The Woman in the Forest
The Woman in the Forest: Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji's Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe and Bruce Onobrakpeya's Akporode
Abstract
This essay-meditation weaves myth, philosophy, and visual art into a visionary narrative of initiation.
Beginning with the archetypal image of awakening in a forest, it unfolds into an encounter with a mysterious woman bearing a calabash—the symbol of consciousness, destiny, and cosmic possibility.
Drawing on Igbo metaphysics of Chi, Urhobo cosmology as expressed in Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Akporode installation, and the artistic philosophy of Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji, the text situates African thought within a global philosophical conversation that includes Dante Alighieri and Jetsun Milarepa.
Through narrative, reflection, and symbolic interpretation, the essay explores knowledge as an immersive forest, initiation as transformation, and the self as both vessel and cosmos—the calabash of becoming.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
I woke up one fateful day to find myself lost in a forest, a place both bewildering and intoxicating, an awesome space that swallowed me up, cocooned yet tiny within the mind blowing infinity, as trees stretched into an unseeable distance, each bark rich with strange designs which yet promised some glorious understanding just out of reach.
Stumbling about in this amazing zone, animated by a balance of fascination and smallness, enclosed by sublime vastness and alive with a sense of being out of place in such a glory far from humankind, suddenly she appeared.
A radiant young woman, a colourfully engraved calabash on her head.
''Are you lost?'' she asked.
''Why do you quake and stumble in the forest of knowledge?''
''Knowledge?'' I responded.
''Yes'' she replied.
"What do you think these trees are, if not pillars of knowledge?
Those inscriptions on the trees are the wisdom of the ages" she concluded.
''How can I interpret them?'' I wondered aloud.
''The work of a lifetime'' she replied.
'' You may begin, however, by taking this calabash from me and placing it on your head to open your mind to the mysteries'' she advised.
Inflamed by desire to understand what I had stumbled into, I gently took the calabash from her head, observing its delicately beautiful designs, exquisite waves against a ground of deep gold as two miniature suns flanked an inscription ''chi'' within the body of which word was written the letters ''uwa'', all strange to me.
Once the calabash rested on my head, everything changed. I became the calabash and the calabash was me.
I was no longer that creature on two legs but an infinite line curving in a circle, as the circumference of the calabash, a line enclosing everything across space, time and beyond, a line plunging into the centre of the calabash, into an infinite void yet alive with possibility.
I now understood what that calabash was.
The calabash of possibility from which each moment is born.
Chi-Ukwu.
Yet also my own chi.
That which made me and me alone.
Yet, a fire from the hearth of Gueno, the Unspeakable.
The calabash melted into my head, descended into my body, distributing itself in my blood and bones, humming an unceasing and delightful song only I could hear.
The inscriptions on the trees began to glow with meaning as the woman led me deeper into the forest.
We walked and walked until we came to a grove of particularly massive trees which she led me into.
Seated at the centre was an elderly man, whom she addressed.
''Father'', she said, ''I found him and offered him the calabash, which he was quick to accept''.
''An insightful one'' he responded, ''though he is yet to fully grasp what he has stumbled into''
He moved his hands in patterns I had never encountered before, and was still for a moment, brooding.
Then he spoke.
What is Happening?
Chiagoziem Nnaemeka Orji's self portrait Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe and Bruce Onobrakpeya's installation Akporode converge in this piece which takes its inspiration from the forest pillars of Akporode, a visual projection of the Urhobo conception of the vast and mysterious universe, structured by exquisitely inscribed pillars evoking the Urhobo pillar symbol for aspiration to Oghene, an Urhobo name for the creator of the universe, pillars suggesting trees, trees evoking a forest, an ecosystemic complexity reverberating with the complex unity of cosmos in the thought of the neighbouring Yoruba.
In the image of waking up to find oneself lost in a forest the medieval Italian poet Dante engages with contemporary Nigerian artists from decades long generational divides, Orji, the young philosopher from Igboland and Onobrakpeya, the Urhobo artist thinker in his 90s, both taking forward the vision ignited by Onobrakepya and his colleagues at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, about delving into indigenous African art and thought in creating modern art, a vision Uche Okeke, Onobrakpeya's Zaria colleague, took to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where Orji studied.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, in restless quest for what Orji calls, in Igbo, ''mgborogwu'', ''roots'', roots of cultural wisdom, across one's nativity and other worlds, reaching from ultimate origins to Earth, stumbled upon those two artist thinkers, taking a picture of Onobrakpeya seated on the divination tray by his installation.
Combining Orji's picture and those of Onobrakpeya and his installation into a collage that evoked in him the journey in the forest, the forest of Akporode, as names of the Ultimate from various African thought systems resonate- Chi-Ukwu, Great Chi of the Igbo; Gueno of the Fulani; the Calabash of Possibilities from Which Each Moment is Born, a name for the ''odu'' in Olodumare, the Yoruba idea as understood in the diaspora religion Lukumi, as described by Shloma Rosenberg.
Grant your gracewaves, O gurus, as spoken by our Buddhist brother in the Himalayas, Jetsun Milarepa.
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