riddles and songs collected from very young Yoruba children suggest how free from prurience are subjects America tends to hold taboo. Beier cites the song told hlm bv a six-year-oldgirl, used by little girls to drive boys (eightof them, apparently...