Thanks.
Dynamism of Yoruba Discourse and How to Present It
In the essay being discussed, I stated that I am adding an expansion of the original expression on relationships between òwe , metaphorical expression, and discourse, òrò.
I integrated the standard version and made clear to the reader that I was adding an expansion of that version, and stated my sources.
In my response to Afolayan, I also described such addition as a demonstration of the dynamism of Yoruba discourse.
This dynamism is about the expansive interpretive possibilities of nature and of artistic forms responding to nature.
On the discussion of the logic of stating that òrò , discourse, may be understood as the vehicle for understanding òwe, metaphorical expression, your analysis is limited to the perception of òrò as words.
Òrò and òwe, in this hermeneutic system, are both verbal and non-verbal.
--Ojogbon Toyin Adepoju.
You totally miss Ojogbon Afolayan's point. Ebenezer Obey did not coin the proverb whose older version was used by Rowland Abiodun. Obey 'signified upon' ( to use an African- American phrase) a usage whose authorship your initial hunch correctly interpreted to be unknown., mainly for musico- rhetorical effect even though Obey understood its correct usage.
If you are writing and not singing the Obey music in question, you are obliged to use the correct form and not the Obey version. Obey was involved in artistry, you are involved in scholarship. Even if you are involved in the analysis of Obey's music you will be required to compare Obeys artistic representation with normal usage and not substitute one for the other as if they are one and the same.
It is hermeneutically meaningless in normal usage to say ',Òrò l'eşin òwe' The Yorùbá will tell you Àşìpa òwe. (Incongruous proverb.) It is like Achebe saying ' words are the palm oil with which proverbs are eaten. i.e. words make proverbs intelligible rather than proverbs make words intelligible.
If you want to analyse why Obey used this non- familiar form then you go into the metaphor- musical second stage of analysis. But your essay is not about music in general nor Ebenezer Obey's music per se.
OAA
Mr. President you took an oath to rule according to the Constitution.
Where are the schools to promote the teaching of the country's lingua francas?
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>Date: 12/10/2020 02:58 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Cc: Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Yoruba Affairs - The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin : An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 2 : Interpretive Contexts [Edited]
Great thanks, Oga Afolayan.
Please forgive the length and possibly complexity of my response.
I see your question as an opportunity to examine the relevant aspect of Yoruba hermeneutics, techniques of interpreting relationships between expression and the meaning of life, as I understand that term ''hermeneutics'' so far.
Dynamism of Yoruba Discourse
I am aware of the older version of the expression you reference.
Rowland Abiodun's book, Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, which I discussed, uses the older version.
I have chosen to add the expansions which I stumbled upon on a Facebook page because I see them as a creative development facilitating a richer exposition of the concepts at play.
Thanks for the description of the famous musician Ebenezer Obey as having coined that superbly apt expression, the Yoruba equivalent of Achebe's famous Igbo derived expression in Things Fall Apart, ''proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.''
I had thought the Yoruba expression was one of those the creator of which is unknown.
Authorship by Obey leading to its use by Abiodun decades later, a progression from popular culture to academic culture, would be a demonstrating of the dynamism of Yoruba discourse, a dynamism emerging from individual creativity and at times flowering into public acceptance, a progressive force further dramatized by the verbal artist who has chosen to expand the decades old expression.
Oro as the Totality of Human Reflective and Expressive Capacity
The concept of oro I am working with goes beyond language, in and of itself, to encapsulate the totality of human reflective and expressive capacity, of which language is a principal vehicle.
Abiodun describes oro as referring to a subject of discussion, an issue under consideration, a point of reference.
Pius Adesanmi ' in ''Oju L'Oro Wa'' aligns with this perspective in translating oro as ''discourse.''
An unidentified translator is quoted by Arthur Nguyen on the exhibition ''The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts'' as translating the well known Yoruba expression ''Oju L' Oro Wa'' as ''Oro, the essence of communication, takes place in the eyes.''
Oro as Grounded in Divine Mind
Abiodun takes these ideas further in identifying oro, not only with subjects referenced by human beings, but with the roots of such reference in human cognitive capacity grounded in divine wisdom, knowledge and understanding, an ultimacy to which human discourse may be seen as ultimately aspirational, with owe, metaphorical expression, particularly in its use of oriki, expressions mapping the nature and development of an entity, as means of reaching to this ultimate source of thought, knowledge and expression.
Oro as Vehicle for Understanding Owe, Metaphorical Expression
Is it possible for oro to be a vehicle for unravelling owe, metaphorical expression, a ''horse'' carrying the hermeneutic explorer deeper into understanding the evocative force of associative expression in words, sound, images and performance, as Abiọdun describes the scope of owe?
Is owe not better understood as an aspect of oro?
Oro as Verbal and Non-Verbal
One could reference different aspects of oro, the verbal and the non-verbal.
Linear and Non-Linear Verbalization
Within the verbal, one could identify the linear and the non-linear.
The linear represents denotative expression, where there is a relatively direct relationship between language and referent.
The non-linear, which corresponds to owe, metaphorical expression is allusive, evocative, connotative.
As I do in the essay, I use the more directly referential, linear expression in explaining the evocative, indirectly expressive owe quoted in the essay.
Would that make such linear expression akin to the swiftness of a horse in unravelling meaning, as ''Òrò l'e ẹṣin òwe'' '' Discourse as a steed, swift vehicle of owe, metaphorical expression,'' indicates?
Òwe, Metaphorical Expression, as a Privileged Mode of Discourse
In examining this question, we could begin by examining the paradox that underlies the entire expressive sequence.
In what sense, actually, is the following conventionally accepted formulation a practical idea?
''Òwe l'ẹṣin ÒròTi Òrò bá sọnùòwe la fií wáa''
which may be translated in the following non-literal manner in order to realize the scope of ideas being evoked-
''Òwe, metaphorical expressions, are the steeds of thought and expression,swift vehicles of discoursewhen discourse is lostit is sought out using metaphorical exploration.''
Òwe l'ẹṣin Òrò, Metaphorical Expressions as Steeds of Discourse
That ''metaphorical expression are the steeds of discourse'' is a universally accepted fact bcs they take expression beyond conventional levels, communicating with a swiftness enabled by integrating otherwise diverse ontological categories to communicate unified meaning.
The Baboon and the Hunter
This is exemplified in the line from Adeboye Babalola's translation ' Salute to the Baboon' in his The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (1976, 95-99) poetry of hunters in Yoruba literature, addressing the baboon as he '' from whose hands the hunter has not received a wife/Yet who receives self- prostration homage from the hunter''.
This is a salute of the hunter poet to the nobility of his prey by evoking the Yoruba tradition of prostrating to one's prospective in laws at a wedding.
This evocation visualizes the hunter seeming to prostrate as he lies supine in hiding fixing his gun on the baboon.
This metaphorical expression conjoins the art of hunting and human dependence on the life of other creatures, within the context of the nobility of those creatures, ideas further developed in the poem.
Thus, metaphorical expression conjoins various domains of reference to deliver meaning through breadth of association at a speed beyond non-metaphoric expression.
Òwe, Metaphorical Expression, as Means of Seeking Lost Understanding
Does this help in explaining the logic of, the rest of the expression, ''Ti Òrò bá sọnù/ òwe la fií wáa,'' if discourse goes astray or is lost, we seek it out using metaphorical expression'' ?
How can the allusive, the indirect and evocative help to clarify a subject that has escaped understanding?
Why use what is not straightforward in understanding something challenging to understand?
Does the expression suggest a view of reality as a complexity that resists easy categorization, and is therefore best appreciated through evocation rather than explicit description?
A view suggested, perhaps, by the ironic complexity of the relationship between the baboon and the hunter in the line previously quoted, reinforced later on in the poem by such lines saluting the baboon as ''Gentleman on the tree top, whose fine figure intoxicates him like liquor,'' ''He whom his mother gazed and gazed upon and burst out weeping/ Saying her child's handsomeness would be the death of him''?
Òrò, Discourse, as Vehicle for Understanding Òwe, Metaphorical Expression
In examining these questions, in reflecting on challenging subjects through the vehicle of imaginative expression, might one not need to break these ideas down to their fundamentals, trying to work out how imaginative expression is related to its referent, an explicatory process that carries the navigator towards understanding, even if at a slower speed than the user of metaphor in weaving the nets meant to illuminate the otherwise perplexing?
In doing that, may one not be employing the literal aspect of oro, discourse in its verbal, denotative form in trying to understand the allusive and connotative?
Would one not be therefore engaging in using this aspect of oro as a steed for exploring the meaning of owe, metaphorical expression?
Is that slow explicatory process not what Abiodun's book is about as he grapples with the evocative powers of the visual, verbal and performative arts?
thanks
toyin
--On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 23:07, 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Thanks, Toyin Adepoju, for another spate of exposition. May your energy continue to surge. Please give attention to this quote from your write-up:
Òwe l'ẹṣin Òrò.
Òrò l'e ẹṣin òwe.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
òwe la fií wáa.
Ti òwe bá sọnù
Òrò la fií wáa.
Be aware that the Yoruba do not render this proverb in the above form. There is no "Oro l'esin owe" after the sentence "Owe l'esin oro" and there is nothing like "Ti owe ba sonu/oro l'a fi n wa a." The first part is the creation of Ebenezer Obey in the early 70s when he sang "Owe L'esin Oro." The last two lines above are totally new. Except, perhaps, you want to marry these lines with the once-talked-about post-proverbials, this would not fit within the context of Yoruba rhetoric.
I assume the addition of "Nítórīwípé àwọn méjèjì/jõún gūn ãrã wõn l'ẹ́sīn nī"is just a side comment and not a part of the Yoruba saying or even a part of the belief system off the people because only òwe is the metaphoric horse for the word. It would be a pragmatic misnormal for the word to be presented as the metaphoric horse for the proverb.
Just my small observation.
MOA
On Sunday, October 11, 2020, 1:02:18 PM GMT+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
In the first paragraph under the section on ''Òwe,'' I have added a reference to John Barrow's The Artful Universe ( 1995) where he argues for the imprinting of cosmos on the human self in the development of human aesthetic orientations, an argument I use in explaining the source of avian imagery in Ọpa Ọsanyin.
The Cosmos in a Staff
The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin
An Understudied Example of Great Yorùbá Art
Part 2
Interpretive Contexts
Image Above
Climbing the Tree
Perched on a pole marked by bundles of raffia grass, the elegant bird looks out over the landscape of possibility represented by the staff of which it is the summit.
Grass and its vegetative associations in relation to nature in general. The pole, upright like a tree on which a bird is perched. A tree reaching deep into Earth and towards the sky.
Its branches, the possibilities of existence. Its roots, the source, its crown, the cosmos. Its trunk, the link between them all.
The babaláwo, adept in the networks of possibility emerging from the intersection of spirit and matter as understood in theYorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge, and the Iyáláwo, his female counterpart, as named in Ayodeji Ogunnaike's "Mamalawo? The Controversy Over Women Practicing Ifa Divination" ( 2018, 20), climb this tree as they explore these intersections, seeking answers to human queries at the points where the branches grow out of the trunk, where cosmic possibility and material reality converge.
In climbing the tree, they aspire to stand poised at its apex, surveying the universe of possibilities, of being and becoming, existence and change, directing it as they can.
At times, these adventurers are imaged as chameleons, adapters to various environments, diverse but interrelated domains of existence, climbing the pole towards the summit.
This is one approach to interpreting the staff above, integrating ideas from various sources in terms of my own perspectives. The staff is described at its Facebook source at Grains Of Africa -Home Of Fine African Art And Antiquities, as an Ọpa Ọsanyin, embodying the power of Ọsanyin, the Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants.
It is similar in appearance, however, to an Osùn Babaláwo, a staff representing the spiritual allies of a babaláwo, as shown in the image below of a babaláwo holding a similar staff from Henry John Drewal et al's Yoruba:Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (1989, 41).
Image AboveThe Procession
Avian imagery in association with staffs, is the shaping character of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Osùn Babaláwo, enabling them share significant associational convergences, as this essay demonstrates.
Oluwatoyin Vincent AdepojuComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is a brief examination of the interpretive contexts, embracing Yorùbá verbal and visual arts, philosophy and spirituality, that converge in the construction and associative power of Ọpa Ọsanyin, a metal structure made up of a pole with birds clustered round it and a bird surmounting the pole, a dramatization of the beauty of nature and its evocative force representing Ọsanyin, the Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology deity of the spiritual and biological power of plants.
The essay employs an example of the similar but less visually complex Osùn Babaláwo in building the foundations for exploring Ọpa Ọsanyin and proceeds to study various examples of the Ọsanyin staff in forthcoming parts of this essay series.
This study of Ọpa Ọsanyin is inspired by my ongoing project "Intrinsic and Universal Significance of Yoruba Aesthetics : Babatunde Lawal and Rowland Abiodun" in which the symmetrical clustering of birds around a central bird is used in symbolizing the unity of individual research orientations around a common ideal in constituting the Ifè School of Yoruba Studies, as I name a culture of the former University of Ifè, now Obafemi Awolowo University, foundational to the scholarly careers of Abiodun and Lawal.
Continued from Part 1.
Contents
Image : Climbing the Tree
Image : The Procession
Abstract
Acknowledgements
The Grandeur of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Limitations in its Study
Image : Flight from Manifestation to Origins
Responding to the Inspiration of Ọpa Ọsanyin
Interpretive Contexts
Ọpa Ọsanyin as an Example of Yorùbá Arts of Nature
The Bird Motif as Evocative of the Dynamism of Àse, Creative Cosmic Force, in Ọpa Ọsanyin,
Osùn Babaláwo and Ọpa Erinlè
Ìwà : Between the Intrinsic Character of a Phenomenon and its Associative Values
Òwe, Imaginative Expression, and Òrò, the Unity of Thought and Expression, as Correlative Horses of
Discourse
Bird Imagery and the Fascination of the Forest
Ọsanyin, Dweller in the Forest, Master of Plant Lore
Image : A Journey from Knowing to Knowing
Acknowledgements
Great thanks to Henry John Drewal,
sculptor of delightful and mysterious beauties,
maker of images and stories of light, sound and motion,
projecting varied lifeways of diverse peoples,
writer of ever restless creativity,
scholar majestic,
Everest of Yorùbá and African arts studies and their ideational dimensions,
journeyer intrepid into regions recondite,
companion of the arcane glories of Gèlèdé of mysterious feminine powers,
as we journey to and fro seeking this and that in this landscape of knowing,
where does your voice not resound,
digger into the world of water spirits and their human companions,
expositor of the beauty and meanings of beads in the Yorùbá cosmos,
master of Striking Iron,
dweller in ideas yet demonstrator of the unity of body/mind,
collaborator extraordinaire,
only God knows how you are able to organise those glorious once-in-a-lifetime art exhibitions.
We salute you for this journey you are walking,
entering unto this planet well before our eyes opened to the light of this world
and clearing the way for the likes of us decades before they expanded to the glory of this search.
O master,
adepto cognitio,
your name penetrates everywhere are assembled those who rightly know,
so do I celebrate your journeys tireless by invoking great texts crafted by you on this quest.
May all who seek to explore the cosmos of Yorùbá and African Arts enjoy the privilege of your guidance and that of your collaborators, among whom we salute the particular prominence of Rowland Abiodun, Margaret Thompson Drewal, John Pemberton III and John Mason.
Great thanks for your consistent goodwill represented by sending me your essay with Rowland Abiodun, ''Ògún/Gu's Resonance in Yorùbá, Edo, and Fon Worlds, ''which confirmed my speculations on Ọpa Ọsanyin and Osùn Babaláwo.
Great thanks too to Seyi Ogunfuwa for his call one morning, describing his quest for knowledge across various spiritualities and secular systems of knowledge as he develops his own philosophy, encouraging my work on the study of the Yoruba origin Ògbóni esoteric order in creating a new school of this body of ideas and practices.
I salute Akinsola Abiodun Solanke for his translation suggestions and translations included in this essay. I am very grateful for Kola Tubosun's advice on tone marks in the expression on the mutuality of imaginative expression and discourse in Yoruba thought.
Such interactions represent my sustaining community as an Independent Scholar.
The Grandeur of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Limitations in its Study
Ọpa Ọsanyin is one of the greatest examples of Yorùbá art, yet this construct, pictures of many varied examples of it readily available online from art dealers in different parts of the world, is little studied in the literature in English on Ọsanyin and associated art, to the best of my knowledge of writings in Yorùbá Studies, which I know as embracing Yorùbá, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, although I think the paucity of information on the subject in texts in English is likely to suggest a similar state in other languages.
Awo Fategbe's '' Ọsanyin'' and Don Egbelade's "Yorùbá Ọpa Ọsanyin Erinle Herbalists Staff", both on Facebook, John Mason on Ọsanyin in Black Gods : Òrìsà Studies in the New World (1998, 36-39) and Nicholas De Mattos Frisvold's Ifá : A Forest of Mystery (2016, 43-8) are priceless on Ọpa Ọsanyin symbolism.
They are complemented by Henry John Drewal and Rowland Abiodun's "Ògún/Gu's Resonance in Yorùbá, Edo, and Fon Worlds,'' from Allen Roberts' et al's Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths ( 2019, 278-307) which discusses Ọpa Ọsanyin and the similar Osùn Babaláwo, staff of the babaláwo, adept in the esoterica of the Yoruba origin Ifá system of knowledge.
The interpretations from these texts, being those readily available to me and brief yet richly insightful, will be used in this essay series on Ọpa Ọsanyin in constructing a unification of perspectives on this art and expanding those interpretive examples.
Henry John Drewal et al in Yorùbá: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (34) represent one of the few instances known to me of response to the technical genius of what might be a demonstration of this artistic form, describing the "simple, graceful lines and energetic interplay of curves'' in a particular example of a pole topped by birds, which may be an Ọpa Ọsanyin. This effort is inspirational for developing sensitivity to the skill actualized by the imaginative manipulation of metal evident in Ọpa Ọsanyin art, a sensitivity which needs to be further cultivated and highlighted.
The only texts I know which discuss Ọpa Ọsanyin at some length are Robert Farris Thompson's "Icons of the Mind: Yorùbá Herbalism Arts in Atlantic Perspective," (African Arts, Vol.8. No.3. 1975. 52-59+89-90) and the Barakat Gallery notes on Ọsanyin and Osùn staffs in the section of their website on Yorùbá Staffs.
Thompson's "Icons of the Mind'' is a superb essay on the relationship between Ọsanyin beliefs and Ọsanyin art, providing a tantalizing and foundational description of the symbolic possibilities of this creativity within the Yorùbá cultural universe and its diasporic expressions.
This foundational account needs to be built upon. The associative values of this sculpture beyond its originating frameworks, speaking to the human experience in other contexts, also need to be developed.
The Barakat Gallery notes on Ọsanyin and Osùn staffs are the most sustained verbal response known to me to the interrelations between the associative values of Ọpa Ọsanyin in relation to Yorùbá culture and the artistry of the staffs.
These descriptions are priceless expositions of how the technical dexterity of these works is inspired by and projects an ideational universe, a cosmology unifying the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, humans, deities and the arcane personalities who unify these possibilities of existence, witches, portrayed as birds , and diviners, depicted as both birds and chameleons.
Magnificent as these expositions are, however, they represent one strand of possible interpretations of Ọpa Ọsanyin and Osùn Babaláwo and their interrelationship, a singular perspective that needs to be complemented by others, as I try to do in this essay, guided, among other sources, by the Barakat Gallery notes which I reproduce in a collage of quotes in a subsequent part of this essay series, quotes slightly edited by myself to create a unified text while retaining their distinctive language and expressive force.
The associative values and imaginative and technical genius of the Ọpa Ọsanyin sculptural corpus cry out for better understanding within their perception as an open ended development of artistic potential, a majestic demonstration of creativity within a very basic yet imaginatively inspiring and infinitely evocative tradition, in which variations are developed within a fixed set of possibilities represented by the bird motif.
Image Above
Flight from Manifestation to Origins
The sinuous flow from the exquisitely pointed beak to the neck and body, streamlined for flight, may recall English writer John Milton's description of "the poet, soaring in the high regions of his fancies, with his garlands and singing robes about him," an avian metaphor also relevant for Rowland Abiodun's description of the role of poetic, imaginative expression in the quest for and the creation of meaning, derived from the thought of thinkers in the classical Yoruba tradition, as he presents these ideas and his synthesis of them in Yoruba Art and Language( 2014, 24-52).
The Miltonian and Abiodun images are another instantiation of the depiction of creative and cognitive activity in terms of flight, represented, with particular force, by Christian mystical poet St. John of the Cross' account of flight in search of prey, on seizing which quarry he is plunged into darkness, a darkness representing transcendence of all he knows, an evocation of quest for ultimate reality that resonates with Abiodun's description of metaphorical expression, òwe, as understood in Yorùbá, as a means of penetrating from the social and material actualization of human thought and expression to its ultimate enablement in the sources of existence, "òwe as visual and verbal oríkì constitutes a means or ẹṣin (horse) by which Orí as Òrò can descend to the human level and humans can make a spiritual ascent to Orí (50).
The conceptual wealth of this line, possibly the ideational core of Abiodun's first chapter and of the entire book, a point I shall explore in detail in a forthcoming part of this essay series, may be better understood in terms of these definitions:
òwe [imaginative expression]
as visual and verbal oríkì [ verbal, visual, sonic and performative mapping of the being and development of an
entity]
constitutes a means or ẹṣin (horse)[ imaginative vehicle]
by which Orí [ the immortal essence of an entity, transcending but active within time and space,
originating in a divine archetype, Òdùmàrè, the creator of the universe, who is to the cosmos as
the individual orí is to the individual]
as Òrò [ discourse as a demonstration of capacities for reflection and expression emerging from the
originating impulse of Òdùmàrè and ceaselessly and restlessly active in all aspects of human life]
can descend to the human level and humans can make a spiritual ascent to Orí (50).
Abiodun depicts imaginative creativity in terms of a journey between the ultimate source of cognitive possibility and the material contexts of human existence, between the origin of these possibilities in divine mind and the manifestation of these possibilities in human experience, between the nakedness of this incandescent force, divine in origin but migrant in human thought and action, a reality the core of which is dangerous for unmediated encounter with the human mind but is best approached through the indirection of metaphoric expression, a lofty vision of the essence of human creativity which is in effect a Yorùbá version of a universally recurring idea of the divine origins of human reflective and expressive powers, from Jewish, Christian and Hindu ideas of creation being effected though language to English poet S.T. Coleridge's depiction, in his Biographia Litteraria of the ''primary Imagination [as] the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.''
Responding to the Inspiration of Ọpa Ọsanyin
I am drawn to Ọpa Ọsanyin on account of its combination of relatively minimalist structure and use of the humble but deeply evocative images of birds, desisting from employing the more obvious evocative values of such grand avian creatures as the eagle, focusing instead on the structural beauty and elegance in flight of birds in general, often crafting superb depictions of the graceful curve of a bird's neck, deploying these visualizations in ways that may be seen as suggesting far reaching implications in Yorùbá cosmology, unifying humanity, nature and cosmos.
Interpretive Contexts
As demonstrated in relation to an example of Ọpa Ọsanyin in the first part of this essay series, "The Cosmos in a Staff : The Glory of Ọpa Ọsanyin : An Understudied Example of Great Yoruba Art : Part 1 : Avian Aesthetics," Ọpa Ọsanyin demonstrates great imaginative creativity, technical genius and associative range within and beyond the universe of Yorùbá culture, leading to the questions that concluded the essay-
What, exactly, is Ọpa Ọsanyin?
What is its inspiration and the logic of its construction?
Why is it crafted in a manner that can evoke values of such universal penetration?
Ọpa Ọsanyin as an Example of Yorùbá Arts of Nature
The Bird Motif as Evocative of the Dynamism of Àse, Creative Cosmic Force, in Ọpa Ọsanyin,
Osùn Babaláwo and Ọpa Erinlè
Ọpa Ọsanyin is an example of Yorùbá arts of nature as these are demonstrated across various literary genres and visual expressions.
These run from those literary forms strategic for depictions of animals, such as Ijálá, Yorùbá hunters poetry, and ese ifá , poetry of the Yorùbá origin Ifá system of knowledge, to the sculptural forms Osùn Babaláwo, "staff of the master of esoteric knowledge,'' used by babalawo, adepts in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa to Ọpa Erinlè, a staff representing Erinlè, the deity of the forest and the powers of nature in general and Ọpa Ọsanyin, all three staffs marked by birds topping a pole.
Adapting Robert Farris Thompson's example in "Icons of the Mind," the study of any one of these similar sculptural forms benefits from doing so in comparison with the others.
Each of these kinds of metal structure is interpretable in terms of elegant evocations of birds suggesting the quickening of life and its creative capacities through the dynamism of àse, creative, cosmic force, as understood in Yorùbá origin Òrìsà cosmology, and represented, in these images, by the mobility of birds.
Bird symbolism is particularly used in Yorùbá iconography, its visual symbolism, in suggesting the embodiment of àse, creative, cosmic force, by women, primary enablers, through their procreative powers, of the union of materiality and life that is a human being, powers understood as distilled in blood and therefore particularly concentrated in post- menopausal women who do not lose blood through monthly cycles.
Ìwà : Between the Intrinsic Character of a Phenomenon and its Associative Values
These animal depictions demonstrate a strand of humanity's sensitivity to nature as both valuable in and of itself, and suggestive of values beyond itself. These orientations are suggested by two Yorùbá expressions which Rowland Abiodun makes central to his Yoruba Art and Language.
The first of these expressions is ''mọ ìwà fún oníwà, '' which may be translated as ''I grant each existent its right to its own individuality,'' ''iwa'' being open to rendering as ''essential being,'' individuality of existence, fundamental character, understood in terms of the dynamic and yet stable nature of personality as well as of the material qualities that define a particular kind of existence.
Ọpa Ọsanyin projects, through sculpture, the unique beauty of birds, in their individuality of form within particular species as well as in terms of the beauty they demonstrate when gathered as a flock.
Òwe, Imaginative Expression, and Òrò, the Unity of Thought and Expression, as Correlative Horses of
Discourse
These intrinsic beauties also project interpretive possibilities that go beyond the avian world, implicating human existence. These extrinsic values include the beauty of the bird universe, and the question of how appreciation of beauty is developed, a development in which the character of nature on Earth, in particular, and the larger cosmos, in general, plays a strategic role, as John Barrow argues for the imprinting of cosmos on the human self in The Artful Universe ( 1995).
Aligned with these harmonies between the physical character of nature and human perception, is humanity's discernment of associative values in the avian cosmos.
These are metaphorical and symbolic projections in terms of which people see the forms of birds and their behaviour. This tendency of human beings to interpret phenomena in terms of ideas not explicitly indicated by those phenomena is suggested by the following Yoruba conception, quoted from Agogo-Èdè on Facebook which expands Abiodun's rendering (30-1) of the basic formulation of the proverb. Tone marks for the last two lines are provided by Akinsola Abiodun Solanke:
Òwe l'ẹṣin Òrò.
Òrò l'e ẹṣin òwe.
Ti Òrò bá sọnù
òwe la fií wáa.
Ti òwe bá sọnù
Òrò la fií wáa.
Nítórīwípé àwọn méjèjì
jõún gūn ãrã wõn l'ẹ́sīn nī
This expression may be translated as in the following largely non-literal interpretation, with the last stanza being a slightly modified version of Solanke's rendering given in a personal communication :
Òwe, metaphorical expressions
are the steeds of thought and expression,
swift vehicles of discourse.
Reflection and communication
are the horses of imaginative projection
subjects of interest, activities, in which imagination is at play.
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