Coming together and falling apart: something about brooms and Nigeria

African Arts, Autumn, 2009 by David T. Doris

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

There is a popular saying in Nigeria, and if you spend any time on the streets there you will see it often, painted in bright script on the sides of trucks and buses, or affixed with self-sticking letters to the rear windows of cars:

NO CONDITION IS PERMANENT.

Somehow it is always a little disconcerting to see this simple phrase emerge out of the noise and tumult of the streets. It lends perspective to all the commotion, shapes it, gives the world a caption. As true and pithy observations go, this one is hardly exclusive to this part of the globe, or to any particular historical moment. Indeed, it is probably as close to a declaration of Universal and Inarguable Truth as we humans are likely to get with our pithy observations. The Truth it encapsulates is by turns sobering and liberating. Yes, our lives in this world are fragile and short--we know this, or we come to learn it--but it is not death alone that imparts to our lives a sense of impermanence; it is the ordinary ebb and flow of living in the world. No condition is permanent. We tend to remember this when conditions are lousy, when we need solace and a reason to hope that our lot will improve. Likewise, we tend to forget it, even deny it, when we probably would do best to remember it--when conditions are sweet and ripe, and all seems right with the world.

In Nigeria's southwest, there is a well-known Yoruba proverb that also emphasizes worldly being as perpetual flux, transforming a generalizing observation into a culture-specific metaphor:

   Aye l'oja, orun nile.
   The world is a marketplace; heaven is home.

There is neither solace nor admonition in this phrase. In its insistence on materiality, it is even a bit cynical. The marketplace metaphor frames the experience of transience in this world, coolly, without judgment or ethical prescription. Individual fortunes may rise and fall from moment to moment, with causes and consequences that can be explained and even predicted by way of any number of knowledge or belief systems. But what remains constant and undeniable until the end--when we get to rest comfortably and forever in one heavenly home or another--is the necessary and ceaseless relationality of exchange.

Out of the clamor of the marketplace--the Yoruba world figured as an arena of fleeting transactions--arises the ideological foundation of an ethics and of an accompanying aesthetics. Simply and generally stated, that which acknowledges, honors, and maintains the reciprocative flow of appropriate exchange is Useful, Good, and even Beautiful; that which brings it to a halt is Useless, Bad, and something quite other than Beautiful. Stating it this way is absurdly reductive, of course; it does not take into account that acts are judged, and have real consequences, in specific social contexts. But the point is this: An individual's fortune might depend upon the quality of his or her exchanges with others--on the coolness, decency, venality, compassion, bitterness, cunning, or any other attribute of character (iwa) brought to bear in each exchange--but it is always contingent upon acts of exchange as such, upon reciprocation and mutual recognition.

This basic assumption finds nuanced expression in a wide spectrum of Yoruba social and cultural practices: from the call-and-response pattern of ordinary verbal and gestural greetings, to the inextricably paired processes of divination and sacrifice, to the fluid entanglements of political leaders and their supporters and of gods and their supplicants (Barber 1981), to the very notion of Yoruba "tradition" (asa) as a continuing series of individual choices (sa) made in consensus with, and divergence from, the past (Yai 1994).

Even the Yoruba conception of the image as aworan articulates a particular relationship of exchange. More or less closely translated as 'that which we look at and remember" the term aworan is rich in implications (Adepegba 1983:14; Drewal and Drewal 1990:1-4; Lawal 2001, 1996:98-99). By definition, the significant or memorable image engages the viewer in a visual and cognitive dialogue, recalling the past to mind in the present and prompting the viewer's responsive identification with a legacy of cultural and social ideals. Identification is expected, of course, but it is not inevitable. A viewer may choose to disavow such interpellative images, but there are consequences for such disavowals, as we will soon see. (1)

It is no surprise then that what has come to be regarded as the canon of Yoruba art is replete with aworan that model and exalt reciprocity. They make visible (fi ara hon) the qualities of ideal participation in an intersubjective network. As an example, I offer an arugba, an altar figure for the orisa (personified divinity) Sango (Fig. 1). Kneeling figures such as this, with gift-laden hands held forward in performance of sacrifice, depict also that humble gesture's necessary and anticipated reward. Supplicant and deity are each accountable to the other, and each benefits. Empowering gift is met with empowering girl; generosity returns as a crown of thunder. The diversity and persistence of such aworan in Yoruba culture over the past two centuries of dramatic social change suggest that the exchange they depict is both foundational and lasting. They monumentalize the fluidity of transactions, rendering in concrete, durable form the give-and-take that constitutes the person as a person within a network of persons, and the world as a functioning marketplace.