Morning Yet on Creation Day
Awakening to the Cosmological Imagination
of the Yoruba Ayajo Asuwada
Between Myth and Lived Experience 2
by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Reworked by ChatGPT
Abstract
On the morning of 6 July 2026, I awoke with the Yoruba cosmological poem Ayajo Asuwada echoing in my mind.
As its cadences unfolded inwardly, the pressures of daily life temporarily receded, replaced by an imaginative participation in the poem's vision of creation.
This essay reflects on that experience, arguing that encounters with powerful images and ideas are not merely aesthetic pleasures but essential resources for psychological and spiritual well-being.
It also compares two English renderings of Ayajo Asuwada—one by Akinsola Akiwowo and another by Solagbade Popoola—suggesting that while Popoola's version creatively incorporates insights from modern cosmology, Akiwowo's more restrained translation preserves the distinctive mythopoetic imagination of the original.
Ultimately, the essay celebrates the Yoruba cosmological imagination as an enduring testament to humanity's capacity to transform the immediate realities of everyday life into expansive visions of the universe and our place within it.
Morning Yet on Creation Day
On waking from sleep on the morning of 6 July 2026, the first thing that came to my mind was the remarkable Yoruba cosmological poem that imagines the world as beginning with the fall of dew.
As its cadences washed over my consciousness, the anxieties that had occupied me for weeks—my personal challenges, the problems of the wider world, and the many projects I have been racing to complete—slowly receded into the background. For a brief but precious interval, I entered another imaginative landscape altogether.
The poem carried me into its architecture of cosmic creation, culminating in its celebration of the creative force responsible for the unity of all existence: from the human being to the fish in the sea; from the hair upon the human head to the grasses covering the savannah; from the clouds drifting across the sky to the forests spreading across the earth. Everything appeared interconnected within a single, living order.
The experience was intensified by the world around me. Outside, dawn was slowly unfolding. The soft light of morning mingled with the gentle dripping that followed the night's rain. The atmosphere itself seemed to echo the poem's quiet vision of creation.
For a while I inhabited what Chinua Achebe beautifully described as "morning yet on creation day"—the title of one of his essay collections—a moment suspended between non-being and being, when nothing yet exists and yet every possibility already lies waiting within existence.
The Healing Power of Inspiring Vision
Experiences such as this remind me how vital it is to cultivate inspiring ideas and images. They are not luxuries. They are essential to mental health and often, through their calming and invigorating effects upon the mind, to physical well-being as well.
Such images may come from any culture and from any domain of human experience. They may be historical or mythical, scientific or religious, factual or fictional, or they may weave all these together.
What matters most is not their classification but their capacity to awaken joy, wonder, and hope.
They should make us smile inwardly. They should elevate our thoughts, renew our appreciation of existence, and remind us that life possesses depths beyond the immediate pressures of daily living.
Encountering Ayajo Asuwada
The poem that illuminated my morning is Ayajo Asuwada. I know two English renderings of this remarkable work.
The first appears in the sociologist Akinsola Akiwowo's pioneering essay Towards a Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry.
The second is by Solagbade Popoola, a babaláwo—an adept of the esoteric knowledge system of Ifa—who enriches the poem by bringing it into conversation with modern scientific cosmology, incorporating images of stars, planets, and the emergence of the universe.
Two Translations, Two Cosmological Sensibilities
Both versions possess considerable beauty, but my own preference remains Akiwowo's translation. Its comparative restraint allows the original imaginative architecture of the poem to shine with exceptional clarity.
Though leaner than Popoola's rendering, it remains luxuriant in imagery and philosophical suggestion.
It draws me more directly into the creative consciousness of the anonymous Yoruba thinker who first conceived it—an ancestor whose mind blazed with imaginative energy as he forged relationships between image and idea, sound and meaning, narrative and philosophical reflection.
Looking with the eye of imagination toward the beginning of time, this creator discerned order within the apparent multiplicity of existence.
From that intuition emerged the concept of Asuwada—order, integration, harmonious togetherness—as the fundamental organising principle linking nature, humanity, and the ultimate source of existence itself.
Popoola's expanded version possesses a different kind of significance.
By introducing contemporary astronomical imagery, he demonstrates that the creativity embodied in the Ese Ifa corpus is not frozen in the past but continues to evolve across generations.
The tradition remains alive precisely because each generation discovers new ways of expressing enduring insights.
The Mythic Power of the Original Yoruba Vision
Yet I continue to find myself more deeply moved by the mythic universe of the earlier rendering. Its cosmology is expressed through recognisably Yoruba landscapes, objects, rhythms, and experiences.
The universe is not presented as distant or abstract but as intimately woven into everyday life. The immense is encountered through the familiar; the infinite reveals itself through what is close at hand.
Cosmology, Creativity, and the Human Spirit
For me, this is one of the greatest achievements of traditional cosmological imagination.
Working entirely within the coordinates of its own culture, it nevertheless reaches toward truths of universal significance.
It transforms ordinary experience into a vision of extraordinary breadth without ever losing contact with the world immediately before our eyes.
Conclusion: Beginning the World Again Each Morning
Perhaps that is the deepest gift Ayajo Asuwada offered me this morning. It reminded me that every dawn can become another creation story.
Each awakening offers the possibility of beginning the world anew—not because the universe has changed overnight, but because imagination continually recreates our relationship to it.
Through poetry, memory, and contemplation, we recover the capacity to see existence once again with the freshness of the first morning of creation.
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