USA Africa Dialogue Series - What Happended at the Beginning of Time? : The Yoruba Poem "Ayajo Asuwada": Between Myth and Lived Experience 1

What Happended at the Beginning of Time? 

         The Yoruba Poem "Ayajo Asuwada

          Between Myth and Lived Experience 

                                    1

                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

On waking from sleep this morning, the 6th of July 2026, the first thing that came to my mind was the Yoruba poem that depicts the world as beginning with the fall of dew.

As the poem washed over my mind, the various personal challenges and those beyond my self as well as projects I was racing to complete, emotional and intellectual configurations which had occupied me for weeks, recededed to the back of my mind, as I participated imaginatively in the rhythms of the poem, its architecture of cosmic and world creation, culminating in an invocation of cosmic creativity responsible for the unity of all possibilities, from the human being to the fish in the sea, from the hair on a human head to the grass constituting savannah, from the clouds in the sky, one may add, to the trees constituting forests.

For a time, I lived in another world, as the similarity between the poem and the soft light of the slowly dawning day within the gentle dropping of the aftermath of rain placed me in a version of what Chinua Achebe decribes as "morning yet on creation day", in a book of that title, the sense of infinite possibility emerging at the beginning of time, when nothing existed and everything was possible.

Its vital to entertain inspiring ideas and images.They are critical for one's mental health and its value for one's physical well being.

Such ideas and images may be from any aspect of existence, from any culture. They could be factual or fictional or a combination of both.

Their primary value is that they should be able to make you smile inwardly. They should make you feel good. They should elevate your thoughts. They should strengthen your appreciation of life.

The poem that lit up my world this morning is called "Ayajo Asuwada". I'm familiar with two translations of it from Yoruba to English. 

One is by the sociologist Akinsola Akiwowo in his " Towards a Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry".

The other is by the babalawo, adept of the esoteric knowledge of Ifa, the indigenous Yoruba knowledge system, Solagbade Popoola, who expands the poem by adding ideas from the emergence of the universe as described by scientific cosmology.

I prefer the original, leaner version, though still a luxuriant poem, rendered by Akiwowo.

It sensitizes me more closely to the imaginative creativity of that thinker, that ancestor, his mind alight, agile in the creation of connections between images and ideas, between thought and narrative, between sound and meaning,  looking with the eye of imagination at the beginning of time, and drawing inspiration from the organization of the world in terms of wholes, in terms of systems of order,  depicted that order, "asuwa", as the primary, organizing principle of the nature and human worlds and their relationship with the ultimate source of existence.

Popoola's more expansive version, introducing the contemporary image of stars and planets, their constellations strategic for life on Earth, demonstrates the transmission of creativity across generations in the composition of ese ifa, the corpus to which this poem belongs,  but the more mythic universe of the original resonates more with me, its domestication of cosmological ideas within traditional and even homely Yoruba contexts embodying uniquely for me the restless creativity of the human mind, operating within the coordinates of its own cultural contexts, in relation to the universally perceivable character of natture, projecting these realities into a lofty conception of existence that is yet grounded in the immediately perceptible.

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