The Meaning of this Work, its Sources and Inspiration
Thisis a construction of a vision of human development from Yoruba aesthetic ideas.
These ideas are distilled from the writings of Babatunde Lawal and Craig Fashoro,
organized in relation to Ọlabiyi Babalola Yai’s interpretation of Yoruba aesthetic concepts.
This is done through quotations from Yai’s essays, interspersed with quotations from Lawal’s and Fashoro’s works, contextualized by my own reframing of the significance of those quotations.
My comments are placed in square brackets. Quotations from Yai are unmarked. Quotations from Lawal, on the significance of the Yoruba aesthetic concepts àwòrán and awòran, are indicated by quotation marks. Those by Fashoro on the Yoruba aesthetic term ereare also identified through quotation marks. These quotes are at times edited for brevity.
My evocations of the kola nut, the egg, the proverb, the parable and the riddle are transpositions of Yai’s references to Yoruba metaphors in his ''In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition' and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space.''
The entire sequence is prefaced by quotations from other verbal and visual contexts, in italics, that reinforce the thrust of the ideas of the vision I am distilling from Yai’s work as complemented by expressions from Lawal and Fashoro.
Visual art evoking ideas of creativity suggested by knotting and unknotting represented through the elegant swirls of the Ghanaian Akan symbol Nyansapon, as shown in its various adaptations and spirals of progression, recreation and infinity in the opon ifa circular template and the Nsibidi art of Victor Ekpuk are invoked here to complement the soaring thought explored here.
The works of Lawal’s I draw from are “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art” ( The Art Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2001, pp. 498-526) complemented by “Divinity, Creativity and Humanity in Yoruba Aesthetics” ( Literature & Aesthetics 15 (1):161-174 (2005).
I also quote from Craig Fashoro’s Ere-Yoruba, the website introducing his project and book on Yoruba master carvers.
Opon Ifa
The Yai texts I use include his review of Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton III, Rowland Abiodun and Allen Wardwell's Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, 1989, in African Arts, Vol. 25, No. 1., 1992, pp. 20+22+24+26+29.
Another is ''In Praise of Metonymy: The Concepts of 'Tradition' and 'Creativity' in the Transmission of Yoruba Artistry over Time and Space'' in Research in African Literatures , 1993, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1993, pp. 29-37 and Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal and John Pemberton III’s edited The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, 1994, 107-115.
The third is his ''Tradition and the Yoruba Artist'', in African Arts, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, pp. 32-35+93.
Both the previous composition and this expansion are developments from my “Exploring Intersections of African Discourses: Celebrating Ọlabiyi Babalola Yai, Scholar Extraordinaire of African Arts and African Philosophies, ” my first response to reading Yai in the light of exploring Yoruba aesthetics through Abiodun, published in(academia.edu( PDF), Scribd (PDF), Facebook, LinkedIn, Rowland Abiodun and Babatunde Lawal, Philosophers of Yoruba Art blog, Twitter).
Quotations and Interpretations
Voyagers in Eternity
The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming.
From the opening lines of Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Quoting different translations of the lines, first two sentences and last sentence by Donald Keene. Third sentence by Sam Hamill. All from “Narrow Road to the Deep North, Opening Paragraph,Ten Translations”at the website of DavidBarnill, scholar in nature writing.Other superb resources, such as US and Japanese nature writing may be found on other sections of the site. Accessed 8/31/2020.
[In this painting, Good Morning, Sunrise by Victor Ekpuk] the spiral is an Nsibidi sign [ a Nigerian Cross River region ideographic system] meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity. Ekpuk's strong palette of warm reds, deep blacks, cool blues and whites contributes to the overall sense of animation.
Oríis essence, attribute, and quintessence… the uniqueness of persons, animals, and things, their inner eye and ear, their sharpest point and their most alert guide as they navigate through this world and the one beyond.
The ideal artist is an àrè [ as understood in Yoruba]. No etymology of the word has been attempted, but the most plausible one would derive it from the verb re, which means to depart.
Lagbayi, the Yoruba transcendental sculptor, lived as an àrè. An àrè is an itinerant, a permanent stranger precisely because he or she can be permanent nowhere.
[An àrè isa person who approaches life as an] oríkì, an unfinished and generative art enterprise. Oríkì [saluting and invoking the essence and expression of cosmic and individual being in sentient beings’ efforts to understand and navigate the cosmos in relation to their own identity, a process]inseparable from ìtàn, to spread [in time and space], to shine, irradiate, investigate, illuminate.
[ An àrè is committed to pìtàn, to splitting in further multiples the kernels of possibility, separating and ingesting the two lobes of the kola nut of being and becoming, hatching the egg of tomorrow in ways visionary, splitting open the luminous core of the proverb that is life, untying the knot of the parable of existence, unloosening its radiance, de-riddling history, shedding light ] on human existence through time and space [in the spirit of ] Òrúnmìlà [Eleri-Ipin, Witness to Creation] Opìtàn ilẹ Ifẹ, He who deriddles ìtàn, i.e., unravels history throughout Ifẹ territory [ the womb and consummation of terrestrial time in Yoruba mythology.
Àwòrán, Awòranand Ìwòran: The Perceived, the Perceiver and the
Process of Perception
[The artist is anyone committed to shaping life according to the principles of àwòrán, awòran and and ìwòran.
Such a person is particularly sensitive to what they see, hear and feel and to the process of engaging these perceptions.
They are alive to reality as ‘’ a work of art …crafted to appeal to the eyes, relate a representation to its subject, and, at the same time, convey messages that may have aesthetic, social, political, or spiritual import.”
They are particularly attuned to the need to engage with reality through a ‘’creative process [represented by ] an artist's preliminary contemplation of raw material.’’
They are deeply clued to the invocation of ‘’the pictorial memory necessary for visualizing and objectifying the subject, the use of the mind's eye to visualize and give material form to an idea,’’ imagination, vision, enabling power and tools of thought and action, used in interpreting reality and creating schemata or templates in terms of which these encounters are processed.
The subject being engaged with is known as àwòrán.
The process of seeing is ìwòran.
Such sensitives are also keenly alert to themselves as awòran, the person experiencing the sensation, the perceiver, the beholder, the actor upon reality.
Two distinctive but related meanings distinguished by marks indicating tonal inflections, the “root verb wò (to look) [remaining] intact in the two words [àwòrán and awòran]linking the beholder to the beheld” [ in ìwòran].
The known, the knower and the means of knowledge, as a similar process is depicted in Indian philosophy.
An “interface of the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible, the known and unknown in which the act of looking and seeing is much more than a perception of objects.”
A “process of self-reflection and self-re-creation, in which the human becomes the divine, No humanity, no Deity.”
Life as “a ritual process, reenacting the archetypal act of divine creation, linking the physical to the metaphysical and the human to the divine.”
Approaching Life as Ere, becoming a Sculptor of Life
Through such sensitivity, one becomes a sculptor of life, a participant in the shaping of existence as ere, a Yoruba term for free standing sculpture, “meant to be viewed on all sides,’’ a term embracing “physical statuary [as well as] the artistic, the cultural, the architectural, the secular [ and] the sacred and spiritual aspects of the art of carving,” an example of “canons of Yoruba iconology [a discipline ] infinite in forms, styles, motifs and aesthetic values. ’’
Becoming Ilèsanmi and Okosanmijulélo: Between Home and Farm, Between the Familiar and the Unfamiliar
[ Such an artist is both an] Ilèsanmi (I am better off in my hometown) [and an] Okosanmijulélo(Oko san mi ju ilé lo: I am better off on the farm than in the hometown).
The "farm,’’ oko, a metaphor for that which is novel, not ordinary, far from home [is thereby contrasted with] ilé, "home," a metaphor for the daily, the familiar, the given.
Artists are at their best when they are literally "not at home." The opposite of the Western saying "Charity begins at home."
For these artists "charity begins abroad": "Oko san mi ju ilé lo," [ the wild novelties of the farm as opposed to the settled familiarities of the everyday].
[Yet such an artist should be able to be at home everywhere, in all circumstances.
Ìwà, Ilé and Orun: Forms of Home
That is so because the àrè is always on a journey. Aye loja orun ni ile, the world is a marketplace, orun, the place where existence originates, is home, it is said, but even orun is not a permanent destination, because orun must be departed from to participate in the dynamism of the world of space and time that orun cannot replace as the spatio-temporal world needs orun for its own existence, two symbiotic polarities existing as the body and its heartbeat.
If there is any true home, would it not be ìwà, as understood in the expression] ìwà l,èwá, variously translated as "Character is beauty," "Existence is beauty," "Immortality is perfect existence," and "Essential nature is beauty" ?
The role or essence (ìwà) of art in Yoruba culture is to create beauty by activating and making sensible the noumenal solidarity of the various facets and dimensions of the world, the individual, the society, and the supernatural, which are and must be made to be seen/sensed/heard as tributaries of the same big river.
[Yet even ìwà) is dynamic, more spiral than straight line, undergoing change while rooted in an organizing core of possibility].
In the Yoruba world view, oko [farm] is the antonym of ilé [ home]. In terms of artistic practice and discourse, the best way to recognize reality and engage it is to depart from it.
[Yet, even as we depart from the settled familiarities of home, we realize that the farm sustains the home by feeding it, indicating the mutual sustenance of the settled and the distant, the domestic and the wild, the nearby and the far away, as zones of knowing].
Àrès always seek to depart from current states of affairs. They go about (re) and bifurcate or pass (ya) constantly in life[ in terms that might not always be physical and geographical but certainly cognitive, expressed in their constantly reconstructed perspectives on the world in the face of the recognition of the multifarious immensity represented by the expression ] Odo laye "life is a river.’’ Who can encompass a river?
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