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 the Aládǔrà walk the thin line between Christianity and African spirituality, they are the less than perfect sibling, the black sheep of Nigerian Christianity.
The downside of her new-found faith was that she dragged me along with her, a bewildered teenager who couldn’t understand what had come over her mother. Nevertheless, we enthusiastically threw ourselves into the dances, the trances, the rituals... until my mother decided she’d had enough. Now in her late seventies, mother has settled back into being agnostic, at best, leaving me to find a language to describe my empty parts, leaving me to find my missing selves and lead them home.
At some point in my journey, I found myself in a pentecostal church, and once again threw myself into the very heart of it, participating in choir politics, the almost daily ritual of church attendance, and the performance of perfection and holiness.
A lack of rigorous engagement with the bible, the deifying of pastors, sexual harassment, classism, sexism, discrimination, bigotry, and strangely, racism, were hallmarks of my time in church.
When a pastor I considered a friend attempted to rape me and I reported to the “elders,” the church rose against me, I didn’t back down until I got some form of justice.
In hindsight, the reason I never fitted in was because the core of me rebelled at the idea of worshipping in a temple whose books and rituals erases and shrinks every part of me – woman, black, queer, Yorùbá.
One Sunday morning, I simply stopped.
Unlike Ìfẹ Franklin and I, Ifáwẹ̀mímọ́ Omítọ̀nádé was never lost. From childhood she has been immersed in the language and traditions of Ifá and Òòṣà. The confidence and power that comes with being raised fully conscious of the selves and the different ways they can manifest shows in the way she uses social media as a tool to talk about Ifá, Olódùmarè, Irúnmọlè, and Òrìṣà, in a country where religious bigotry is rife and people are denied opportunities and even have violence visited upon them, for daring to be different. A country where, as recently as 2018, a woman was killed for professing her Christianity in a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood of the nation’s capital and nothing happened to the perpetrators.
Even those who profess atheism or agnosticism still operate within the limits of these patriarchal, misogynist, anti-black and homophobic religions, because it is embedded in their language, in their way of seeing and dealing with the world. Like Ìfẹ Franklin said during our conversation, “religion looms over you” whether you buy into it or not. Religion has shaped the language of science, of power, and race relations.
In 1850, as part of the long term project of colonisation and sequestering of Africa’s land masses for exploitation by capitalist states, Samuel Àjàyí Crowther translated the Book of Romans into Yorùbá, and in the process made two major adoptions – Olódùmarè/Ọlọ́ọ̀run, the names of the being revered by the Yorùbá as the progenitor of their race, was changed to god. Èṣù, the one that ensures smooth communication between Olódùmarè on one hand, and Irunmole, Òòsà and the Odùduwà race on the other, was cast as god’s enemy, Satan.
In one fell swoop, Samuel Àjàyí Crowther began the erasure of the histories of Ifá and the demonisation of blackness. For in the bible, Satan is described as the king of darkness and everything evil, while God, an omnipresent, omnipotent being, is the king of light. Ergo, black is the colour of sin and evil, black is wrong. White is the colour of truth and good, white is right.
In 1850, Samuel Àjàyí Crowther sowed the first seeds of anti-blackness in the minds of Yorùbá people, a seed that has taken root and flourished for nearly two centuries. In 2016, against the backdrop of Christian/Islamic fundamentalism and the demonization of anything associated with blackness or ancestor reverence, Ifáwẹ̀mímọ́ took to social media and made a simple but important statement: “Èṣù is not Satan.” These three harmless words brought a tidal wave of hate speeches, death threats and cyberbullying for the then 20-year-old, who was able to withstand the trolling because she knows her selves, and can trace her histories back to pre-slavery, pre-colonial times.
The upside of her bravery is the opening of the floodgates, Ifáwẹ̀mímọ́ gathered a large following of those who had been too scared to publicly state their interest in the ancestors, people who had been practising Ifá privately and had seen no reason to make their beliefs public. The curious and even some rabid fundamentalists. Together, these voices are pushing people to question their beliefs in minute, but important ways, a reclamation of Yorùbá is happening.
Bodè, where Èṣù works
This religion, this practise, connects me, it is everything, it is the root. It doesn’t just connect me to my roots, it is the root, it is everything. Ifá lives in us, all the indigenous religions of Africa live in all Africans in the diaspora. It’s in our blood, it’s in our DNA, it’s in the inflections that we speak, our laughter, the way we tell stories. It permeates everything in my life. And once I became, over time, more still, more quiet, more focused, things just started opening up to me. And you know, once you start learning things about yourself, even if you have your toe in the waters of Ifá, you know, you don’t put your whole body in, you’re connected, because your ancestors are there, the Eégún, they are there and they are alive and a lot of times people would say, “Oh Ife, you’re so special, oh the way they talk to you, oh…” and I’m like they will talk to you too, you are special. There’s nothing about me or that is radiating from me that does not radiate from you and everyone else – Ìfẹ Franklin
In Ìbàdàn, the city where I’ve lived for most of my life, there is an Oríta or Bodè in every neighbourhood. Oríta is the crossroads where Èṣù dwells. Bodè is slightly different, it is the point where the physical and the immaterial meet. They are the borders where Èṣù collects toll from beings trying to cross from one reality to another.
One of the many hats Èṣù wears is that of the comptroller of both the crossroads and Bodè. At every Bodè and Oríta is a market-place, Èṣù is the comptroller of marketplaces, Ajé is the root of commerce.
But I didn’t come to this knowledge until I started journeying to retrieve the lost parts of me. Parts I didn’t even know that were missing. There was just this empty hole that pain gnawed at me continuously, a hole the church promised would be filled by the “holy spirit” but only grew wider, more painful the longer I stayed in the church.
How was I to know that it was my DNA, demanding that I reclaim my identities instead of hiding from them? Of pretending that I’m not traumatised by living in a world that is violent towards me simply because of my perceived gender and skin colour? How was I to know that through miseducation, grooming and subliminal messaging, I’d been taught that everything about me was wrong? The colour of my skin, the manner in which I see the world, the heavy Yorùbá accent in my speech, the manner in which I carry my body. My inability to fit into the boxes the society insists on forcing me into; a universe being forced to shrink into a sugar carton.
***
Like every child who grew up in Yorùbá states, I know about the ẹbọ, offerings placed at the crossroads where three roads meet. I had been groomed to see them as evil, something to be avoided especially early in the mornings, for seeing the offering was deemed a foreshadowing of evil. Seeing ẹbọ somehow made you a partaker of the “evil” whoever had placed the offering there meant.
Offerings originally meant to propriate the earth and nature in all her manifestations was sold to us as evil.
To underline the insidiousness of the demonisation and erasure of our ways and language, my mother, when she was growing up in the forties and sixties, also encountered ẹbọ, but back then they weren’t seen as evil. In fact mother told me that she and her friends used to look forward to these offerings on their way to school because they usually contained edibles (mostly boiled eggs, fruits and ẹ̀kọ) and money. The food and offerings were shared amongst those who left home without breakfast or money for lunch break.
Looking back at this person that I had been, who, in spite of the fact that I wasn’t raised in a religious household, associated everything that wasn’t done in a church or a mosque with evil, gives me an insight into how disconnected we, as a people, are from our roots. Without our roots we are left adrift in a world that’s cruel to itself and moreso to people with skin the color of rich loam.
The first time I met Ìyálọ́jà Bodè, I’d gone to one of the numerous Bodè markets in Ìbàdàn. I needed to buy beads to make myself and some friends anklets and waistbeads. But that was not my first time in Bodè, Òópó-Yéọsà, I’d been there to visit friends, to buy natural beauty products and in recent years to participate in the Yemọja Festival. But it wasn’t until my third meeting with Ìyálọ́jà, a sprightly woman in her early eighties dedicated to ease and enjoyment, that the significance of the neighbourhood became part of my increasing knowledge of my selves, Ifá and the histories of the Yorùbá Nations.
It was in that crowded market-place that she sold to me beads cut out of rare stones, and in the stringing of these stones together, she whispered words so sacred and powerful I still haven’t been able to grasp their entirety, for to translate them into English is to lose their meaning, their significance in my life’s journey.
Ìyálọ́jà, like Ifáwẹ̀mímọ́, did not come to Ifá pathways late. She came into it as a child who learnt the ways of leaves, barks and mushrooms at the foot of her mother, who learnt pharmacology from her own mother, who learnt pharmacology from her own mother. Ìyálọ́jà can trace her roots back to pre-colonial times. In one afternoon and a few short sentences, she traced her roots beyond Ibadan and could tell you the histories of how Ìbàdàn became a city-state in 1821. Her ancestors came with the first wave of settlers, mostly warriors, and established Bodè as the centre for healing and documentation of knowledge about healing.
In the face of the violent nature of Ìbàdàn’s transition from a war camp to a city-state and then to its present form as the capital of Ọ̀yọ́ State, the changes brought about by the slave-taking wars, the losses suffered by her family. In the face of colonialism and “education" and the many ways in which it erased our histories and with it our very nature and self-esteem, her family steadfastly passed on knowledge of healing and commerce to their descendants.
The more traumatised her family was by all these historical occurrences, the more they folded into their selves, and this folding can still be seen in the manner the original neighbourhoods of Ibadan are built so closely, so intimately, defensively, in concentric circles.
Through all these, Ìyálọ́jà’s family, in order to keep their ancient knowledge and practices sacred, had to negotiate their survival – they became Muslims. They started out by sending their children to missionary schools and then when compelled, sent them to Islamic schools. In the process of negotiating, they lost most of their descendants to modernism, and the Abrahamic religions. Some chose to stay, some who were lost, returned.
One of the very few who chose to stay, learn and teach is Ìyálọ́jà. A woman who is powerful and vulnerable to the same degree. A woman who has had to make a lot of sacrifices to maintain her independence and to rise to become one of the most powerful women with authority in Ìbàdàn.
It is important to state that Bodè is presently one of the largest markets in the southwest of Nigeria dedicated to the sale and documentation of herbs. In the market are also Oníṣègùn, mostly women, who use Ifa and natural remedies to cure illnesses.
According to Ìyálọ́jà, the point of using these natural remedies is not primarily to “cure” illnesses, but to protect their users even after they are well. The point of healing is not just wellness, but wholeness.
Wellness ≠ Wholeness
I always wonder if the people on the continent think about slavery, think about enslavement…
- Ìfẹ Franklin
My uncle, Rasaki, joined the army at the cusp of the Biafran War in his late teens. He was a stubborn young man set in his ways, he wanted adventures, wanted to see the world. Uncle Rasaki was a brilliant young man who, in spite of passing out of secondary school with flying colours, refused to apply to any university, instead he joined the army against his parents’ wishes.
Before Uncle Rasaki joined the army, my grandmother, Amuda, had divorced my grandfather and moved from Lagos to Ìbàdàn to set up her catering business.
She told me of the last day she’d seen him, looking so good in his army uniform. He was much calmer, more self-possessed, a total opposite of the wild thing that gave hell to his parents when he became a teenager. She told me that on that day, she begged him to reconsider his decision, that it wasn’t too late. She’d been hearing rumours of war; the southeast had seceded under the leadership of Colonel Ojukwu and she’d also been told that the Aburi Accord had failed, and the likelihood of a war loomed in the horizon.
My uncle had laughed her fears off and told her that there was no way the Nigerian government would wage war on its own citizens, the Igbo wanted nothing more than to leave and that shouldn’t be so difficult?
He was wrong, my grandmother was right.
By June of 1967, the Nigerian government had indeed started killing its own people, and before December of the same year, my uncle had been shipped out to the East, to fight in a war he didn’t have a hand in starting.
The last my grandmother heard from him was a postcard he sent her from an undisclosed location in the east, in which he reassured her that he was fine and should be home soon. The last she heard of him was a short message from the army informing her that her son had gone missing in action.
The Yorùbá have a saying that encompasses the trauma of losing a loved one: “ọmọ ẹni kú sàn jù ọmọ ẹni nù lọ.” To translate this saying into the English Language is to lose its essence but I can attempt to put it into context with another saying: “ó f’ikú s’àgbà.”
The Yorùbá do not believe in death as the final destination. Death is the pathway to other planes, other realities and existences. After death, a person can transit to Àjùlé Ọ̀run where no one has ever been to and returned from, the person can become an ancestor, the impartial carer for the future generations of a particular lineage as long as they keep them in remembrance. Death can even be a passport to a new existence on earth, in this case the dead simply transits from one part of the world to another, Àkúdàáyà. Death in some cases leads to reincarnation, especially if the person was deeply loved. My mother, for example, is the reincarnation of my great-great-grandmother (on my grandfather’s side) who died around the time my mother was born.
When a child or a young person dies, the Yorùbá believe that death has made this young person an elder, an ancestor, “ó f’ikú s’àgbà.” And when someone dies, proper rites are carried out, not just to ease the transit of the person from one plane to another, but this process also allows the family to mourn the deceased and get some form of closure.
But when one’s child goes missing, how does the family mourn? How do they gain closure?
My grandmother never got closure from the loss of her child, neither did my grandad, or my mother, or her siblings who remember Uncle Rasaki as a super-fun elder brother who strapped them to his back when they were babies, and cared for them as they grew into young adults. A carefree adventurous story-teller.
My family never healed, and until her death, my grandmother never stopped hoping that her son would return home, for “ọmọ ẹní kú, sàn ju ọmọ ẹni nù lọ.”
Till her death, my grandmother was as healthy and as sprite as it was possible for a woman her age, but till her death, she was never whole, for a large chunk of her heart wandered the face of the earth seeking the child that didn’t return home from a war he didn’t start.
You want me to tell you about slavery? That’s a loaded one…One of the things I would tell you is that no one has ever asked me personally about the slavery before, no one… - Ìfẹ Franklin
Around 1525, a couple of sailors from an European country “press ganged” some “natives” from the “West Coast” of “Africa” into working on their ships. On discovering how “strong” and “hard working” these enslaved people were, they decided to go back for more “natives.” Within a few years, these European sailors would raid small coastal villages, killing the most vulnerable and those who fought back, enslaving the rest. The next step was wooing malcontents with gold, and with their aid, mapping out the hinterlands, toppling resistant city-states in the most violent manner possible, setting up terrorist groups who raided towns and cities for recruitment and enslavement, levelling resistant cities to rubble and stealing everything not screwed down.
By 1807, the Abolition of the Slave Trade had entered the statute book of the British, the most powerful slaver of the era. In 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed again by the same British Government.
Between 1830 and 1866, over 850,000 West Africans were violently taken from their families, their mothers, fathers, and siblings, they were forced on slave ships and taken to new, hostile, lands. Between 1525 and 1866 over 12 million people had been kidnapped from West African shores, less than 10.5 million made it to slave farms in the Americas, where under inhumane conditions, they toiled in every major industry, extracting precious metals, cutting timber, building railways, harvesting coffee, cultivating tobacco, cotton, sugar, being used for medical “experiments.”
The wealth and “civilisation” of the global north was built on the backs of these human beings, who till-date, still do the most backbreaking work under intolerable circumstances and are brutalised in the same manner their ancestors were during the slave trade era. Their reserves filled with gold stolen, tricked or taken through corruption, an endemic corruption sown into every colonial system, alongside degradation and erasure.
Do the people back on the continent think about the slave trade? Don’t the people on the continent carry the trauma of loss in their DNA? Have the people on the continent acknowledged this pain and grief and not having closure? Have we examined the manner in which colonialists set up governments and systems on the continent? These extractive and violent police states with corruption deeply embedded in their governance. Have we compared it to the way and manner systems are designed in the global north to extract from, reduce and violate black bodies in the diaspora?
Have we?
Between 1525 and 1866, over 12 million families in West Africa lost their homes, their valuables, and their loved ones. These families that were left behind to gather their shattered bits together, to re-start from nothing. People who had to tattoo the faces of the children left to them in case they got stolen and had to be rescued. They were afraid to mourn their loved ones for they did not know if their child was lost or their child died.
Isn’t it better for one’s child to die and transit to another plane than for the child to be lost?
Ọmọ ẹni kú sàn jù ọmọ ẹni nù lọ.
The ones that waited their lifetimes hopeful, hopeless. Those who lit lamps praying it would lead their loved ones home. Huge chunks of their hearts wandering the face of the earth seeking those whom they’ve loved and lost. Passing the trauma of violence and loss down to their generations even as we grapple with colonialism, capitalist systems designed to keep us at the bottom of the food chain, western education and most recently religious fundamentalism – tools designed to keep inflicting pain on us even though we’d lost so much.
Picking up pieces of the selves
I went to Ọ̀ṣun, unlike previous times this was more than a visit, it was a conscious return to my roots, to the
For they are encoded in my DNA.
As I sat by the river, feet in the flowing waters. Ọ̀ṣun gave me back the missing parts of me. She mentioned their names, the names of my ancestors, giving them back to me, for they are my lost selves.
And as the empty parts of me were filled by those I’d ignored, denied, reduced, demonised... Ọ̀ṣun gave me peace.
Osun cleansed me.
Ọ̀ṣúnwẹ̀mímọ́.
Article Originally commissioned and published by bytrulyco.com(2020)
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