The mentor concept is useful, but Irele was a man I struggled with as well as admired, fought with as well as shared his vision, was disappointed by as well as was disappointed him, worked with as well as strove to carve my own path in relation to him.
The mentor concept is more that of a person being guided by another and I doubt if I enjoyed such a relationship with Irele since my nature faces challenges with such an orientation, an interpretation of my relationship with Irele that has only just come to me as I write this, helping me appreciate aspects of my relationship with him I have not fully understood.
To what degree can one reasonably maintain a prideful stance with a man who is at least ten years older than one's mother, who was active in scholarship well before one was born, whose name features prominently in scholarship when one was barely able to talk?
Everyone to his own story at the breaking of the canoe across the great river, as the ferry man strides across the waterways, the balance of earnings weighed between solidity and sinking.
I salute you, brother, of the great light radiant from deep inside the horizon, the constellations of totality manifest in the arabesque and the spiral.
toyin
On 14 July 2017 at 14:48, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
I get it. In other words you ARE one of his mentees!
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 14/07/2017 01:31 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Missing Abiola Irele
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Abiola Irele was my fan because he admired and identified with my work on various subjects and disciplines, as evident in his open admiration and explicit encouragement of that work.
I was his fan because I admired and identified with his work in various subjects and disciplines, as demonstrated by my study of his work, visible at my blog on his achievements.
He was alert to the significance of practically anything written by me that came to his attention, though these writings were communicated wholly through social media, existing only on self publishing online platforms.
This is striking because he was a scholar whose career was built in the traditional mode of conducting scholarship primarily or wholly through designated official channels such as academic journals and offline academic fora, but in the spirit of ceaseless experimentation that characterized his approach to academic and other discursive platforms, as represented by his work as pioneering editor and possibly founder of New Horn Press which brought out new writers, some of whom, like Niyi Osundare and Harry Garuba, have become luminaries in African literature as well as such works as the first edition of Soyinka's essay collection, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, in impressively produced volumes, and his editorships of various fledgling and more established journals based in or outside Africa, such as the Benin Review, Black Orpheus and the Savannah Review, and his work on such special issues of Research in African Literatures as the one on music and that on African orality, if I recall correctly about that journal, he was open to acknowledging and promoting knowledge and creativity from any source, constantly working to bring the margins into centrality, or demonstrating the centrality of what, in other contexts, could be seen as marginal, from all kinds of African creativity to online creations like mine.
He once suggested he introduce my Blogger platform, constituted by several blogs on various disciplines, from the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination to art and female centred aesthetics, to his students at Harvard, as long as I concealed the erotic blogs, a move I chose not to make in the name of what I understood as my own integrity of vision, since I saw all the blogs as diverse expressions of one orientation.
It was, after all, through constructing videos out of snippets from similar controversial sites that I developed the skills that enabled me make the video Meditation on Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths, integrating the underwater photography and philosophy of David Doubilet, the art of Nicholas Roerich, the poetry of the Hindu Upanishads and of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross, subsumed by the music of Christian Latin Gregorian chants and flute accompanied Sanskrit chanting of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, which Irele admired, if I recall correctly.
A half playful post I made on the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo Group we both belong to about a man who had disappeared from the history of the universe on account of the unanticipated impact of his study of the philosophical qualities and mystical potential of the Ghanaian origin Adinkra symbols led to his asking me to contact him about the possibility of my contributing essays to the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought he edited with Biodun Jeyifo.
I eventually contributed and was paid for the essays "Ifa/Odu", " Ori", "Orisa", central conceptions in Yoruba thought, "Mazisi Kunene", the great South African philosopher and poet and "Modern African Art" . Its possible to read most or all of these essays free online through the 'look inside' function on the book's Amazon page and perhaps through a similar feature in Google books.
He based his assessment of my capacities purely on what I had written not on any knowledge of my academic education, interestingly because all my academic education is in literature, and did not include work in art, Yoruba Studies or philosophy,with the Kunene encyclopedia essay having the only direct relationship with my academic training, that being the subject of my BA dissertation, although I think I took the subject further in the encyclopedia by discussing Kunene's philosophy, presented in the context of his elaboration of his understanding of classical Zulu thought in his introduction to his epic Anthem of the Decades, that introduction being his best work of all I have read, superior even to his epic Chaka and his poetry collections. I have not read some other essays of his and am yet to read Anthem, though.
The opportunity to contribute to that encyclopedia proved strategic because it reinforced my commitment to self education in a broad range of disciplines, integrating my research orientation at the intersection of the visual and verbal arts, spirituality, philosophy and science, correlating African, Western and Asian cultures, emblematised by the encyclopedia essay on Ifa/Odu, which demonstrates the relationship between practically all the disciplines constituted by Ifa-literature, mathematics, spirituality, the visual arts, and herbalogy, and the significance of these disciplinary Ifa achievement beyond Ifa, providing a framework for more detailed work demonstrating the illuminative power of Ifa outside its own explicit disciplinary contexts such as my "Ifa Divination, Autobiographical Theory and the Letters and Selected Paintings of Vincent van Gogh" .
Thanks
toyin
On 13 July 2017 at 06:47, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Was Prof Irele one of your fans or did you mean you were one of his fans?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 12/07/2017 00:31 (GMT+00:00)To: WoleSoyinkaSociety <WoleSoyinkaSociety@yahoogroups.com >, usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com >Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Missing Abiola Irele
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--I will really miss Abiola Irele.
There are certain things one understands better only when it is too late, having blindly related to the world as if immortality was assured, and there would be enough time to do all that needs to be done.
He was one of my dedicated fans, though I performed below expectation too many times, in the spirit of a person drunk on opportunity, the variety a haze blocking clarity of vision.
One might not understand what love is at times, until it is gone.
On the long journey of trying to understand who I really am, he gave me a lot of support, giving unqualified identification to my choice of social media and self publishing online platforms as primary scholarly publicisation systems, on the basis of which he offered me sterling opportunities in mainstream academic publication, some of which I was wise enough to make the most of.
I have never been completely at home with schooling and academia in their currently globally dominant sense, and Irele's appreciation of my efforts as I sought to find my own way has been central fuel in that struggle.
He is a colossus, yet always appreciative of any effort one makes to highlight his inimitable radiance.
Something important is gone from my life.What flows in to occupy the void thus created?
The memory of the coruscation of power that is the master. The foregrounding of the abyss against which one must measure oneself.
I have so much I want to share with you. Work already done which I saw myself as too occupied to share. Work in progress which is likely to delight him. That attentive ear is gone from the space we long shared.
toyin
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