214048260 Histories of Errancy Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka s Abiku PDF

Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts and Soyinka's "Abiku"

Douglas McCabe

Research in African Literatures, Volume 33, Number 1, Spring 2002,pp. 45-74 (Article)

Published by Indiana University PressDOI: 10.1353/ral.2002.0027

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Histories of Errancy: Oral YorubaÀbíkú Texts and Soyinka’s “Abiku”

Douglas McCabe

The corpus of written Nigerian literature contains at least thirty worksin which àbíkú or ogbánje play some sort of pivotal role.1 Most are inEnglish, and among them are canonical texts by Tutuola, Achebe,

Soyinka, Clark-Bekederemo, Emecheta, and Okri. These àbíkú writingsconstitute a major tradition within Nigerian literature, so it is surprisingthat no study has been done which reads them together and orders themhistorically as such. Indeed, existing studies of àbíkú literature lack anykind of historical perspective. They are limited to thematic and stylisticcomparisons of canonical written texts, by-passing the relationship of thesetexts to oral àbíkú literature, to nonliterary àbíkú discourses, and to theconcerns and anxieties surrounding their historical circumstances of com-position. Symptomatic of these studies’ lack of historical perspective is thereliance of their interpretations upon insufficiently considered accounts ofàbíkú. Such accounts (sometimes they are just hasty definitions) often mixfacts about àbíkú with facts about ogbánje; represent àbíkú as homogeneousacross time and space; fail to distinguish between popular and expert, offi-cial and heretical, indigenous and exogenous discourses of àbíkú; assumethat the belief in àbíkú has a psychological rather than ontological origin;and hastily appropriate àbíkú to serve as a symbol for present-day, metro-politan concepts and concerns.2 The upshot of all this has been to estab-lish and encourage a practice of literary exegesis that not only occludesthe historicity of àbíkú—its embeddedness in specific times, localities, dis-courses, concerns, and circumstances that render it inalienably heteroge-neous, politicized, and protean—but also occludes, in turn, the historicityof the literature that takes àbíkú as its subject.

The first aim of this essay is, therefore, to retrieve some sense of àbíkú’srich and varied history. To this end, I consider in detail one “traditional”Yoruba theory of àbíkú offered by a senior Ifá babaláwo, demonstrating itspoliticized nature by situating it in the context of eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century Yoruba society. The second aim of this essay is to look atsome oral Yoruba àbíkú literature—to look at it as literature, that is, ratherthan as part of the anthropological catalogue. I thus consider some of theformal and thematic features of àbíkú names, oríkì, and narratives, whilealso relating these aesthetic features back to the orthodox Ifá discourse andits nexus of historically contingent concerns. The third contribution of thisstudy to existing scholarship is to show that some detailed knowledge oforal àbíkú representations and their history is indispensable to understand-ing the dynamics and significance of twentieth-century àbíkú literature writ-ten in English. Taking Soyinka’s well-known poem “Abiku” as my example,I show that the poem is profoundly shaped by what it inherits from the past(oral àbíkú texts and Yoruba politics), even as it is also shaped by its ownhistorical circumstances of production (Soyinka’s nostalgia for home in

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1950s London). In the end, I want to show that the formal and thematicdifferences between Soyinka’s poem and the oral literature are largelytraceable (though not reducible) to their embeddedness in different “his-tories of errancy,” histories of straying (geographically and ideologically)from hegemonic sociopolitical forms.

Àbíkú literally means “one who is born, dies”—though the compact“born to die,” with its implication of a fated or deliberately planned death,has become the standard translation.3 Ifá babaláwo apply the term to chil-dren who have secret plans to die at a certain time in their upbringing,only to be born again soon afterwards, repeating this itinerary of deathand birth until they are spiritually “fettered” (dè) by their parents andforced to stay in the world. At present, the term àbíkú enjoys a hegemonyin Yoruba cultural discourse over other extant and current terms used bythe Yoruba for the same phenomenon, such as èré, emèrè, rlérx, rgbx orun,rlxgbx, l’olówó-pmp, abáfxfxrìn, rlxmìíkxmìí, and ejínuwpn.4

According to Babalola Ifatoogun, a senior Ifá diviner from the Oyo-Yoruba town of Ilobu, àbíkú are “thieves from heaven . . . They come fromheaven to steal on earth” (Àwpn sì lolè orun . . . Àwpn yìí ló wá jalè láyélàtorun).5 More precisely, àbíkú are an rgbx ará orun, a “club” (rgbx) of“heaven-people” (ará oun) whose founding purpose is to siphon off richesfrom ilé aráyé, the “houses” (ilé) of the “world-people” (ará-ayé). Àbíkú fur-ther the aims of their robber-band by using children as a cover for theircriminal operation. Each àbíkú is born into an ilé and poses as a child thatis either sweet-natured and beautiful (and therefore likely to be lavishedwith good things) or sickly and disturbed (and therefore likely to be thebeneficiary of expensive sacrifices). In such a way, the àbíkú quickly accu-mulates money, cloth, food, and livestock. Then, at a certain time and by acertain method prearranged secretly with its rgbx, the àbíkú dies and takesthe spiritual portion of its loot back to heaven. After dividing the spoils withits rgbx, it prepares to re-enter the world and fleece the same or another ilé.

The only way for an ilé to stop being robbed by an àbíkú is to “fetter”(dè) it spiritually, just as one physically fetters a thief or similar low-life,such as a goat or a slave.6 To fetter an àbíkú, the ilé must first discover its“sealed words” (àdé ohùn), namely, the binding and top-secret (àdé) oathsit swore to its rgbx regarding the specific time, circumstance, and methodof its return to heaven. Because these contractual statements are “secrets”(àsírí), only an Ifá “father-of-secrets” (babaláwo) can “hear” (gbígbq) themand “disseminate” (tú) them to the ilé. Knowing the àbíkú’s sealed wordsenables an ilé to fetter the àbíkú in one of the following three ways: by“blocking” (dí) the precise conditions necessary for its death, as one blocksa road or a womb; by “publicizing” (tú) that the àbíkú’s secret aims havebeen discovered; and by disguising (àmìn) the àbíkú so that it will not berecognized when its rgbx comes to abduct it from the ilé. If an ilé success-fully fetters an àbíkú and “forces it to stay” (dá dúró) in the world, theàbíkú’s rgbx will try to “snatch” it (yp) from the house and bring it back toheaven. “‘Snatching from the snake-pit’ (yíyp lqfìn) is what the rgbx callspicking up (wá mú) one of its members from the world. In their eyes, ahouse in the world (ilé ayé) is a prison (ewon); one of their members is

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doing time there, so they come and snatch it away (yp p kúrò)” (Yíyp lqfìn niàwpn n pe kí rgbx wpn wá mú rnìkan kúrò láyé. Bí ìgbà txnìkan wà lxwon tí wónwá yp p kúrò níbe nile ayé rí lójú wpn).

Ifatoogun’s account of àbíkú matches, not only in its substance but inmuch of its detail, the accounts given by other Ifá babaláwo.7 In particular,Ifatoogun’s key oppositions—geographical (orun vs. ayé), sociopolitical(rgbx vs. ilé), informational (àdé ohùn vs. àsírí tú), and kinetic (dè vs. yp,forcible restraint vs. forcible dislocation)—are shared by other babaláwo,just as they also share his keywords for defining these oppositions. EvenIfatoogun’s organizing metaphor of banditry is not unprecedented. Otherbabaláwo know àbíkú as àgbà olè or “master thieves” (Babalola 63-21), a termused in common parlance to denote bandit kings and other merciless andsuccessful robbers. Moreover, all Ifá babaláwo stress that the rgbx ará orunprofits unethically from the ilé aráyé, primarily referring to àbíkú as elérè(owner-of-profit) or emèrè (drinker-of-profit).8

If pressed to use one English word to characterize àbíkú, Ifá babaláwomight well call them “errant,” a word that combines the two interrelatedsenses of vagrancy and delinquent behavior. That is, àbíkú are geographi-cally nomadic, wandering in rgbx-groups between orun and ayé, unclaimedby any one geographical place; and àbíkú are wayward, straying delin-quently and willfully from the norms defining the ilé, profiting unethicallyby exploiting the ilé ’s constitutive attachment to definite geographical loca-tions (houses, villages, ancestral cities) and practices (having children andperpetuating the patrilineage). When the ilé attempts to fetter (dè) àbíkú, itis attempting to normalize them both spatially (to halt their itinerancy) andsociopolitically (to shift their allegiance from rgbx to ilé). According to Ifábabaláwo, errancy (the state of being itinerant/delinquent) is the essence ofthe rgbx ará orun, just as normalization (the process of fettering to place/lineage) is the essence of ilé aráyé. Such, then, is the official discourse ofàbíkú offered by Ifá babaláwo.

This official representation of àbíkú as an errant rgbx robbing the fixedilé is far from politically innocent, if only because rgbx and ilé are loadedterms in the context of Yoruba society and political history. Ilé means notonly one’s current house and town of residence, but also one’s entire patri-lineage past and present, and the ancestral city to which the lineage tracesits historical origins. The foundation of every ilé or “house” in all of itssenses is sexual reproduction; having children maintains the lineage’s his-tory and extends it both temporally (into the future) and geographically(into new houses and towns). Egbx, by contrast, denotes any elective clubor association based not upon lineage, ancestral city, marriage, or procre-ation, but upon an activity or project shared in common by the members(such as hunting, selling wares in a market, or worshipping an òrìsà) andto the secrets associated with that activity or project (skills, sacred texts, rit-uals, records, or the activities themselves). Such clubs/associations oftenstart as groups of friends, tend to be separated along gender lines, have anelected leader, often meet on a weekly basis, and are neither hierarchicallyorganized nor constitutively tied to a particular geographical location.

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Traditionally, they included benign gangs of neighborhood children, pro-fessional/trade associations (e.g., hunters’ guilds), òrìsà cults (e.g., awoSàngó), and groups whose activities and membership were more covert andultra-secret, such as witches and thieves.9 Ilé and rgbx thus constitute twocontrasting templates of sociopolitical organization among the Yoruba:the male-dominated ilé is based on marriage, lineage, procreation, geog-raphy, and hierarchical structures of seniority and inheritance; the male-or female-only rgbx is based on voluntary membership, mutual benefit, pur-suit of a shared nonreproductive purpose, and group secrecy (the keepingof esoteric or specialized knowledge, practices, skills).

Potential rivals in theory, rgbx and ilé historically interpenetrate in localYoruba politics, with people having loyalties to both. A single rgbx is com-posed of people from many different ilé (patrilineages, ancestral cities)and can cover a wide geographical area. One of the primary aims of somergbx, such as the Egúngún cult or female worshippers of virtually any òrìsà,is to protect or restore women’s fertility—the material basis for the ilé’shegemony. Egbé (in the form of òrìsà cults, hunters’ guilds, or the ògbóni)have historically played a pivotal role in maintaining or shifting the bal-ance of power between different ilé, sometimes bolstering the authority ofchiefs and kings belonging to one ilé, but sometimes also undermining itand opening the way for political resistance and change.10 Similarly, one’silé can often determine to which rgbx one belongs; one becomes a warrioror a worshipper of Sàngó because one’s parent or patrilineage belonged tothe warrior profession or the Sàngó cult. Despite this practical interpene-tration of rgbx and ilé, most Yoruba today would say that one’s membershipin an ilé is more important than and takes precedence over one’s mem-bership in an rgbx.

The ilé as a political ideology has dominated much of Yoruba history.Historically, it is tied to the royal empire of Oyo, an empire that thoughtof itself and elaborated its structures of rule through ritual metaphors ofmarriage, procreation, and geographical origin (Laitin 171-77; Matory 8-13). At its apex in the mid-eighteenth century, the empire of Oyo cov-ered all of what is now Yorubaland, enriching itself and extending itspower by controlling the major north-south trading routes and by sellingdomestic slaves and captives of war to buyers on the coast throughDahomean middlemen (Law 341; Morton-Williams, “Slave Trade”). Thecapturing and selling of slaves thus constituted an important feature ofOyo’s commercial activity, just as it would later be an important focus forthe smaller, war-like polities of Ibadan and Abeokuta that helped precipi-tate the final fall of the Oyo empire around 1830. When, at the beginningof the twentieth century, the British colonial authorities sought to imple-ment Indirect Rule in Yorubaland, they resurrected the Oyo monarchyand, with it, the ideology of ilé upon which its political structures wasbased. In short, the ilé has been hegemonic in Yorubaland for much of thepast three hundred years.

But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ideology ofilé was challenged by egbé structures of rule from two quarters. First, thenew polities of Ibadan and Abeokuta which came to dominance in the


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early 1800s during the fall of Oyo were modeled on the rgbx. Relativelysmall and mobile groups of mixed lineage were led by charismatic, skilledleaders and competed with each other for wealth, power, and followersthrough warfare (expanding territory and capturing slaves) and transat-lantic trade (slaves again being the major export commodities, the majorimports being cloth and iron). Second, the decline of Oyo was accompa-nied by a pernicious and ubiquitous rise in banditry and slave-raiding—activities carried out by geographically vagrant rgbx. These rgbx raidedvillages and ambushed itinerant traders to gain material wealth and sell-able human captives. They posed a threat to the structures of procreationand geographical stability at the heart of Oyo’s ideology of the ilé, as theeye-witness accounts of Ibariba banditry offered by Captain HughClapperton and Richard Lander make clear (Clapperton 60; Lander 284).The threat posed to the ilé by these rgbx is related to the rise of Ibadan andAbeokuta, for these political economies largely depended upon the suc-cess of their own itinerant rgbx, mostly warriors and slave-raiders. In short,the ilé’s hegemony was, during the nineteenth century, undermined andsuperseded by a hegemony of the rgbx.

By representing àbíkú as an errant rgbx that threatens the stable ilé,then, Ifá babaláwo would have, during the nineteenth century, intervenedin an on-going debate between two rival templates of sociopolitical orga-nization, taking the side of the ilé over the rgbx. That Ifá’s official accountis historically embedded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conflictbetween rgbx and ilé seems clear enough: not only was this the most recent(and perhaps only) period of Yoruba history in which the ideology of rgbxusurped the ideology of ilé, but it is also the period in which errant rgbxformed for the purpose of making wealth and children disappear from theilé (slave-raiding gangs) were ubiquitous and definitive of economic andsocial life. It is surely no accident that the terminology and imagery ofslave-raiding (“fettering” [dè] and “snatching” [yp], capture and abduction,strangers from the bush who lure children away from their homes) is cen-tral to Ifá’s account of àbíkú as an errant rgbx.11 In short, re-situated withinthe context of nineteenth-century Yoruba history, Ifá babaláwo’s officialtheory of àbíkú strikes us as highly politicized. On the one hand, it implic-itly disparages the rise of rgbx-based polities and rgbx-based banditry thataccompanied the fall of Oyo and the height of the transatlantic slave trade.On the other hand, it propagates the ideology of ilé, harking back to thestable rhythms of procreation, marriage, and lineage-perpetuation thatundergirded Oyo’s violent indigenous imperialism.

Having thus briefly considered Ifá’s official representation of àbíkú, itsmain tropological coordinates, its relationship to one aspect of Yoruba his-tory, and the politics of that relationship, it now remains in the first part ofthis essay to consider Yoruba oral literary texts pertaining to àbíkú. Sincethe Ifá divinatory system at one time “governed almost every aspect ofYoruba life” (Abimbola, “Ifa” 101), it should come as no surprise that oralàbíkú texts are strongly shaped by the official discourse of Ifá.12 These textsinclude names (orúko), salutations (ìkíni), descriptive acclamations or

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“praise-names” (oríkì), proverbs (òwé), songs (orin), folktales (ààlq), histori-cal narratives (ìtàn), and Ifá divination verses (rsr Ifá).13 Like Ifá’s officialaccount of àbíkú, this literature is governed by metaphors of spatial opposi-tion (òrun/ayé, wandering/stasis) and represents àbíkú, either implicitly orexplicitly, as a spatially and socially errant rgbx that must be forcibly assimi-lated to, or rejected from, the ilé. The human and the good are defined bygeographical fixity and commitment to structures of lineage-perpetuation(especially child-bearing and honoring parents); the nonhuman and thebad are defined by geographical vagrancy and commitment to furtheringthe aims of one’s rgbx (especially when they conflict with procreative ideals).But the oral literature does not merely rehash the official discourse.Instead, the oral àbíkú literature takes up and elaborates the tropologicalcoordinates of the discourse in a way that (wittingly or unwittingly) under-mines Ifá’s hierarchical valorization of the ilé over the rgbx, revealing the ilé’sinternal contradictions, ideological fractures, and historical contingency.The larger and more complex the oral text, it seems, the greater this prob-lematization of the ilé. Below are four examples from the corpus of oralàbíkú literature that make this case: names, salutations, oríkì, and Ifá ìtàn.

Àbíkú names are perhaps the most well-known and widespread genreof oral àbíkú literature. Whether take they the shape of derogatory insults,veiled threats, or plangent supplications, these names, like the Ifá dis-course itself, represent the àbíkú’s social errancy—its repeated deaths andbirths—in spatial terms.14 Exemplary in this regard is the much-used àbíkúname Ajá, meaning “dog.” Among the Yoruba, dogs are generally consid-ered to be dirty, feces-eating animals whose unconstrained wandering is asource of trouble—spilt pots and stolen food. A child named Ajá is thus achild whose delinquency is construed as spatial vagrancy. We find similarmetaphors of itinerant space at work in other, less insulting àbíkú names,such as Ayqrunbò (“One-who-goes-to-heaven-and-returns”), Málpmq(“Don’t-go-anymore”), or Dúrójayé (“Stay-and-relish-the-world”). Here, thespatial terminology of Ifá (e.g., òrun, ayé, lp, dúró) is not only explicitlydeployed, but the child’s unsettling powers of vagrancy are implicitlyacknowledged, even as they are also denied and dispelled through theimperative, incantatory grammar of the appellations.

That the spatial imagery of the names is tied to Ifá’s theoretical oppo-sition between rgbx and ilé is clear when we consider the purposes behindthe appellations. Obviously, a name like Ajá is designed to shame a childinto giving up its dog-like errancy and staying in one place. But the name isalso meant to disguise the àbíkú, the idea being that its rgbx will mistake itfor some worthless thing and give up their attempts to rescue it from theprison of the ilé. In a similar fashion, imperative supplications like Dúróspmp(“Stay-to-bear-children”), Kòkúmq (“Don’t-die-anymore”), and Mátànmí(“Don’t-deceive-me”) are plainly meant to make the child feel guilty fordying too often. Such names are also incantations, attempts to bring abouta new state of being in which the child no longer goes away. Most impor-tant, however, such names are àsírí tú: by publicizing to heaven-people and world-people alike that the child’s secret àbíkú identity and


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secret àbíkú plans have been discovered, the names work to separate theàbíkú from its rgbx and fetter it to the ilé. In short, the camouflaging andpublicizing purposes behind àbíkú names imply, and serve to reproduce,the antagonism between errant rgbx and fixed ilé central to Ifá’s official dis-course of àbíkú. The popular politics of àbíkú naming conforms closely tothe Ifá’s ideology of ilé.

Things become more complicated when the names are placed withinthe larger salutations to which they belong. For example, Ajá ò máa já’kun,dákun má lp Ajá, (“Dog, don’t break your leash; don’t go, please, Dog”[Verger 1455]), deploys the same metaphors of spatial vagrancy and fixitythat the simple name of Ajá implies. But where the name was politicallystraightforward, the salutation is more ambiguous. On the one hand, itsays that the child is a valued member of the ilé; the elders calling out thesalutation want the child to stay there and be a part of it—a positive atti-tude consolidated around the surprising address of dákun, “please,” tosomething supposed to be dirty and subhuman. On the other hand, thegreeting is also the kind of command we give to dogs and other inferior,unruly things that need to be put in their place. Dogs are irritating piecesof property because they do not always respect our control and confine-ment of them; they chew through their leashes or run away. In this sense,the salutation amplifies the derogative insult of the name Ajá, warning thechild to be docile and obedient like a piece of property, not unruly like awild animal. This calculated ambiguity between affirming and rejectingthe àbíkú child is underscored by the salutation’s tonal play. For example,the second part of the salutation inversely mirrors the first part—dákun málp Ajá is epanaleptically opposed to Ajá ò máa já’kun—and this rhetoricallypowerful construction is surely meant to evoke and aggrandize the àbíkú.But the same rhetorical mirror also creates a verbal sense of confinementand precise control, like a trap lifting and snapping shut again; it is a wayof capturing and subduing the àbíkú. Moreover, we find Ajá gnomicallyencapsulated in ò máa já’kun (think: ò má-ajá-kun), as if the dog (ajá) hasbeen penned in between “you-don’t” (ò máa) and “break-leash” (já’kun) orelse were redefined as “[one who] does not break the leash.”

At once formally and thematically ambivalent, then, the salutationboth affirms and rejects the identity of its àbíkú addressee; it welcomes theàbíkú inside the fold of the ilé, but does so on the condition that the àbíkúbecomes something different and less errant than it is. As an oríkì, the salu-tation evokes and affirms the powers of the àbíkú; as an incantation, it triesto reverse the flow of those powers and bring a new reality into being. Thesalutation’s central trope—the spatial confinement of a errant subhuman(“Dog, don’t break your leash”)—is thus a self-conscious instrument ofnormalization, an attempt to reform a hypermobile delinquent (the àbíkú)into a stable citizen embodying the values of the socially hegemonic ilé. Butthis normalization is, as we have seen, inherently equivocal: it opens theboundary between the normal and the abnormal, the worthy and theworthless, the fixed ilé and the errant rgbx, even as it also reaffirms and for-tifies that boundary. The Ajá-salutation exemplifies a form of linguisticcapture that draws attention to its own nature as a capturing device. It

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enforces those boundaries between acceptability (a spatially confined “per-son”) and unacceptability (a spatially unconfined “dog”) that constitutethe ilé, but does so in a way that advertises the contingency and vulnera-bility of those boundaries, the chance for them to be otherwise. This kindof ambiguous textuality works to deconstruct the politicized oppositionbetween errant rgbx and fixed ilé upon which Ifá’s orthodox account ofàbíkú relies.15

We find a similar aesthetic elaboration of political concerns to do witherrant rgbx and stable ilé in the following oríkì, chanted extemporaneouslyin April 1970 by Akande, a member of the Egúngún cult in Ipetumodu16:

Òótq ni.Aíyéronfx, Aíyéronké.Orúkp mxrin l’àbíkú.Jálugbó.Pólesú.Aládà-ò-sí-n’lé.Qmp Olókó-re’nú-oko.Qmp Kòtò-akàn-ni-kò-se-wò.E pé a kò ní ráhùn gbèhìn.E è ní sí’jú wo orórì pmp yín l’aíyé dandan.Èmi náà ò ni sí’jú wo orórì pmp mi.E rì i bí?Bí a à bá ní p’arq,T’á à ní porp àbùkù,T’á à ní fi’gbá kan bò kan,Ojú òrun t’xiyr ífò láláì f’apá kan ara wpn.Ilé mi tó mi í pè láláì pe baba oníbaba.

It is the truth.The world [ayé] has something to love, the world has something

to pet.Àbíkú have four names.Run to the bush.Full of Esu.Owner-of-the-cutlass-is-not-at-home [ilé].Child of the-owner-of-the-hoe-is-away-to-the-farm.Child of the-crab-hole-is-impossible-to-enter.You say that we shall not regret at the end.You will not in your lives open your eyes to see the graves of your

children certainly.I, too, shall not see the grave of my child.Don’t you see the point?If we are not going to tell a lie,If we are not going to utter words of contempt,If we are not going to put one calabash into another,The sky [òrun] is wide enough for the birds to fly in without

their wings touching each other.There is enough material about my lineage [ilé] for me to chant

without my having to praise someone else’s father.


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This àbíkú oríkì is, like the Ajá-salutation, concerned about errancy: aboutvagrancy and normalcy, about maintaining boundaries between the ilé andits alternatives. The non-ilé spaces of “bush,” “crab hole,” and “farm” arecounterpoised with the human ilé and its activities: having something tolove, putting one calabash into another, telling the truth. The àbíkú is seento unsettle the boundary between these two opposed spaces. Its delinquentvagrancy (“Run to the bush . . . Full of Esu”) is in tension with norms ofprocreation and lineage-perpetuation that are policed and protected bythe chanter’s fellow Egúngún-rgbx members: “You [Egúngún] say that weshall not regret in the end . . . I, too, shall not see the grave of my child.”It is no surprise, then, that Akande ends his chant by enjoining fellowEgúngún members to maintain boundaries unsettled by the àbíkú, bound-aries that work to propagate the ideology of ilé: boundaries between“truth” and “lie,” between the value-encoded spaces of “home” (ilé) and“bush” (igbó), between the productive and unproductive use of a tool (“putone calabash into another”; the sexual, procreative symbolism is not to bemissed here), and between “my own lineage [ilé]” and “someone else’s.”

It should also be pointed out that Akande’s chant is a tissue of quota-tions, a deliberate re-presenting of publicly circulating oral àbíkú texts, par-ticularly àbíkú names. As Carmina Davis points out, the line “The world hassomething to pet” is an innovative variation upon the well-known name fora female àbíkú, Dúróoríìkx, “Stay and you’ll be petted,” just as “Child ofowner-of-the-hoe-is-away-to-the-farm” freshly paraphrases the name Kòsqkq,“There-is-no-hoe [i.e., to dig your grave]” (Davis 228). The latter name isan apparently innocuous observation (i.e., we have no grave-diggingtools), but it conceals a rather aggressive threat (i.e., we will not bury youif you die again). Akande’s aesthetically delightful twisting and appositionof well-known àbíkú names culminates in his coining of a new name: “Childof the-crab-hole-is-impossible-to-enter.” This coinage clearly warns theàbíkú that if it dies again its parents will cut off one of its fingers (a stan-dard mutilation-treatment for àbíkú children), just as a crab will eventuallycut off a child’s finger if the child keeps poking it in a crab-hole. There isalso the more arch and grotesque suggestion, here, that the mother’s vagi-na (“crab-hole”) is a place that bodies should exit but not enter—that theàbíkú should stop trying to reverse the normal direction of female fertilitylest it be disciplined by the mighty Egúngún, the protectors of procreation.In short, Akande is interested in reminding us that àbíkú should be con-tained because they upset spatial boundaries, boundaries between exit andentrance, between home and bush, between one lineage and another. Hisoríkì thematizes the threat posed to the socially hegemonic ilé by the errantoutcasts—by those who, like àbíkú or thieves or dogs, have no regard forthe spatial and evaluative distinctions that work to normalize people asmaintainers of the ilé.

Akande’s text, then, conforms in one sense to the politics of Ifá’s offi-cial discourse of àbíkú; it sides with the values and forms of life underpin-ning the ilé’s structures of rule. But it does so by affirming the importanceof the Egúngún cult—an rgbx—within those structures. What Akande’s rep-resentation of àbíkú masterfully discloses is a contradiction fundamental to

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the ilé: its structures of procreation and lineage-perpetuation depend forthe smooth functioning upon a nonprocreative, nonkinship, rival tem-plate of sociopolitical organization (the rgbx). Indeed, the oríkì—by thevery fact of being an oríkì—affirms the essence and existence of àbíkú,thereby also affirming the vagrant rgbx as a sociopolitical form. In such away, the àbíkú chant of Akande is both determined by and subversivelyengaged in a particular history of errancy: the history of contentionbetween rgbx and ilé in precolonial Yoruba society.

As a final example, consider Ifá divination verses (rsr Ifá) pertaining toàbíkú. Forty-six of these have been collected, but there may be as many as256.17 The central part of each Ifá divination verse (rsr Ifá) is its historicalnarrative (ìtàn), a story putatively about real-life events from the past thatserve as a precedent for the problems facing the babaláwo’s client. The ìtànis also the only part of an rsr Ifá where babaláwo afford themselves imagi-native freedom to improvise, elaborate, and play upon what has beenremembered by rote. If there is any heterodox side to babaláwo’s accountsof àbíkú, it will therefore be found in the ìtàn of àbíkú divination verses.

The àbíkú histories (ìtàn) of Ifá are preoccupied with geographical dis-location, espionage, delinquency, capture, and abduction. Like the namesand the oríkì, they deploy the spatial metaphors and tropological coordi-nates characteristic of Ifá’s orthodox account of àbíkú to dramatize theproblems posed to the ilé by errant rgbx of “thieves from heaven.” Forexample, a great many of the Ifá ìtàn conform to the following pattern. (Inwhat follows, the àbíkú is gendered female for the sake of narrative sim-plicity.) While in heaven or the bush, an àbíkú conspires with her fellowrgbx members to be born as a child into the house (ilé) of an important per-sonage (usually a king or the god/founder of Ifá divination, Orunmila),then to die and return to her rgbx at a precise time. She journeys to theworld and executes her plan successfully several times, much to the con-sternation of her human parents, whose pocket books and patience arequickly sapped by the many sacrifices, medical consultations, and initiationfees incurred each time she appears. The parents are puzzled becausenone of the sacrifices and medicines prevent the child from dying. Afterdying for the nth (usually third or seventh) time, the àbíkú readies herselfto enter the world again. On this occasion, however, someone (usuallyeither a father, a hunter, or Orunmila himself, and usually after consultingan Ifá babaláwo) takes up a hiding place in heaven or in the bush. He over-hears her confiding secretly to her rgbx about the precise time, place, andmethod of her death and return to heaven, then bragging loudly that herparents can do nothing to weaken her resolve to die. Her rgbx promises tocome and rescue her if she is captured by the ilé. The intrepid spy thenreturns home (ilé), reveals the intelligence gathered in his espionage mis-sion, and prevents the àbíkú from returning to heaven by preventing theprecise conditions necessary for her death from ever coming about. Forinstance, if the àbíkú had planned to die as soon as the wood lit after herbirth was consumed, the parents would use a banana-tree trunk instead ofnormal firewood, because the banana trunk burns so poorly that it wouldnever be consumed, thus preventing the àbíkú’s death. By thus using her


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secrets against her, the parents and the babaláwo are able to fetter (dè) theunwilling àbíkú and confine her to a house of the world, a place she doesnot want to be.

Not surprisingly, this narrative pattern reflects and reinforces theorthodox account of àbíkú offered by Ifá babaláwo. It deploys Ifá’s keytropological oppositions to tell a comedy of intelligence: an intrepid herodiscovers hidden facts about the world and devises an ingenious plan tofoil the egbé that threatens the ilé. The ilé is implicitly associated withdomestic, familiar, human spaces and activities: village and shrine, ritualand sacrifice. The rgbx, by contrast, is associated with what is alien anddemonic: the perilous geography of the bush, the evil activities of conspir-acy and deceit. In one sense, then, the Ifá ìtàn encode the history of con-flict between rgbx and ilé in a way that propagates the ilé’s ideology ofparentage and procreation.

But the àbíkú ìtàn also break down Ifá’s official opposition between rgbxand ilé. As with the àbíkú salutations and oríkì, the ìtàn blur the value-ladenspatial boundary between world and heaven, domicile and bush. Invertingthe àbíkú’s journey from heaven to the world and back again, the babaláwoor hunter journeys intrepidly from ilé to bush/heaven and back; andwhereas the àbíkú’s journey is a keeping of secrets, the hero’s journey is anunlocking and dissemination of them. The most important factor in thesuccess of the hero’s journey is not his own resourcefulness and dedicationto the ilé, but the geography of heaven or the bush itself. The mysterious,occluding geography that harbors secrets that threaten the ilé is the verything that enables the hero’s concealment, espionage, and eventual dis-semination of those secrets. This common military tactic—using theenemy’s strengths against it—is, of course, also a common literary con-vention, but its international ubiquity does not negate its particular effectsin the àbíkú ìtàn, which are, on the one hand, to confuse the official dis-tinction between òrun and ayé and, on the other hand, to reveal the com-plicity between errant rgbx and static ilé, occult geographies and publicizedlocations.

To insinuate the ilé’s contradictory reliance upon those errant struc-tures that it officially condemns is the heart of the àbíkú ìtàn’s politics. Notonly does the hero rely upon the àbíkú’s own shrouded landscape, but thehero himself is an errant rgbx member (a hunter or babaláwo that journeysafar) upon whom the procreative center of the ilé depends. Moreover, theilé is portrayed as a cunning captor of children, forcibly dislocating themfrom the community to which they belong; the ilé snatches àbíkú from theirrgbx and fetters them by means of deception and subterfuge (e.g., usingbanana trunk to fuel the fire). Such snatching, dislocation, and deceptionare the very practices for which the official, pro-ilé discourse of Ifá demo-nizes the errant rgbx. In such a way, the ìtàn plays upon and dislocates itselffrom the orthodox discourse, representing the rgbx and its errancy as a nec-essary condition for the ilé’s official stasis. There is a further irony, here, inthat the moral of àbíkú ìtàn as told by Ifá babaláwo is, invariably, that Ifábabaláwo (who constitute a geographically dispersed rgbx that accumulateswealth from the tragedies of the ilé) are the only ones who can stop àbíkú

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(another geographically dispersed rgbx that accumulates wealth from thetragedies of the ilé). Here, again, the ilé is seen to be perilously reliant uponthe egbé structures of organization it wishes to subordinate and control.

Finally, the àbíkú ìtàn present the errant rgbx as a vibrant alternative tothe ilé. This is especially evident in those set of ìtàn which focus upon theleader of àbíkú (Ìyá Jánjásá or Olóìkó) and her preparations to enter theworld, but is also evident in the set of àbíkú ìtàn we have been discussingthat focus on a hero’s subterfuge of àbíkú. For even here we glimpse a kindof community claimed by the appealing values of mutual benefit, nonpro-creative friendship, shared specialized activity, and geographical free-dom—a community that exists outside of and in contradiction to the fixedilé that seeks to marginalize and subordinate it. Though this appealing sideof the àbíkú’s errancy is tucked into the background of the ìtàn and scarce-ly acknowledged, its presence is enough both to denaturalize the ilé, dis-closing it as only one political form among others, not something eternaland necessary; and to demystify it, showing that its hegemonic position inthe foreground depends upon its constant suppression and control ofthose alternative forms.

In short, the àbíkú narratives of Ifá, like the salutation and oríkì dis-cussed above, engage with a history of errancy through an aesthetic formthat is itself errant, straying from a univocal affirmation of the ilé to revealits ideological fractures and contradictory reliance upon the errant rgbxstructures. Unlike Ifá’s official descriptions of àbíkú as “thieves fromheaven,” oral àbíkú literature among the Yoruba is not merely propogandafor the ilé, nor can it be simply construed as an uncomplicated depositoryof anthropological information. It is a politicized literature, at once deter-mined by and intervening in the historical contest between rgbx and ilé thatgoverned nineteenth-century Yoruba society. Its intervention in this contestis surprising, for it dissents from the very theory of àbíkú, the orthodox Ifátheory, whose tropes and terminology feed it.

What is even more surprising, perhaps, is that we find a similar combi-nation of historical and aesthetic errancy embodied in a work of twentieth-century written àbíkú literature, Soyinka’s “Abiku.” Soyinka is anEgba-Yoruba who grew up in Abeokuta and Ibadan, the polities that duringthe nineteenth-century modeled themselves on the rgbx. Given this fact,one might well expect Soyinka’s “Abiku” to be in tension with the ilé-cen-tered discourse of Ifá, drawing upon the oral literature in a way that repro-duces an ideology of egbé rather than an ideology of ilé. But this is not whatwe find. For although Soyinka’s poem owes much to its oral precursors—formally, it models itself on an àbíkú oríkì, quoting Ifá narrative conventionsand coining new àbíkú names; thematically, it explores the politics oferrancy, engaging in matters of wandering and delinquency—we discoverin the end that the poem has little to do with the sociopolitical tensions thatso preoccupy the oral àbíkú literature. Instead, Soyinka’s text is concernedwith conflicts between family loyalty and individual self-creation, Yorubastructures of family rule dominating Soyinka’s childhood and Westernstructures of political individualism that defined his first sojourn in


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London—a literary fact that only comes to light if we take into accountwhere and when the poem was written.18

Soyinka’s poem “Abiku” was first published in the tenth number ofBlack Orpheus, which appeared sometime in the last quarter of 1961 or thefirst quarter of 196219:

ABIKUIn vain your bangles castCharmed circles at my feet;I am Abiku, calling for the firstAnd the repeated time.

Must I weep for goats and cowriesFor palm oil and the sprinkled ash?Yams do not sprout in amuletsTo earth Abiku’s limbs.

So when the snail is burnt in his shellWhet the heated fragment, brand meDeeply on the breast. You must know himWhen Abiku calls again.

I am the squirrel teeth, crackedThe riddle of the palm. RememberThis, and dig me deeper still intoThe god’s swollen foot.

Once and the repeated time, agelessThough I puke. And when you pourLibations, each finger points me nearThe way I came, where

The ground is wet with mourningWhite dew suckles flesh-birdsEvening befriends the spider, trappingFlies in wine-froth;

Night, and Abiku sucks the oilFrom lamps. Mothers! I’ll be theSuppliant snake coiled on the doorstepYours the killing cry.

The ripest fruit was saddest;Where I crept, the warmth was cloying.In the silence of webs, Abiku moans, shapingMounds from the yolk.

If we flip back a page from Soyinka’s poem, we see John Pepper Clark’spoem of the same title, also making its first appearance in print. The delib-erate apposition of the poems was an important event in Nigerian literaryhistory, not only because it precipitated the West African pedagogic andacademic tradition of comparing and contrasting the two poems, butbecause nothing like “Abiku” and “Abiku” had appeared in the pages of

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Black Orpheus before.20 Their compressed language, dense imagery, self-conscious craftsmanship, and use of personae or “masks” must have sur-prised the journal’s readers, accustomed as they were to theWhitmanesque effusions of Senghor, the crystalline structures of Okara,and the cool rhymes of Langston Hughes, all of whom shared with theirimitators the Romantic convention of speaking about one’s own experi-ence in one’s own voice. Soyinka’s “Abiku” marks a radical break from thisconvention—a break toward the cryptic, compact, intricately allusive, andanti-Romantic language that would mark much of his subsequent verseand drama. Given these publication circumstances, it is easy to see why crit-ics from the late 1960s until today have invariably read the poem as a kindof hymn to nonconformity, with its recalcitrant àbíkú clearly mirroring thecocksure iconoclasm of Soyinka himself—that maverick and upstart crowwho, by 1961, was already something of an enfant terrible on the Nigerianliterary scene.21

But if seeing the poem in the context of its publication yields one read-ing, seeing it in the context of its composition yields another. In a 1985 lec-ture, Soyinka tells us that he wrote “Abiku” in London when he had beensuffering from “nostalgia”:

Colin Garland was—still is of course—an Australian. He shared aflat in Notting Hill with a West Indian actor, Lloyd Record, in thesixties, which was how I met him. I came into his studio one dayand—there it was—a painting of “Abiku”! I entered the studio,stared and shouted: Abiku! He stared back at me, not knowingwhat the hell I was talking about.

Of course there was nostalgia. After all, I had been away fromhome—for the first time ever, and for over three years at that time.Any object, voice, smell, sky-line, was available for conversion tomy catalogue of missed or repressed images […]a few weeks later,I consoled myself by writing the poem “Abiku.” (Art 195)

Soyinka went to England for “the first time ever” in the fall of 1954 to studyat the University of Leeds, and returned to Nigeria on the first day of 1960.Of course, the text says he met Colin “in the sixties”—but this must be amistake, because we know from Soyinka’s Ibadan that he was on goodterms with Colin and Lloyd well before his debut on the London stage inNovember 1959 (Brien; Parekh and Jagne 438; Soyinka, Ibadan 28). Thus,if the poem was written just “over three years” from Soyinka’s initial entryinto England, then it was written sometime in late 1957 or early 1958,when he had finished his degree and was working in London for the RoyalCourt Theatre. Contrary to what is often assumed, then, the poem was notcomposed by a cocksure maverick strutting his stuff, the enfant terrible ofthe Nigerian literary scene. It was composed by an unknown, homesick,twenty-three-year-old, fledgling writer living in London, routinely encoun-tering racism and alienation, as his London poems (e.g., “TelephoneConversation”) and his memoirs of the period (e.g., Ibadan 27) make clear.Knowing this makes it harder to read the poem as a hymn to nonconfor-mity that mirrors Soyinka’s own maverick character and cultural praxis,


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and easier to read it as a traditional Yoruba oríkì, a nostalgic evocation ofthe familiar past (àbíkú) in an alien present (London).

In an interview with Jane Wilkinson, Soyinka give us some idea of whatthis Yoruba past pertaining to àbíkú, revivified by the poem, might be:

[Y]ou have to understand that I grew up with àbíkú […] Àbíkú wasreal, not just a figment of literary analysis. […] I keep emphasiz-ing the cruelty of àbíkú once they realize their own power withtheir parents, with their elders, how they use and abuse theirpower, and at the same time the kind of intelligence of the àbíkúand their loyalty to their own group, almost like children versusthe adult world. (Wilkinson 107-08)

One of Soyinka’s playmates as a young boy was also an àbíkú, and he tells usin his autobiography Aké: The Years of Childhood that she was characterizedby her strange rebellion against parental authority:

[Mrs B.’s] only daughter, Bukola, was not of our world. […]Amulets, bangles, tiny rattles and dark copper-twist rings earthedher through ankles, fingers, wrists and waist. […] Like all àbikú shewas privileged, apart. (16)

It made me uneasy. Mrs B. was too kind a woman to beplagued with such an awkward child [a child who threatened todie if she was not given anything she wanted]. […] I thought of allthe things Bukola could ask for, things which would be beyond thepower of her parents to grant. (18)

Soyinka’s memories of àbíkú bear traces of the Ifá discourse. He rep-resents àbíkú in terms of an oppositional tension between rgbx and ilé, “loy-alty to [one’s] group” versus loyalty to one’s “parents.” He also tells us that“amulets, bangles, tiny rattles, and dark copper-twist rings earthed [theàbíkú]”—the word “earthed” recalling dè, Ifá’s term for fettering àbíkú tothe houses of the world. What is most striking about these passages, how-ever, is that these traces of Ifá are subsumed within an overall focus uponthe àbíkú as a individualistic child (“privileged, apart”) antagonistic to therule of parents and elders over children (“like children versus the adultworld”). Not only is such a focus unanticipated by the Ifá discourse, but italso locates Soyinka’s memories of àbíkú within a sociopolitical problemat-ic different from that animating Ifá theory and oral àbíkú literature alike—a problematic having to do not with the rule of ilé over rgbx, but with therule of adults over children, elders over juniors, families over individuals.

Given the circumstances precipitating the poem’s composition andgiven the memories upon which Soyinka drew, it should come as no sur-prise to us “Abiku” is preoccupied with the relationship betweenSoyinka’s Western present and his Yoruba past, between Western-stylepolitical individualism and Yoruba-style familial rule. Soyinka’s poemeverywhere represents the àbíkú as an “I am,” a self-defining individualthat contests and resists being ruled by its parents and community. Ascritics point out, the presence of parents is implied by the constant men-tion of religious ritual. The putting of “bangles” on ankles, the sacrifice

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of “goats and cowries,” the use of hot shell-fragments to “brand” theàbíkú, and the pouring of “Libations” all refer to community-defined rit-uals that parents would perform to “earth” an àbíkú. In this sense, thepoem’s ritual images are metonyms for the claims made on the individ-ual by family and community, as well as synechdoches for the (sometimesviolent and “brand”-like) mechanisms of normalization by which thoseclaims are internalized and enforced. The àbíkú’s “I” is represented asbeing detached from those claims, vagrantly slipping free from theiremotive grasp (“Must I weep [. . .]?”) and their physical imprint upon itsbody (“brand me”). Instead of submitting itself to the interests of itsparents, the àbíkú is persistently self-defining (“I am Abiku,” “I am thesquirrel teeth”) and self-determining (“I’ll be the/ Suppliant snake”).What critics interpret as a generalized kind of “nonconformity” (dissentfrom any norm whatsoever) is therefore better interpreted as a particularkind of non-conformity (individualistic dissent from the norm of Yorubafamily rule).

This self-ruling detachment of the “I” from structures of family rule ismirrored by the àbíkú’s temporal vagrancy, its detached wanderingbetween times. In the first stanza, “I am Abiku” protrudes as such a star-tling and memorable line in part because it asserts the àbíkú’s presence notonly as an “I” but as an “am” in the temporality of the present. This asser-tion of present time is immediately complicated, however, by the temporalindicators following it. The gerund “calling” inherits the present tense of“am,” but it also brings with it the past and the future, “the first / And therepeated time.” In such a way, the “I” of the àbíkú is presented to us in thefirst stanza as above all a creature of disjointed time—a time neither linear(Western) nor cyclical (African) but instead unpredictable, scrambled,haywire, a time that deconstructs any stable relationship (linear or cyclical)between past, present, and future.22 Àbíkú break down, complicate, andwander insolently back and forth across temporal distinctions, Soyinkaseems to say, and this is reinforced for us as the poem goes on. The last lineof the third stanza pulls us toward the future (“When Abiku calls again”),for example, but the first line of the fourth stanza yanks us back assertivelyto the present (“I am the squirrel teeth”) before inviting us to the past timeof memory (“Remember this”). This disjointure of temporality continueswith the paradoxical assertion in stanza five that an original event and itssubsequent recurrence, “once and the repeated time,” exist simultane-ously, just as infancy (“I puke”) and extreme age (“ageless”) are cotermi-nous. “Ageless” also means, of course, “timeless,” suggesting that the àbíkúexists not only inside of time, persisting in spite of it like a timeless mas-terpiece, but also exists outside of time like an eternal god. In stanzas sixand seven, the àbíkú’s path into the world (“The way I came”) is describednot in spatial or geographical terms, but through a temporal metaphor,the day’s progression from “mourning” (a clear pun on “morning”) to“Evening,” and from evening to “Night!” But since we are following theàbíkú’s path back to its beginning, we are meant to understand that“Night!” is the àbíkú’s temporal starting point, “Evening” its mid-point, and“mourning” its end-point. The àbíkú inverts the normal direction of time,


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in other words, a fact that the poem strikes home by re-inverting againwhat the àbíkú has already inverted, showing us “mourning” before“Night!” In short, the time of àbíkú is the time of vagrancy, a time thatinverts or simply disobeys the normal rules of temporality, insolently jay-walking across temporal distinctions between past and present, history andeternity, even as it seems unequivocally to assert the present presence of an“I am.” In such a way, the àbíkú’s temporal vagrancy mirrors and under-scores its individualism, its delinquent straying from the political struc-tures of family rule.

But this disjointed time also complicates the àbíkú’s contest againstparental rituals. Since the àbíkú’s “I” is fractured temporally from within,its self-assertive “I am” and self-determining “I’ll be”—reliant as they areupon a definite present and definite future—are destabilized. The àbíkú’sself-ruling individualism is thus seen to be contradictory, needing the verytemporal distinctions (the “time” of parental rituals) that it truantly repu-diates. The political value of individual self-determination is complexlyintertwined, the poem seem to say, with the rule of individual selves byfamily and community.

The poem’s insistence upon the time and the “I”—upon seeing the àbíkú’s vagrancy as temporal and its delinquency as self-creatingindividualism—are clear departures from oral literature pertaining toàbíkú, which represents the àbíkú’s vagrancy as spatial and its delinquencyas rgbx-like conspiracy. But the poem is also deeply indebted to oral liter-ature. In particular, it belongs to the Yoruba oral genre of oríkì, a genregermane to the poem’s insistence upon the temporal.23 For as KarinBarber points out, oríkì are all about time: they invoke the past to affirmthe present, aesthetically transcending the gap between past time and pre-sent time by textually demonstrating their continuity (Barber, I CouldSpeak 15). Fragmentary quotations from past texts—histories, songs,proverbs, local gossip, and so on—are cobbled together in surprising waysto capture whatever is most noteworthy and distinctive about a subject atthe present moment. When performed by a virtuoso, an oríkì becomes adense labyrinth of quotations (Barber, “Quotation”) that are tantalizinglydisjointed and polyvocal: cryptic, name-like formulations are juxtaposedwithout any attempt at prioritizing one over the other or concealing con-tradictions between them, and “[t]he ‘I’ of the utterance moves continu-ally, speaking with different voices” that have no definite relationship withone another (I Could Speak 288). Thus, while oríkì are politically conserv-ative in that they affirm the present state of things by revealing its conti-nuity with the past, oríkì can also have a politically destabilizing effect: byholding open past contradictions and withholding a single authorialpoint of view, oríkì show “the possibility of things being otherwise” (ICould Speak 288).

Soyinka tells us that he “grew up with” oríkì (Wilkinson 100), and hispoem has all the hallmarks of the oral poetic form: it is a cryptic and poly-vocal tissue of quotations, evoking the Yoruba home of Soyinka’s past in thealien present of his London sojourn. Let me take a few examples. To beginwith, the poem is, like the oríkì of Akande discussed above, a bricolage of

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innovative àbíkú names. To see this, one need only join the words togetherwith dashes, or place the standard Yoruba name-making prefixes of “Qmp”(“Child of . . .”)“ or “Ò ni” (“One who is/says/has . . .”) before every secondline. In the first stanza, “[Child of] In-vain-your-bangles-cast-charmed-circles-at-my-feet” is both an apt and delightfully surprising appellation foran àbíkú, capturing as it does the quality of boastful arrogance characteris-tic of Ifá’s heavenly thieves. Similarly, “[One who says] I-am-Abiku-calling-for-the-first-and-the-repeated-time” is a suitable name, invoking as it doesthe àbíkú’s propensity to be born repeatedly and, when it is born, not to staytoo long—“calling” understood here as “briefly visiting.” The entire poemcould be read in a similar fashion; each couplet, and sometimes each line,constitutes a name or name-like formula intended to capture somethingdistinctive and noteworthy about àbíkú. In such a way, the individualisticàbíkú’s self-definitions turn out to be community-derived appellations—identity-defining names or name-like formulas authorized by structures offamily rule antagonistic to the àbíkú’s individualism.

True to the poem’s nature as an oríkì, many of the name-like formulascobbled together in the poem are cryptic and polyvocal. “The god’sswollen foot” of stanza four is a prime example. The phrase might refer to“the foot of a tree” (Roscoe 55)—presumably the sort of numinous treeoften associated with àbíkú. But other critics tells us “[t]he earth is said tobe the footstool of God,” so perhaps “the god’s swollen foot” refers not toa tree but to a deep grave in the earth (Senanu and Vincent 191)—mak-ing the directive, “Dig me deeper still/Into the god’s swollen foot,” a sar-donic piece of advice to parents, since everybody knows that burying anàbíkú will only encourage it—that tossing it disrespectfully into the bush isthe best way to prevent its return.

In addition to such allusions to the Yoruba past, “god’s swollen foot”unquestionably cites the classical Greek story of Oedipus, whose name lit-erally means “Swollen Foot.” This invocation to Oedipus—hardly surpris-ing given Soyinka’s perennial interest and use of Greek mythology (seeBacchae; Myth; Zabus)—is multi-faceted. First, it condenses one of the cen-tral stories of Western literature into a cryptic verbal clipping that makespresent another noteworthy quality of the àbíkú—its being, like Oedipus,an ill-fated infant who, thought dead, returns again to harm its parents.Second, it playfully alludes to early twentieth-century debates amongYorubanists about which of three ancient civilizations (Egyptian, Greek, orIfe-Yoruba) was the origin of the other two (see Frobenius; Olumide;Parker)—a debate which persists to this day (see Bernal). Third, Soyinka’soblique allusion to Oedipus cross-references Freud’s view (hegemonic inthe West at the poem’s time of composition) that a so-called “Oedipalstage” during early childhood (hatred of paternal omnipotence) leads achild to see itself as an individual “I” separate from its caregivers. Here,again, is the conflict between children and parents, between Western struc-tures of individualism and Yoruba structures of family rule that governsSoyinka’s representation of àbíkú. In short, “the god’s swollen foot” is anexemplar of the poem’s cryptic polyvocality, its incessant multiplication ofnot-entirely-compatible perspectives and voices, Yoruba and Western, past


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and present. Truly, “Soyinka’s sources are not only heterogeneous, theyalso interact with each other in one and the same text” (Ralf 45).

This sort of polyvocality reaches a kind of cadenza in the last few stan-zas of the poem. The àbíkú is referred to in the first person (“I’ll be,” “Icrept”) as well as the third person (“Abiku sucks,” “Abiku moans”), forexample, and theories about witches (“flesh-birds”), agriculturaldiscourses (“the ripest fruit”), and Yoruba tales and proverbs about thespider (“the spider, trapping”) are cited in rapid sequence.24 “Suppliantsnake” appears to quote Ifá’s story about the snake killed by parents ontheir àbíkú-child’s wedding day, but this authoritative source is soon buriedin a heap of cryptic allusions that yoke different voices and different dis-courses together into a single utterance. The metaphor “warmth was cloy-ing,” for instance, yokes together descriptive categories as separate astemperature and taste, while “Mounds from the yolk” compares a humangrave-site to the first stage in a chicken’s life-cycle—a re-translation ofàbíkú, “born to die,” that is at once serious and arch. In short, the poem isrelentlessly polyvocal, shifting in a labile fashion between differentsources, voices, perspectives, and descriptive categories. This verbalvagrancy reflects the àbíkú’s temporal vagrancy, which we have said is anintegral part of its assertion of individualism, its straying from the stabletime of tradition and ritual embodied by parental structures of control. Insuch a way, the confining conservatism of the names and name-like for-mulations is counterbalanced by a decentered multiplicity of quotationsthat make room for the àbíkú’s will to individual self-determination.

Soyinka’s oríkì might be a tissue of many name-like formulations quot-ing multiple source texts, but there is also a sense in which the poem is asingle quotation from a single source: a quotation of the boasts made byàbíkú characters in Ifá’s àbíkú narratives. As mentioned earlier, almost everyàbíkú narrative told by Ifá deploys the standard plot device of an àbíkú whobrags about its secret plans, boasting that its parents can do nothing to stopit from carrying them out. This boast turns out to be a lot of hot air, how-ever, because a hero, spying on it from a good hiding place, overhears theàbíkú’s secret plans and uses this intelligence to capture it. Like the stereo-typical àbíkú in Ifá’s narratives, Soyinka’s àbíkú is a loud-mouthed braggartwho lists each thing its parents might do to keep it alive and rejects everyone: “bangles” are cast “in vain”; sacrificed “goats” will not make it weep; a“brand” will not prevent it from carrying out its plans; “libations” only pointit back to heaven. Handed this comprehensive, confidently uttered rejec-tion list, critics have assumed the parents’ efforts to be futile. But this rejec-tion list is entirely conventional: it is the hot air of a braggart, and braggarts,as the Ifá convention says, get caught. Seen in this light, the governing ironyof Soyinka’s poem is not a tragic irony (we and the àbíkú knowing that theparents’ efforts are futile) but a comic irony (we and the parents knowingthat the àbíkú’s oath is hot air). Some critics (e.g., Ogunsanwo 47) havesuggested that the poem “parodies” oral àbíkú narratives and “mocks” theirassociated religious practices. But the opposite seems true: the poembelongs to and relies upon our understanding of Ifá’s narrative conven-tions, conventions that undermine the àbíkú’s boasting individualism.

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If we are considering the poem as a single quotation from a singlesource, however, then it also unquestionably cites the well-known sayingàbíkú s’olóògùn d’èké, “Abiku turn herbalists into liars.” According to Ifábabaláwo, herbal medicines (òògùn)—or whatever else a herbalist (olóògùnor onísègùn) might concoct—are pointless against genuine cases of àbíkú.25

This is because the problem they pose is not medical but epistemological:their power is based upon humans’ ignorance of their secret plans to dieat a certain time and by a certain method. Only an Ifá babaláwo, throughdivinatory communication with Orunmila, can discover those secret plansand leak them to human beings. For this reason, Ifá is praised as Òdùdù tíídu orí emèrè, “The savior who saves the head of emèrè [i.e., àbíkú]” (Akinyemi184). Read as an elaborate improvisation on àbíkú s’olóògùn d’èké, the poemdoes indeed mock and conceptually undermine parental efforts guided byherbalist rituals, thereby suggesting the triumph of self-ruling individual-ism over structures of family rule. But this triumph is vulnerably fragile, forthe old saying (at least on Ifá’s authoritative interpretation of it) alsoimplies that the individual’s private secrets are knowable and that, oncethey are known, parents and community authorities will again be able toregain control.

There is no question, then, that Soyinka’s poem is an oríkì, a tissue ofquotations from past texts intended to encapsulate and affirm some of theàbíkú’s more noteworthy qualities and capacities. But this oral Yoruba formis couched within a conspicuously Western lyric form of quatrains wherethe flow of ideas is—quite contrary to oral oríkì practice—broken by unnat-ural enjambments (“Remember / This,” “ageless / Though I puke,” “I’ll bethe / Suppliant snake”) or slowed down by the occurrence of periods andsemi-colons within each stanza. (In Soyinka’s final version of “Abiku,” pub-lished in Idanre, however, these intrastanzaic periods and semicolons thatpunctuate the original Black Orpheus version are replaced with commas,dashes, or nothing at all in an effort to re-create that cascading effect of lin-guistic proliferation to which oral oríkì artists aspire.) Also unlike oríkì andtypical of the lyric, Soyinka’s poem is internally tied together and organizedby patterns of imagery (e.g., images of time, of body parts, and of theanimal world). We have said that the poem’s “I” is fractured from within byits temporal vagrancy, but this “I” also creates a certain sense of univocality,of one voice speaking from a single perspective about itself—a univocalitytypical of the Western lyric that exists in tension with poem’s oral Yorubapolyvocality. In such a way, Soyinka complicates his deployment of the oral genre, staging at the level of genre the embroilment between Westernindividualism (symbolized by the lyric) and Yoruba family rule (symbolizedby the oríkì) explored throughout the poem.

All that we have been saying about “Abiku” is further complicatedwhen we turn back to its circumstances of composition. In London,Soyinka was an àbíkú in the sense, handed down to him by the oral litera-ture, of being someone forcibly separated from his origin (Yorubaland)and exiled in a place he did not want to be (England). As we have seen,Soyinka pushes against London and all that it represents in the poem: thespirit of Western-style individualism is subverted by its own temporal


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vagrancy and by quotations from Yoruba oral texts that embody thepolitical value of family rule; and a conspicuously Western form of short-lined quatrains (England) strains to house his oral oríkì (Yorubaland). Inthis sense, the poem strives to transcend time and geographical separation,strives to make Soyinka’s Yoruba past present again and thereby affirm thehegemonic structures of expression (oríkì) and political organization (fam-ily rule) that centrally constituted his Yoruba home—structures for whichthe àbíkú is both a metonym and a symbol. But the àbíkú is also Londonand the West, embodying a self-determining individualism (“I am”) thatpushes against the determination of one’s life by parents and communityelders (“Mothers!”). As an oríkì to àbíkú, the poem affirms this individual-ism, celebrating Soyinka’s individualistic detachment from parents andfamily in his London present—but, problematically and paradoxically, itdoes so through a series of quotations from past Yoruba texts that togeth-er symbolize a nonindividualistic attachment to them, thus qualifying andundermining the very celebration they make possible. In short, Westernand Yoruba forms, both political and aesthetic, are seen to be mutuallyentangled in uneasy alliances, even as they also conflict and undermineeach other in a poetic peroration that is at once controlled and dizzying.

Soyinka’s poem, then, is pervasively indebted to oral àbíkú literature.But it belongs to a very different historical moment and a very differentpolitical problematic than its precursors. Oral àbíkú literature is constitutedby concerns about protecting the ilé against rival rgbx-like structures,embodying the contest in a way that affirms the ilé while revealing it to befragile, contingent, and beset with internal contradictions. By contrast,Soyinka’s literate oríkì is inseparable from the tensions between Westernindividualism and Yoruba familialism that it so perplexingly stages, affirm-ing and denying both political values. The different histories of errancyengaged in by the oral texts and the poem are reflected in their differentrepresentations of errancy. In the oral àbíkú texts, the àbíkú’s errancy is spa-tial and subversive: loyal only to its rgbx, the àbíkú upsets the spatial bound-aries between ilé and igbó, between ayé and òrun, between one ilé andanother; and this spatial errancy undermines the ilé’s constitutive activitiesof procreation, lineage perpetuation, and the honoring of one’s ancestralcity. For Soyinka, by contrast, the àbíkú’s errancy is temporal and indeter-minate: the àbíkú is an “I am,” no longer part of an rgbx but an atomisticindividual belonging to a disjointed time, attempting to determine itselfrather than submit to the rule of parents.

If this essay has shown nothing else, it has demonstrated the need tohistoricize àbíkú literature, to situate it within the field of official discoursesand political anxieties peculiar to the time and place of its production.Whether they belong to discourses of truth or to the category of literature,representations of àbíkú are heterogeneous, politicized, and historicallyembedded. They work to reproduce the ideological mirages that accom-pany and underwrite hegemonic social and political forms, but can, as wehave seen, also work to dissent from and resist them. Future studies ofàbíkú literature would do well to keep this fact of historicity in mind, if onlyfor the following two reasons. First, it would remind us that any “strategic

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choices exercised in filiation with indigenous resources” (Quayson 6)observable in àbíkú literature are not as deliberate and consciouslyplanned as the phrase “strategic choices exercised” might imply, eventhough it is also true that authorial agency is in the end not reducible tothe dialectic of base and superstructure or some other crude determinism.Second, critical attention to the historicity of àbíkú would help dispel thepowerful temptation to interpret àbíkú in a way that reflects critics’ owntheoretical or political commitments rather than the commitmentsembodied by the literature. As postcolonial critics, for example, we mightbe tempted to appropriate àbíkú as a trope for postcolonial hybridity andliminality, for the migrant experience, for the defiant nationalism of decol-onization, for “magical realism,” or for the globally unjust distributions ofwealth and power which importantly contribute to high child mortalityrates in “developing” countries. Such interpretations, however conscien-tiously elaborated, are not only ahistorical, but also run the risk of quiet-ing the multiple and varied indigenous histories of àbíkú with which theliterature is intermeshed. At worst, such ahistorical, academic representa-tions of àbíkú might come to stand for the indigenous varieties—a problemsimilar in kind and in urgency to the perennial problem of “metropolitanhybridity” standing for “subalternity” (Spivak 308-11, 358-62).

NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

I use diacritical marks throughout on Yoruba words that carry culture-specificmeanings relevant to this study, except for proper nouns. Thus, the word àbíkúreceives tone-marks and is italicized throughout, but “Oyo” (as the name of a townor kingdom) and “Soyinka” receive no tone-marks or subscripts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of this essay is based upon fieldwork (interviews and literature collec-tion) carried out in Igboland and Yorubaland in 1999. This fieldwork would nothave been possible without the kind and generous assistance of many persons andinstitutions. I am therefore very grateful to Mr. Tim Cribb and Dr. Ato Quayson ofthe University of Cambridge; Prof. Ossie Enekwe, Rev. Dr. Anthony Ekwunife, Dr.Chibiko Okebalama, and Dr. Benjamin Okpukpara of the University of Nigeria,Nsukka; Prof. Oyin Ogunba, Chief Bayo Ogundijo, and Dr. Sola Ajibade ofObafemi Awolowo University, Ife; and to all those who generously shared their timeand knowledge with me during the course of many interviews. For financial sup-port, my gratitude goes to Mr. Evan Schulman; the Cambridge CommonwealthTrust; the Smuts Memorial Fund; and the UAC of Nigeria Travel Fund. Forimmense help with Yoruba orthography and for protracted etymological andhermeneutic discussions on key Yoruba terms, I am greatly indebted to EniolaAkinjobin-. My gratitu de also goes to Dr. Sola Ajibade of the Department ofAfrican Languages and Linguistics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria, for


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transcribing and providing rough English translations of my recorded interviewswith Yoruba babaláwo. Finally, I have benefited greatly from correspondence withChristey Lynn Carwile of the Unive rsity of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, who iscited in my bibliography under the surname “Routon.

NOTES

1. To the best of my knowledge, these works are: C. Achebe; Ajiboye; Akoma;Amadi; Chekwas; Chukwuezi; Clark-Bekederemo; Emecheta (Joys; Kehinde;Slave Girl); Euba; Fatoki; Ike; Kotun; Lakoju; Maduekwe; Monebi; Nguty;Nkala; Nnabuife; Nzekwu; Okeke; Okigbo; Okri (Famished; Infinite; Songs);Owolabi; Schütze; Soyinka (“Abiku”; Akè; Dance); and Tutuola (“Antare”; MyLife; Witch-Herbalist).

2. Among the more extended or notable of these commentaries are: Aizenberg;Aji and Ellsworth; Cezair-Thompson; Cooper; Garnier; Hawley; Jones; Maduka;Ogunyemi; Ogunsanwo; Okonkwo 56-57; Osundare; Quayson; Taiwo; Zeleza.Ogunsanwo contemplates the “intertextuality” of Ben Okri’s The FamishedRoad, but does not consider its relationship with oral àbíkú literature as such.Verger (“La société”) and C. C. Achebe (“Literary Insights”) are exceptions tothe general rule in that they construe the literature as a source of anthropo-logical information about àbíkú and ògbánje.

3. The currently standard translation “born to die” appears to have been coinedby Samuel Johnson (83). My gratitude goes to Eniola Akinjogbin-McCabe andto Dr. Akin Oyetade and Anya “Bola” Oed of the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, London, for debating the linguistics of àbíkú with me.

4. See Abraham 135; Adeoye 38; Aworeni; Beier, “Spirit Children” 330; Fatoki vi;Ifatoogun; Ifayinka; Olanipekun; Renne 25; Verger, “La socièté” 1455. Èré,emèrè, rlérè, rgbx òrun, rlxgbx are discussed elsewhere in this essay.

5. Everything in this and the next paragraph is derived from Ifatoogun. Other Ifábabaláwo from whom extensive accounts of àbíkú have been collected areAworeni, Ifayinka, Olanipekun, and Verger. Further important information onthe Yoruba àbíkú can be found in: Abraham 7-8, 159, 162; Adebajo; Adeoye;Babalola; Bascom, Yoruba 74; Beier, “Spirit Children,” “Geist-Kinder”; Crowther2; Davis 85-90, 132, 228-31; Doherty; Ellis 111-14; Johnson 83-84; Houlberg“Social Hair” 380-82; King; Leighton 32-33, 79-80, 146-8; Maupoil 391-92;Merlo; Mobalade; Morgan; Morton-Williams, “Yoruba Responses”; Nathan, ch.1; Parrinder 95-100, 161; Popoola; Prince 106-07; Renne, ch. 2; Talbot, Peoples2:358-9, 3:719-31; Verger, “La société,” Notes 163-70; Williams.

6. “To tie” (idè) an object for the purpose of making it “something/someone inbondage” (òndè) seems connected only to a handful of currently or historical-ly typical practices among the Yoruba: (a) the tying of goats or other domesticanimals to stop them from roaming or causing trouble; (b) the penning in ofa wild animal by a circle of hunters; (c) the capture and manacling of thieves,madmen, and slaves. The metaphorical usage of dè by Ifá associates àbíkú withall of these spheres of Yoruba life. Dè is also used a ritual metaphor in the wor-ship of some òrìsà. As Matory observes, Sàngó is praised as the hunter withchains who “catches children . . . like a royal slave hunter” (Matory 190).

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7. Verger’s article is the only other published account of àbíkú by an Ifábabaláwo—the unnamed babaláwo in question probably being the one fromDahomey who initiated Verger into the Ifá cult. Adeoye’s information alsoseems largely derived from Ifá. I have collected further accounts from Aworeni,Ifatoogun, Ifayinka, Olanipekun—all senior Ifá babaláwo in different areas ofYorubaland.

8. See Abraham 159. Abraham cites emèrè as a synonym of rlérè, and rlérè as a syn-onym of àbíkú, but offers no etymological breakdown of emèrè. I have followedEniola Akinjogbin-McCabe’s tentative conjecture that: emèrè = e-mu-èrè = “one:-who-drinks-profit” (pers. interview). But it is also possible that emèrè is a loanword from the Arabic, Nupe, or even Igbo, for we know that borrowing of thiskind has occurred (Gbadamosi 207; Matory 267; Renne 25).

9. On the rgbx, see Eades 61; Frobenius 158-63; Matory 95-96.10. Several anthropological works on the Yoruba published in the 1990s have

demonstrated the influence of such rgbx on political life. It is the central argu-ment of Apter’s book on “critical” ritual groups and of Matory’s reading ofSàngó worship.

11. This centrality of slave-raiding tropes to Ifá’s theory of àbíkú—and to some Ifá-prescribed àbíkú rituals (such as the donning of iron manacles or saworo)—sug-gests that the slave trade may have been the material cause of àbíkú (as aseparate phenomenon from, say, ìbejì). There is not (yet) enough evidence todecide this issue finally, but the evidence—e.g., the fact that belief in àbíkú(children who die young and come back repeatedly) seems confined to WestAfrica and is at its most concentrated on the “Slave Coast”—is substantial andinteresting enough to deserve treatment in a separate essay. A notable and ger-mane account of children being lured away from their homes by rgbx and soldinto slavery is to be found in Ajisafe’s History of Abeokuta (105). For more on thecultural and economic impact of the slave trade in Yorubaland, see Dowd; Law;Morton-Williams, “Slave Trade”; Oroge.

12. On the “textuality” of Yoruba oral literature, see Barber, “Quotation.”13. For published examples of oral àbíkú literature, see: Adeoye; Bascom, Ifa verses

1:4, 17:3, 19:3, 33:1, 101:1; Beier, Yoruba Poetry; Davis; Delano; Johnson;Olayemi; and Verger, “La société.” I have collected additional names, oríkì,songs, proverbs, incantations, and rsr Ifá pertaining to àbíkú from Aworeni,Ifatoogun, Ifayinka, and Olanipekun.

14. For more on àbíkú names, see especially Adeoye; Johnson; Verger.15. But see Barber (“Deconstructive Criticism”) for a caution about using decon-

struction in relation to Yoruba oral literary texts.16. Akande’s text was transcribed and translated by Davis (Davis 226-27). I have

added diacritical marks to her transcription, but have not changed her trans-lation.

17. According to Ifayinka, “Every odu of Ifá speaks of àbíkú.” Since there are 256odu, there might be as many as 256 rsr Ifá pertaining to àbíkú. Verger gives useight of these; Bascom four; Adeoye one. I have collected thirty-four from fourdifferent Ifá babaláwo; three of these rsr Ifá are different versions of thosealready collected by Adeoye and Verger.

18. The term “individualism” is often used to characterize Soyinka’s self-sufficiencyor nonconformity (e.g., Quayson 73). But I use the term in its more particularsense of the political philosophy that privileges the individual above the groupand enshrines the individual’s right to self-rule rather than subordinating it to


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the needs and wishes of a community. The spirit of self-sufficiency and non-con-formity can be found in nearly every society worldwide—but individualism assuch is still only peculiar to and definitive of Western liberal democracies.

19. Date inferred. For a chronology of early editions of Black Orpheus, see Benson289-90. Since the Black Orpheus version of “Abiku” is closer to the poem’s his-torical moment of composition than subsequent versions, I base my analysis onit rather than on the Idanre version. The former differs from the latter in hav-ing no epigraph defining àbíkú and in being punctuated by periods and semi-colons rather than by commas and em-dashes.

20. Comparison of the poems “has been a frequent attraction for the West AfricanExaminations Council’s literature examiners, year in-year out, right from the‘60s” (Ogunsanwo 46). For examples of this pedagogic tradition, seeMaduakor 71-75; Nwoga 61-62; and Senanu and Vincent 192-93. Benson pointsout that the journal was an educational tool for teachers and a formative influ-ence on the development of Nigerian literary culture (27).

21. Variants of this reading are offered by, e.g., Jones 1; Larsen 107; Maduakor 71;Maduka 25-27; Nwoga 187; Ogunsanwo 47; Okonkwo 64; Quayson 124; andTaiwo 221.

22. In this sense, the poem is in tension with négritude and Soyinkan valorizations ofcyclical/African time, just as much as it is in tension with linear/colonial time.On the subject of cyclical African time (which includes the liminal time of tran-sition), see Soyinka (Myth 144). For a reading of “Abiku” that argues, contraryto me, that the poem’s time is cyclical, see Osundare 98. On temporal disjoin-ture as a deconstruction of linear and cyclical time alike, see Derrida 3-30.

23. Other critics have hinted that they understand the poem as a kind of oríkì.Taiwo, for instance, tells us that the poem “praises” the abiku “as a hero” (221);Nwoga remarks that Soyinka calls us “to admire” his subject (187). But no crit-ic has explicitly read the poem as an oríkì or spelled out the implications of this fact.

24. On the subject of spiders, Ellis catalogues this Yoruba proverb: “When the spi-der intends to attack you it encircles you with its web” (231). Abimbola tells usthat in the Ifá literary corpus the spider “is always referred to as master crafts-man who weaves his threads with great expertise” (Ifa 218). These two, some-what contradictory traditional representations of the spider are simultaneouslycited by Soyinka to encapsulate different distinctive qualities of àbíkú—itspredatory aspect (negative) and its crafty intelligence (somewhat positive).

25. Aworeni, Ifatoogun, Ifayinka, and Olanipekun are all in agreement about whatfollows. For an account which differs from theirs, but which appears to conflateIfá babaláwo with onísègùn and other persons claiming to heal àbíkú, seeMobolade 62-63.

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Abraham, R[oy] C[live]. Dictionary of Modern Yoruba. London: U of London P, 1958.

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Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958.Achebe, Chinwe Christie. “Literary Insights Into the Ogbanje Phenomenon.”

Journal of African Studies [Berkeley] 7 (1980): 31-38.Adebajo, S. “Kórì: The Yoruba Deity of Children.” Orita 21 (1989): 65-77.Adeoye, C. L. Orúko Yorúbà. Ibadan: Oxford UP, 1972.Agbor, Ajan. “Born to Die.” Newswatch [Lagos] 20 Feb. 1989: 32+.Aizenberg, Edna. “‘I Walked With a Zombie’: The Pleasures and Perils of

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Barber, Karin. I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oríkì, Women, and the Past in a YorubaTown. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1991.

. “Quotation in the Constitution of Yoruba Oral Texts.” Research in African Literature 30.2 (1999): 17-41.

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