Susanne Wenger: Artista E Sacerdotessa: By Paola Caboara Luzzatto
"To build a shrine is like performing a religious ritual. The aim is the same: Bringing to awareness what was in the dark, rediscovering the mythical event in the present, taking the divinity down to the world, finding the divine inside ourselves." Amazon.com
Synopsis:
Paola Caboara Luzzatto's Susanne Wenger: Artist and Priestess is bilingual, written in Italian and English. Though a small book, it is structured into five parts. Evidently, Luzzatto takes her time to do this neat structuring in order to better present the dramatic, though systematic, self-immersion of Susanne Wenger, the subject of the book, in Yoruba traditional religion. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this bilingual book of biography is that it records rather than tell. It records the words of the artist and priestess Susanne Wenger. In this style it reads as concise and direct. It also offers us the untainted wisdom, the mystical lore, of a rare woman turned half-human-half-god. The author very methodically conditions herself as a medium through which Susanne Wenger's enchanting words reaches the reader with an aura of mysticism.
It is thus through her own words that the reader delves into the life and practice of Susanne Wenger alias Adunni Olorisa, the iconoclastic, legendary priestess of Obatala (the divinity of creation, of the Sky) and Sonponna (the divinity of suffering, of the earth) in Yoruba traditional religion. She was indeed a strange phenomenon in Oshogbo, Nigeria. Though an Austrian, she lived in Yorubaland for over sixty years, not as an expatriate (as she ought to have been, having arrived Ibadan as an expatriate scholar's wife), not as a researcher, not as one of those Europeans who came to Africa in the 1950s to amuse themselves with primitive, paganistic folkways of the Africans, but as a naturalized (she disliked the word "converted") native, fully involved in the native religion now declared heathen by even some of the natives who had converted to Christianity and Islam.
Susanne Wenger herself knew of the strangeness of her immersion in the Yoruba traditional religion. She was also worried that people, especially her fellow Europeans, interpreted her involvement in negative, derogatory ways, and were inclined to, in her own word, "psychoanalyse" her. But one very frank thing that keeps recurring in the narrative is the strangeness of her entire being, which only became meaningful even to herself when she embraced the Yoruba religion. Raised by parents who "were both gifted and frustrated" (122), often spending her childhood nights crying ("I would allow myself to cry, and nobody ever knew" (121)), Susanne Wenger did not only get into the depth of loneliness and meditation, she also began to plumb the spiritual dimension of objects, such as the trees and the rivers around her. She naturally grew up a deviant, a communist.
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