Lost in Translation: Trauma, Disconnect, Language and Journeying back to the selves
I was not born into the tradition of Ifá, my family is Christian but not really “practicing” Christian. We didn’t really go to church and all that. Even though the religion looms over you whether you are initiated into Ifá or Christianity. I became involved with Ifa when I was about 22years old. - Ìfẹ Franklin, African American Artist. Like Ìfẹ, I wasn’t born into Christianity. My mother, a single parent, was agnostic (at best), although she swung towards the wilder side of Christianity at some point in her journey. Mother herself was a wild woman who danced at the edge of respectability, she still is, fiercely independent, a risk-taker even in old age. In hindsight she would have stuck out, a red flag in the “boring respectability” of “orthodox” churches. She found the the holier-than-thou and aspirational culture of pentecostalism tacky, so it only made sense that her fears and anxieties found home in the Aládǔrà Church (aka Cherubim and Seraphim church, aka Kérúbù àti Séráfù). For