Quintessence of Yoruba Aesthetics
A Very, Very Short Annotated Selection
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Rationale for this Compilation and Criteria for Selection
Looking back over years of exploration of a subject, one may wish to sum up what one is learning or to highlight the most striking, the most impressive examples of what one has encountered.
I am also interested in providing something that could equal some of the striking anthologies regularly produced on Western aesthetics and critical theory in which such great works as German philosopher Immanuel Kant's section on the Sublime in his Critique of Judgement are placed alongside texts by other masters of European thought.
The selections here were made both for the significance of the message being communicated as well as for their power of expression, the quality of communication they demonstrate, because the manner in which an idea is projected is strategic to how the idea is understood.
I'm also interested in writing as an art form as well as an intellectual instrument, a means of thinking as well as of communicating thinking.
I hope one day to publish the selections below as a book, followed by another selection, a selection of such remarkable texts drawn from work relating to other parts of Africa or to Africa as a whole, such as Olu Oguibe's "El Anatsui : Beyond Death and Non-Nothingness, " African Arts, Vol.31, Issue 1,1998, Chinua Achebe's ''The Igbo World and its Art," the foreword to Herbert Cole and Chike Aniakor's Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos, 1984 and Norma Rosen's "Chalk Art in Olokun Worship," African Arts, Vol.23, Issue 3, 1989, 44-88.
Selections
1. Rowland Abiodun, ''The Future of African Art Studies : An African Perspective'' in African Art Studies : The State of the Discipline. Washington: Smithsonian, 1987, 63-89.
The best summation of Yoruba aesthetics known to me. Passionate, ideationally rich and lucid. Maps Yoruba aesthetics in terms of an intersection of metaphysics, an enquiry into the nature of existence, and ethics, explorations of how best to live.
2. "The Yoruba World," the first chapter of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989, is superb on relationships between central concepts in Yoruba metaphysics and Yoruba aesthetics, investigations of art and of beauty, as these correlations are demonstrated by Yoruba art.
Powerful illustrations, insightfully organized within the text for maximum effect, further foreground the discussions of relationships between ase, creative, cosmic force, and individuality of the self, ori, within the matrix represented by the convergence of material and spiritual worlds, aye and orun, an understanding particularly strongly realized in the distinctive cognitive and artistic cultures of the Yoruba institutions Ifa and Ogboni, richly represented here through few but powerful examples of their visual art, carefully discussed by the authors.
The images at the copy of that chapter in the link above are impressive but do not come near the clarity of those in the complete book, a magnificent visual feast across its thick breadth.
3. Babatunde Lawal, "Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art," The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2001, 498-526.
Magnificent on ideas of perception and recreation of perception in relation to the nature of the self as understood in Yoruba thought.
Encyclopedic on a miniature scale as the author draws in a broad range of references in the Yoruba philosophical and historical cosmos in developing his thesis. Richly illustrated with pictures of works of art and of people representing the essay's ideas.
4. Rowland Abiodun, "Verbal and Visual Metaphors: Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori ." Word and Image 3/3, 1987: 252–70.
This is an infinitely rich essay on intersections between human and divine creativity within a cosmogonic and terrestrial frame. The essay displays Abiodun at his best in oscillation between Yoruba literature, Yoruba art and expositions in English.
Cosmogonic evocations are brought alive in terms of both cosmic grandeur and human personification in philosophizing through poetry on the roots of human reflective and expressive powers.
The essay is significantly shaped by some of the best examples and English translations anywhere of Yoruba literature as represented by ese ifa, literature of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge.
This essay is reworked as the first chapter of Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, 2014, where it is further developed in terms of a theory of the Yoruba expressive concept oriki unifying the entire book, the book itself a summation of Yoruba aesthetics from Abiodun's perspective.
In correlating human and divine creativity, the essay be better appreciated in comparison with Lawal's ''Àwòrán'' and ''Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics,'' Literature & Aesthetics 15 (1):161-174 (2005).
5. Wole Soyinka, "Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype," " Drama and the African World View" and "The Fourth Stage" in Myth,Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
A uniquely individualistic journey through the origins of drama in ritual as the human being tries to make sense of the cosmic context of his existence through imaginative action within space.
The focus of examples is on Yoruba literature in its philosophical and spiritual significance, in comparison with references to Diaspora African, Western and Asian cultures. Soyinka combines wonderfully ideational exposition with evocations of personal response to the wonders of the ideas and experiences he describes. Contains various memorable sentences demonstrating Soyinka's inimitable poetic force.
6. Ọlabiyi Babalọla Yai, "In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1993, 29-37 and in The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Edited by Rowland Abiodun, Henry John Drewal, and John Pemberton III, pp. 107-115. Washington: Smithsonian, 1994.
Yai's best published essay known to me. The essay is beautiful in its manner of conceiving and expressing ideas, demonstrating the epistemic range, the capacity for developing broad ranging knowledge, of Yoruba expressions, in a manner that unifies metaphysics, history and aesthetics.
This essay is complemented by another Yai masterwork, his review of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989 (African Arts,Vol. 25,No. 1, 1992, 20+22+24+26+29 ) and by Yai's ''Tradition and the Yoruba Artist,'' African Arts , 1999, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, 32-35+93).
Those other essays help make clearer Yai's discussion of the relationship between the Yoruba concept of the self, ori, as applying to all entities, animate and inanimate, as individual and social entities, the multi-artistic evocation of the expression of the self, oriki, and the exploration of these expressions within narratives mapping these dynamisms within space and time, itan, as Yai's descriptions of these concepts may be summed up.
7. Rowland Abiodun, "Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase," African Arts, Vol. 27 (3)1994: 68–103"Àṣẹ:Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art," Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 24, 4, 1994, 309-322.
These two essays, along with the ''Ase: The Empowered Word Must Come to Pass," a chapter in Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language where both essays are reworked, are the only in depth examinations known to me of this particularly strategic concept of àṣẹ in Yoruba thought.
They are complemented by the introductory but ideationally and visually superb presentation of the subject in the first chapter, "The Yoruba World," of Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought,1989.
These works are also better appreciated in comparison with Ahmadou Hampate Ba on the metaphysics of language among some African peoples in his "The Living Tradition," in The UNESCO General History of Africa.Vol.1: Methodology and Prehistory. Ed.J.Ki-Zerbo. Heinemann, 1981,166-205.
"Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics" is particularly rich in expository scope and dazzling wealth of visual illustrations, visualities which are better accessed through the JSTOR link rather than the University of Amherst link above.
Across both essays Abiodun's characteristically luxuriant grasp of the evocative sonorities of the Yoruba language is at play, carefully rendered in the original, translated with sensitivity to both imaginative power and communicative force, expounded in English both precise and poetically sensitive. The essays are pillars of Yoruba aesthetics and philosophy. I hope a book of this calibre or greater, dedicated to this subject, will emerge if it has not already.
8. Babatunde Lawal, "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni," ( African Arts, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1995, 36-49+98-100) is the most important essay known to me on the Yoruba origin esoteric order, Ogboni.
The essay is summative of a vast subject and yet profound in that compression of breadth. The ideational power and aesthetic potency of Ogboni thought and art shine through in Lawal's intellectually powerful prose, at times soaring into incantatory force as he tries to get to the heart of the glorious ideas he grapples with. The superb images, exquisitely arranged in various sizes within the text, dramatize some of the lived experience of those whom these ideas represent, the Ogboni.
This is another encyclopedic essay from Lawal, in which a breadth of ideas providing a perspective on Yoruba thought in general is brought to bear on a subject examined in careful detail in a manner demonstrating its imaginative and ideational power.
9. Richard Olusegun Babalola's "Architectonic Interregnum," INTBAU, is a splendid discussion of Yoruba architectural theory and practice in terms of the relationship between Yoruba metaphysics and spatial and social order.
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