The Shattering of Obatala: Obatala Speaks of Himself; Personalizing Systems of Knowledge: Eruptions of Ifa Tuntun
Image: Crown of Obatala from The High Museum of Art
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Seated in my garden admiring the stars, I wonder about their glory and celebrate the sheer joy they give me as I delight in my ability to enjoy them.
Yes, that situation with the people different from the others still disturbs me.
I was drunk and shaped people in ways that differed from the pattern I had already established.
Imperfection is fundamental to existence, but why did it have to come from me in that instance?
How will I atone for that mistake, reverberating as it will across the centuries, everywhere?
As Obatala sat musing in his garden, he did not know that something even more devastating than the blunder he made in fashioning human beings in ways different from the standard he had earlier set was about to occur.
" The stars seem to stretch into infinity" he observed. "Does infinity exist, as a possiblity beyond this world, perhaps?" he mused.
At that moment, a rock rolling from the hill behind where he sat hit him with terrific force.
He was shattered to pieces, sundered into shards that broke off into space and the corners of the Earth.
It is said that his servant Atunda was the one who rolled that stone unto his employer.
Why?
Anger at the imperfections in terms of which he had been formed by Obatala in the creator 's earlier drunken state?
No one knows.
Another views holds it was Eshu who did it, a child both mischievous and cunning, yet a long range perspective of whose activities some see as generating unanticipated creative and destructive possibilities, making the unexpected one of the richest values of existence.
One stance holds Eshu was envious of Obatala's tranquility, in contrast to his own restlessness, uncomfortable in the most expansive space, at home in the groundnut shell.
Did Eshu do it out of dissatisfaction with stability, with the placid peace represented by Obatala, pushed by the need for rupture, breaking from established order, new creativities emerging, Eshu who turns right into wrong and wrong into right?
Someone watching this story unfold took a calabash, scouring the farthest reaches of the universe and the remotest corners of the Earth, he reconstituted the sundered Obatala.
But the best he could do was reshape Obatala's intelligence and creative power, his essential identity.
The nucleus of possibility that shaped his core Orunmila could not bring together.
No one can return the cosmos to its previous inchoate potential after that potential has begun to unfold.
The unrecovered fragments of Obatala became like the stars, permanently active throughout the universe, constituting the framework of existence.
The orisha.
Hence Obatala became known as Orisanla, the Large or Mighty Orisa, the Source of all the Others.
Salutation to Obatala
Orisa! The Immovable! The Noble One!
He who lives daily in gorgeous greatness;
He is so mighty that he cannot be lifted;
Immense in white robes!
He sleeps in white clothes,
He wakes in white clothes,
He rises in white clothes.
Venerable Father! Yemowo's consort!
Orisa delights me as he is in state;
It is a delectable place where Orisa is enthroned
resting in the sky like a swarm of bees.
(From Bolaji Idowu, Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief, 1962, 75. Last line from African Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional African Poems, compiled and edited by Ulli Beier)
White
the sacred sum of all colours
colour unclouded, orient sapphirine
softly suffusing from meridian height
down the still sky to the horizon line
opposite and companion of black
unknown depth
where life grows
beyond full understanding
the silence enabling deepest knowledge
condition of perfect calm
calling upon
the skeleton and spine
to transform the dweller of peace
into a determined warrior
in the battle of life
gaining a spine and a skeleton
enabling the human journey begin
from its peaceful and patient original state
funfun, whiteness, a force that reveals itself little by little
in stability and peacefulness
unfolding the concealed and mysterious at its core
dudu, blackness, mystery, ewo,
emerging as pupa, redness
spiritual forces of fire and fierceness related to blood, to the passions
the principle that actively infuses any form of germination with power.
Spirits of whiteness
Spirits of darkness
Male and female
Light and darkness birthing totality.
(Adapted from Susanne Wenger, A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland, 88, 210; lines 3-5 from Dante, Purgatory: Divine Comedy, translated by Dorothy Sayers. All lines from mine 11 onward are slightly adapted from Ifa: A Forest of Mystery by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold, 2016, 29-30)
Commentary
A retelling of the sundering of Obatala and his error in moulding some human beings while he was drunk.
The reflection on the imperfections in constructing beings when Obatala was drunk is based on a story I read in various texts, the most striking of which are stated below.
The image of reflecting on the stars comes from German philosopher Immanuel Kant's great meditation on the relationship between the celestial bodies and the human mind in relation to infinity at the conclusion of his Critique of Practical Reason, one of the most wonderful things I have ever read and which I try to recreate for myself on a daily basis as a contemplative practice through my imagination.
The reflective stance through which the story is filtered is shaped by an understanding of the orisha, the deities of Yoruba origin spirituality, as representing human positive and negative potential framed in terms of divine identity, crystallized in Soyinka's characterization of Obatala in his Seven Signposts of Existence, "Man is imperfect; man strives towards perfection. Yet even the imperfect may find interior harmony with nature. Spirit overcomes blemish-be it of mind or body. Oh, peace that giveth understanding, posses our human heart".
The image of Eshu quotes from "Eshu, God of Fate" in Jack Mapanje and Landeg White's edited Oral Poetry from Africa, 1984, 110, the description of Eshu in relation to expansive space and the groundnut shell from that poem reinforced through adapting Biodun Jeyifo on the significance of rupture in knowledge systems in "Abiola Irele: The Scholar as Critic", Perspectives on Nigerian Literature: 1700 to the Present,edited by Yemi Ogunbiyi, 1988, 130-134, 134.
This retelling of the story tries to both amplify the humanness of the values being developed while cosmicizing, as it were, the event of rupture that climaxes the story .
The narrative is thus brought closer to integration into the psychological and philosophical economy of the reader who identifies with it, in the spirit of the understanding of orisa as aspects of the self, but, in my view, aspects of the self in both its terrestrial and cosmic framework.
Sources for the Shattering of Obatala and his Misshaping of People
Bolaji Idowu's Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief.
Ulli Beier 's The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger.
Wole Soyinka's "Idanre".
Noureni Tidjani-Serpos, "The Postcolonial Condition: The Archeology of African Knowledge: From the Feat of Ogun and Sango to the Postcolonial Creativity of Obatala",
( Research in African Literatures
Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 3-18)
Niyi Osundare, "Wole Soyinka and the Atunda Ideal: A Reading of Soyinka's Poetry" ( Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, ed. by Biodun Jeyifo).
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