The first three volumes of Jaap Verduijn's Odu Ifa Collection by Jaap Verduijn and Brenda Beek
One of the delights of my daily reading is the collection of literature from the Ifa system of knowledge assembled by Jaap Verduijn and Brenda Beek as Jaap Verduijn's Odu Ifa Collection, in three volumes of a projected sixteen volumes, each volume addressing one of the odu, the organisational categories and active agents of Ifa, sixteen in number.
Ifa is a spiritual and philosophical system organised in terms of literary expression and mathematical structure, spreading globally from its origins in in Nigeria's Yorubaland.
The work of Verduijn and Beek makes it clear that Ifa has definitively arrived on the world stage as a creative form that may speak to everyone regardless of their cultural orientation, geographical location or dominant belief system.
My encounter with this exquisite collection is one of my more robust relationships with texts in this body of knowledge, ranging across
collections in poetry and prose, scholarly and general.
The distinctive feature of this collection is its highlighting of the imaginative essence, in my view, of Ifa, through the diction, rhythm and imagistic character of the poetry, through unique visual art created for this collection, and through the visual integration of image and verbal text.
Through this complex of features, Verduijn and Beek deliver a powerfully unique rendering of this ancient literature, bringing closer its broader appreciation than before now, of a cultural treasure of global value equal in force to the famous paradoxical beauty of Zen Buddhist stories, the imagistic force of Sufi storytelling, the symbolic quirkiness of Hasidic narrative, as in the older examples represented by Nahman of Bratslav and the more recent collection of Holocaust narratives by Yaffa Eliach.
In these literary forms from Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, we encounter delights of the creative imagination, of the ability to condense a universe of possibility into the tight structure of a short story and yet enable it weave an infinity of interpretive possibility though its encounter with the reader or audience, an encounter that opens a window into humanity's relationship with the sacred, as seen from the prismatic variety radiated from a particular vantage point.
This quality of structural compression and evocative scope is demonstrated in a distinctive manner in Ifa literature, but like a musical score needs skilled musicians and conductors to interpret its power, Ifa literature needs the kind of rendition that would facilitate the unlocking of its ocean of potential value as it travels beyond the musical rhythms and cultural allusions of its original language of composition.
Verduijn and Beek are able to achieve this demonstration of the universality of the value of Ifa literature and its engagement in ritual through the balance of gravitas and play in their rendition of the poetry and the playful wonder of Beek's art, in relation to explicating the ritual application of the literature.
The art evokes the symbolic universe of Ifa in visual terms that delight the eye and may tug at the sensitivity of the mind to layers of semantic value beyond the immediate.
The visual art complements the poetry which is delightful in its transposition of reality, its play with characterisation and action.
Verduijn and Beek succeed in transposing Ifa into a modern idiom, actualising its creative essence through an individualistic rendering of the ancient texts, bringing them alive in the here and now as voices that speak a language native to anyone who is able to allow them to enter into the crevices of one's mind, a language that is all human languages and none, because it transcends all human expressions and yet integrates them, a depth of possibility that may be touched irrespective of one's orientation in relation to the informing beliefs of this literature and its ritual context.
Is anything more needed to take further the achievement demonstrated by Jaap Verduijn and Brenda Beek's Odu Ifa Collection?
That extra step might be the explanation of the technical terms of Ifa philosophy that recur in the verbal text produced by these two creatives.
Another could be a body of commentary that responds to the evocative possibilities of the visual art and its relationship with the verbal text.
These possibilities create a platform for further work in taking forward the implications of this project, the way a literary critic helps to clarify the creative power of a work of art through his reflections on it.
Such reflections, in relation to these books, could involve sharing more of the experience of relating with these creative works, exploring the visual power dramatised by the artistic layout of the books, the role of colour and visual structure in composing the exquisite forms represented by these works, the relationship between these visual configurations and the verbal text in creating what I understand as a ritual form, a perception of the books as ritual, divinatory structures through which one may cultivate a mental map of the symbolic universe of Ifa, that mental map being central to the development of knowledge in Ifa and the deployment of this knowledge in understanding the human condition and how to act within it.
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