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The Still Pool Forgets

A Reminding from the Yoruba

The Yoruba people of western Africa, one of the largest ethnic populations south of the Sahara, constitute a powerful urban culture. Yoruba cities fostered rich economic, administrative, and religious systems, and it was precisely this society the western slave trade plundered for human wealth: nearly all slaves brought to the Americas came from west Africa, and of these, Yoruba slaves and their descendants became a most significant influence in the cultures of Cuba, Brazil, and other parts of the Americas, including the United States.

These Africans brought with them a deep and practical regard for the arts. In Yoruba cities, sophisticated systems of exchange and distribution had made markets for weaving, dyeing, iron-working, brass-casting, woodcarving, beadwork, leatherwork, and pottery; arts networks grew wide and interdependent. Even Yoruba hunters were said to praise the gifts of those who carve wood or compose song; proficiency in these arts was valued as highly as bravery and warrior skills. Among the social features of Yoruba life were powerful polygamous family systems, and a pre-eminence among older women of magicians and spell-binders. Professional distinction was accorded singers or poets, who were responsible for perpetuating and embellishing the stories of gods and notable mortals, figures such as Shango (God of Thunder), Ogun (God of Iron), and Eshu (God of Fate). In New Orleans and New York today you can find shops in which are sold images of Ogun, god of hunters, warriors, professional circumcisers, all who make use of his metal. From the totemic figure dangle tiny knives and hoes and hammers and machinery-parts; in him many ages meet.

Both gods and men can be appeased. Among the functions of the professional poets is the making of honorific names. Unlike naming in patronymic cultures, Yoruba naming occurs not only at birth or marriage, but throughout one's life. There is the name that comes from circumstances of the birth (the-one-with-the-cord-around-his-neck, let us say); there is the name recording the parents’ (sometimes unsentimental) sentiments about the event (the-straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back). And there is the third kind of name: oriki. These names are a form of pet-naming, praise-naming, poetic name; and though praise names may be assigned at birth, they are earned all through life. A very notable figure may garner many such names, and very great trees, cities, or gods are paid tribute by professional oriki-makers. Ulli Beier (to whose indispensable work I owe my acquaintance with Yoruba poetry) gives, by way of example, the oriki these poets bestowed on the first European explorers in Africa: “a pair of shorts that can worry a large embroidered gown.”⁶ It is an immediately funny and yet painful reminder of colonial history, in a practically succinct, semiotic garb.

I mean to celebrate the practical premises of Yoruba poems. To the mind of someone brought up on English and American poetry, it seems refreshingly direct—full of humor, wit, and intricate exemplification. Abstraction operates to bespeak, not to outspeak, physical experience. In poems of considerable structural complexity, poems that operate as pulsing signs for human understanding, this ground of Yoruba metaphysics is moving. Yoruba singers and drummers set up powerful long-distance communications (CNN watch out): songs can actually change fates (some 600 gods, after all, are listening; and they can be tickled, pleased, seduced). All the Yoruba gods but one (the unapproachable Olodumare) are variable, mischievous, and yet amusable; and all can kill—there is a god, for example, of smallpox. All are also respected and honored, and there results a peculiar mix of affection and insult that resembles nothing so much as familial relations. Not unlike human beings in their gifts and foibles, Yoruba gods are responsible for love and trouble both.

The Yoruba value generosity as wealth. If the poems to the gods don't seem very pious or predictable, perhaps it is because the gods themselves don't: among the originary stories of Yoruba mythology, for example, the occasional tendency of the gods, like human beings, to drink too much and then make compositional mistakes explains how white people came to be.

Riddles and songs collected from very young Yoruba children suggest how free from prurience are subjects America tends to hold taboo. Beier cites the song told him by a six-year-old girl, used by little girls to drive boys (eight of them, apparendy) away from their play:

Penis penis plays by himself

Vagina vagina plays by herself.

We shall not play with somebody

Who has sixteen testicles.

Two children's riddles for which the answer is “vagina” are: “a small bearded god, whom we must kneel to worship,” and “a little bush becomes a court case.” From infancy to old age, the Yoruba sensibility is tickled with the carnal comedies.

I'm not a scholar of Yoruba language or culture. I can't judge the fidelity of the translations used here (all taken from Ulli Beier's remarkable collection of Yoruba poems, divinations, chants and proverbs), nor offer social or political elaboration on the context. I refer interested readers to Beier's work, and in particular to his descriptions of the pitches and rhythms of “talking” drums. My intention is simply to appreciate a few of the poetic texts Beier has given us, taking the texts as artifacts provocative in (and to) English. What these pieces did to me was strike at the heart of my sense of the poetic; they worked like an antidote to overdose. (I mean the overdose of polite nostalgias and predictable discretions in contemporary American poetry.) These brief Yoruba pieces make an extraordinary contrast to our poetry-magazine-multitudes because of their directness, their practical relation to the material world, their freedom from self-absorption or perennial regret. In them, one senses the force of an efficacious act, and not an art in the process of its own elegizing. They proceed by a kind of structural logic and natural analogy. Human beings seem to be treated as only one form of being among others; there's plenty to learn from plants and animals, as well as from gods, who are (in the Yoruba cosmology) no more fickle than weather (and no less). Poetry itself takes on the patterns of such creaturehood; it mimics, honors, and affects nature. For the Yoruba, far more fundamentally than for contemporary Americans, poetry has daily force as a human form of nature.

Death

I cannot carry it,

I cannot carry it.

If I could carry it,

I would carry it.

When the elephant dies in the bush

something is carried into the house.

When the buffalo dies in the forest,

something is carried into the house.

But when the mouse dies in the house

something is thrown into the bush.

Note here first of all, in the best sense, the beating-around-the-bush. The bush is a literal location, and the poem doesn't metaphorize away a difficult question. It is stunning, immediately, for the directness of its address to the sorrow at hand. Apart from the natural analogical relation that arises between title and body of poem, there is in the poem no direct identification of the repeated “it” as the burden of death itself. Indeed, the virtue of the poem lies entirely in its refusal to abstract its object: the physical weight of the death, and not its philosophical constitution, seems at issue, and the repetition “I cannot carry” builds up great power, as if in plain linguistic illustration of a Dickinsonian numbness-in-the-face-of-death. In concentrating less on the idea than on the body of death, this poem distinguishes itself clearly from most American elegies or meditations on the subject: there is a kind of death math here, an effort physically to “grasp” or “bear” its dimensions.

The mental move from animal to human deaths—inevitable in hundreds of American road-kill poems—is left, blessedly, implicit in this Yoruba death-chant; and a kind of humor (almost unthinkable in this connection in America, where the unbearability of death is itself unmentionable) obtains in the sudden disposability of the domestic corpse, the brief heft and trajectory of mouse.

The trail of analogies is also a trail of changes. Parallels highlight a pattern of repetition and variation. The animals become progressively lighter, but also progressively closer to home. Not only how big they are but how near us they live becomes important. What death means to us, in ranges unenclosed, is what we can carry off: from the death of the elephant and buffalo much can be made, much can be redeemed. But from the deaths closest to us, what salvage? Deaths inside the human house are removed into the outer world; deaths in the outer are (at least in part) brought in.

Paradoxically enough, the most portable deaths are of the biggest, farthest animals. The verb “carried” is insistent, occurring in six of the poem's ten lines; and in the last line of the poem suddenly it is replaced by “thrown”—this accounts for at least part of the shock of levity at the end. Of these large and far-off deaths, something (quantities of something, tusk or meat) can be taken in. (We live on—live off—the deaths of things outside; we are their grave.) But of the deaths “in the house” something is thrown out. We don't eat the mouse, or use the hide of the dead domestic cat; deaths in the psychological interior have to be pushed out of mind, so we can live. The poem suggests how big a little thing can be, close-up (the closest deaths are the least bearable, is a fair paraphrase in English). The line thus drawn between the domestic (even the domestic “wild” animal like the mouse) and the outside world (even its most amicable animals) is a clear and inviolable line, physical, psychological, and spiritual.

The four its and the three somethings seem brilliandy, intently nonspecific. They are not vague, as so many somethings are in contemporary poetry (wanting to evoke the bodiless unnameable, wanting, in short, to get a big feeling out of a small abdication). Here the somethings are bodily parts, more or less simply. But a principle, an equation, even, is being worked out, and it is the pattern of carryings, not the content or mystification of them, that is most important to the Yoruba poem. Indeed these words insist on looking not at private but at a sum of public gestures, and rather than evading the difficulty of naming, by slipping from the letter toward the spirit, they do an exacter, weirder work: a kind of framing, very physical. In contemporary American poetry, “something” crops up as poetic phrasing around powerful mysteries: something told me she was dead; something moved in the shadows; there was something red about the night, etc. It partakes of our mistake about the great mysteries, if we assume that they inhere in the spirit and not in the letter of things. In short, in our poetry, a “something” is seldom so meant: it is more like a nothing, its drift is atmospheric, its vicinity the failed ideal. One feels American poets have deeply lost their faith in the physical power of words. Culturally that power seems most directly to obtain in the arenas of advertising and public relations, the very arenas from which most American poets are by nature and by economic association most deeply alienated—and the realm popularly accorded poetry, that of sentiment, is represented in America by the million-fold small-surprise industry of the greeting card. We don't, as a rule, make even our own prayers, or value freshness or invention in them. If we believe in God, we don't believe in a God that would change his mind. The much mentioned “personality” of American life—your “personal” banker, your “personal” God—seems deeply, perhaps pathologically, impersonal. And our prudishness with regard to sex—its unmentionability intimate with the industry of pornography, making much of private parts and making of property the most sacred place—resembles nothing so much as our way of dealing with death. A fundamental loneliness comes of the displacements of sex and death into dark back rooms, into solitudes, into chambers where tissues and towels are dispensed for secret blottings out, and from which the yearner or mourner returns to sunlit—loveless, deathless—streets, wiped clean of carnal attachment and animal relation.

Compare that world, its models of animal life, and the world of the poem that follows:

Quarrel

Nobody will quarrel with the woodcock,

because of his blue coat.

Nobody will quarrel with the parrot

because of his red tail.

You old people of this world,

don't be my enemies.

Would you kill a dog because he barks?

Would you kill a ram because he butts?

Would you kill the goat because he fucks his mother?

Forgive me, don't fight,

and let me taste the world

like the fly that interprets the wine…

One loves this song's sense of necessary conviviality in the grips of sex and death. Its funniness and feel of fable arise from patterns of analogy, and there are, in the translation, wonderful ambiguities that arise because we don't know exactly where to attach the becauses. (Beier gives us one of each—placing a comma before the first and not the second.) Is the red tail the sign that warns off quarrel, or is the red tail (the blue coat) the content of the quarrel? In the latter case, the “taster of the world” (the lover of barking and butting and fucking) argues that his pleasures are his very fur and feather, his very nature and stripe; no one can quarrel with what is so much a matter of born identity. In either case, the coat and tail are flashed as signs: they serve as the poet's defense against those “old people.”

The oldsters have their own say about sartorial flourish. “A young man can have a robe like an elder's, but he can't have rags like an elder's,” so the elders tell us. Notice what dignities accrue to the old—not the fancy clothes, or big pension, or store-bought Winnebago; any money can buy those. But the way we age, the way we wear and weather, those are ours alone. You can't get store-bought rags. They take years to perfect. It is a wisdom that turns the meaning of wealth inside-out, and knows how nouveau the material senses of riche can be.

Patterns of repetition and variation account for much of the momentum and charge of “Quarrel.” The trail that leads to the shock of “fucks his mother” has proceeded by analogue, sidewindingly innocent (barks worsens into butts, but remains a feature of animal nature; butts worsens into fucks, and suddenly fucks appropriates an object from the realm of the human taboo). Imagine the encounter between missionary niceties and this lively forthrightness. To my mind, such a thought recalls the transcripts we do have of encounters between English officer/lawyers and the native Americans they were trying to convince to sign real estate contracts that would, ultimately, keep the tribes from hunting—even though the tribes were promised they'd retain such rights. At the end of the negotiations, in which any reader of English can see the arts of legal interest at work—arts of representation and persuasion that would later flower into advertising's industry on those same American valleys and plains—and during whose proceedings one sees clearly the respect the native American elders pay their visitors before agreeing to what they clearly understand would mean sharing the land—at the very end of all of these negotiations, a sign appears more telling than the legal signatures. The tribal elder remarks, as he makes his assenting mark on the documents, that the parties must concur on equal footing, being men who share the sense of a single God, men equal under the same God. Whereupon the English officer in attendance replies, in effect: “Very good. We'll send in missionaries to educate you.” It is a moment of pure hubris on the part of the English, a moment in which one can't help wincing at their self-absorption, their indelicacy.

Though one can imagine the ways a merely moralizing reader might dismiss the barks-butts-fucks propositions as crude, and never detect the poem's fundamental subdety and humanity, the last few lines of this Yoruba poem “Quarrel” are as acute, as refined and refining, as any I know. It's a young man's poem to the old, remember, and the address that was begun in lines 5 and 6, with “you old people of this world / don't be my enemies,” now reaches its culmination in “Forgive me, don't fight, / and let me taste the world.” This young man, though flashing his fighting form, is eschewing battle, and asking the elders’ blessing on those other energies of youth (barking, butting, fucking, in full fettle, finest feather—asking a blessing, that is, not on death-dealing but life-loving acts, acts of argument and sport and love). The last two lines (“and let me taste the world / like the fly that interprets the wine”) enact a powerful shift of scale. Like the trail in “Death” that led from tragedy of elephant to comedy of mouse, this poem's thrust includes a sudden turn: after waving red flags, brandishing blues, and generally making much young-male bravado, it comes down to a refinement all the more endearing for taking place on a fly's lip: the molecule of wine the sipper savors (and, in savoring, considers) is, though tiny, yet significant. And the word “interprets” is a gorgeous translatorial move; it takes on added elegance for referring to a feature of the poetic (and readerly) caretaking going on even as we read. The poem, like the world, keeps being remade, fresh and actual, in the senses of its interpreters.

The poem's claims on us are finally funnily disarming, for the speaker who had preened and charged and strutted through the poem turns both as refined as a wine-taster and as humble as a Musca Domestica. It is the wine of the world that is celebrated finally, and that emphasis establishes the true spirit of the poem. Consider the disinclination of so many contemporary American poems either to comedies of bravado or to the savor of a joyous carnality, and you realize why Yoruba poems can so much refresh us. To the extent that they are most interested in private emotion and personal nostalgia, our poets have forgotten how to move; and to the extent that they've lost that capacity to transport and to be transported, lost trans-generational contact, they've forgotten how to swing beyond the singular, and sing.

It is revealing to examine the kind of proverbs the Yoruba people tell. Some Yoruba proverbs have a lot in common with the sayings of European elders. (After all, there is a community of experience in the body of old age, and sometimes elders resemble their counterparts in other societies more than they do the young ones in their own.) It might as well be Yiddish, the Yoruba saying “He who shits on the way will find flies on the way back.” But there are characteristic Yoruba proverbs that seem, on the other hand, refreshingly unEuropean in their moral motions: “A person fetching water from a pool says he saw somebody wearing a mask. What will he say who fetches water from a stream?” The art of Yoruba masquerade has its own formulaic tradition, but the universal logic of this riddle already richly suggests the reflective comparison between still and running water, and asks the agile mind to consider, in the manner of the Zen koan, the reflection to be had when one draws one's image not from holdings, but from flowing and change.

Or consider this: “The thinking of a wolf is enough to kill a sheep.” It is one of those translations one loves the more for its double reading, for both the subjective genitive (the wolf's thought) and the objective genitive (the sheep's thought about the wolf) work to make the proverb's points: in the former case, the wolf's power goes beyond tooth and claw, and in the latter case, the point is about the victim's complicity in his own demise: for fear can cause its own heart attack. In either case, the proverb reminds us that the mind can be the sharpest weapon, whether you use it to attack another or to attack yourself.

The one I love best, I guess, because it has the signature Yoruba twists in it, from raucous outburst to wry insight, is this: “The worm is dancing, but that is only how he walks.” Yoruba poems as a genre seem forthright, going straight to the dance of the matter; skeptical about human nature, not so full of themselves they fool themselves.

Tricks

The star is trying to outshine the moon,

the frog is preparing a trick to get wings,

the one who wears a cotton dress pretends to wear velvet,

the one who is wearing velvet pretends to be a king.

We all try to do

what God never intends us to do.

Watch out: “We shall catch and kill”

is what we cry when we go to the battlefield.

We tend to forget that we shall meet another man there

uttering the same cry…

It is this capacity to see things from the other perspective suddenly that puts the best kind of nation in imagination; it is an integrating capacity one might call love, if love in English didn't seem first and foremost narrowly self-interested. Yoruba children's songs are full of this dance of ironies and empathies, right from the beginning. Keep in mind that what the cow is to the English, the yam is to the Yoruba, and lend an ear to the happy yammer (no cower) of this children's song:

Yam

Yam, yam, yam,

You are of pure white.

You have a gown of meat,

You have a cap of vegetables,

You have trousers of fish.

Yam, oh yam, oh yam.

Or, in the same connection, but in another poem, consider the fledging generosity, forgiveness and rueful natural knowledge involved in the following children's song about the hapless baby, Lagbada:

Housetraining

Lagbada shits in the house

We do not blame him

Lagbada pisses in the house

We do not blame him.

But the flies will give him away.

The flies will give him away.

Transgenerational conversations frequently enrich Yoruba songs and poems. Here is one that demonstrates many of the poetic idiosyncrasies I've highlit in other poems: it is full of the analogical and parallel structures we've seen elsewhere, yet also full of irrepressible expansiveness, lucid mysteries.

Memory

Whatever I am taught,

let me remember it.

When the big fish comes out of the water

we can see the bottom of the pond.

When the big toad comes out of the water

we can see the bottom of the well.

When the kingfisher dives into the water

his brain becomes clear.

When the cheek of the pregnant antelope was marked

her child was also marked.

If there is one piece of meat left: in the pot

it will surely be taken by the spoon.

Everything the landlord does

is known to the swallow.

Everything that is in your brain,

my father,

let it be known to me.

This one's mysteries are lucid in time. It is no accident that in the world of the poet who could write such a poem, the god of fate, Ishu, is able to “throw a stone today and kill a bird yesterday.” The poem is called “Memory” and like all poems asks its reader to circle from its end back to its beginning: in the father's brain is what the son will need, a kind of future made of past. The markings of the antelope are communicated to her child, in genetic memory; and though people may argue about who gets the last piece of meat in the pot (who lives longest), still the spoon (the carrier) survives them all.

There is subtle play on content and container here: the pond and well contain clarity the way the mind, able to remember, does. In order to remember, you take, paradoxically, something out—the big fish or the big toad: its motion and dimension can only muddy the water. The toad is amphibian, it will come and go, whereas the fish will probably come out only once. But either way the big animal has to be gotten out (or has to, himself, get out) before the medium of memory can become calm enough to be clear.