This past week was my last working with the Araba in 2010, and it was honestly one of the most interesting. It started out on a sad note as the Akoda of Ode-Omu (a good friend of the Araba, and a very knowledgeable Babalawo) lost his younger brother. So on Monday we went to visit him and give him some money to help with the funeral preparations, and didn’t really do much else. I felt pretty bad for him, not just because he lost his brother, but also because he had told the Araba the week before that he didn’t have any money and I think he is expected to finance most of the funeral. He’s a really nice guy, and he kind of reminds me of what a Yoruba Santa Claus might look like because all his hair is white, he’s a little portly, and he likes to laugh a lot.
Whenever I hear about problems that people are having or have had here, I like to try to think of an Ese Ifa that would address that problem to imagine which sign would have come up for him/her if (s)he were to have come to a Babalawo, like the previous governor of Osun State and Irosun-Agbe. The next day the Araba taught me another Ese Ifa, Idin Yeku, that foretells immanent sudden death, which I thought might have been a possibility since the disease that killed the Akoda’s brother was very sudden.
Sometimes for some of the more incredible Ifa messages, I ask the Araba if he has even cast them for someone and what happened, and I did that for this one. He told me that about a year or two ago, he cast it for two brothers in the neighborhood, who didn’t believe him and said that he just wanted to eat the goat that was prescribed in the sacrifice (along with white clothing that is currently in the person’s house and two wooden statues, and some money). To make a long story short, both of the brothers died a few days later in an accident with some kind of machine on the street and the Araba showed me the spot where it happened. It was pretty scary stuff!
I learned about a few other interesting ones that the Araba cast as well. I think the most interesting one was Irosun-Opinmi which contains a story about a man named Sasore who’s destiny it was to become king even though he had to struggle to realize it (the story is pretty fascinating and reveals a lot about the Yoruba concept of Ori [destiy] and how it can and cannot be changed). Anyway, the Araba said he had cast it twice, once for his friend who is a cripple, but was able to become the king of Ode-Omu even though many people protested because of his disability, and the current Ogunsua, or King, of Modakeke who also had to fight a lot of rivals before taking the throne. There is another one about infidelity that warns the person to stop cheating with someone else’s wife (or husband/significant other) because he will soon die as a result of it most likely because of Magun, a medicine you can make if you think your spouse is cheating on you. The Araba told me he cast this one for a guy who enjoyed “pleasurable company” too much, and when he warned him, the guy got mad and stormed off, and a few weeks later he died while in the process of doing what Ifa warned him not to do...
We didn’t get to finish all of the Ese in this Odu (Irosun) but in all of them, except for the last two that I haven’t learned yet, Ifa has something to say about women’s issues. I think about 10 or so have to do with having babies, others are about taking care of children, most of the stories contain female characters and/or are about the issues listed above. One of my favorites is Irosun Okanran, which explicitly prohibits the client from touching women inappropriately or forcing them to do anything against their will. The explanation the Araba gave for it’s meaning was incredibly unforgiving and contained serious worldly and supernatural repercussions if the person does not heed Ifa’s warning. Another one that I found really interesting prescribed monogamy even though traditional Yoruba society is very much polygamous (The Araba himself has 5 wives, I think...). The way Ifa described it was fascinating; it says that this person will only be able to have one wife, but he can chose the way that happens. He can either marry one woman and treat her well, or he can try to find a second, and one of them will leave. It used the analogy of light and darkness and says, “When light enters the house, darkness must flee.” I think if I keep doing work on Ifa in grad school I might have to write a paper or something on this section of Ifa because it is very clearly focused on women, while it’s hard to identify a specific focus of any of the others.
So far I have studied exactly 100 chapters of the 256, sometimes when I try to think about all of them it makes my head spin a little bit. About a month ago, the Araba told me that it would take about a year for a Babalawo in training to reach the place that I had then. Since I'm not memorizing all of the verses word for word, I get to move much more quickly, but it has made trying to memorize the meaning of the messages very difficult since on some days like Thursday and Friday the Araba and I went through about 8 chapters or more per day with at least 2 verses per chapter. I have typed them all up on a Word document to help me study, but it is now about 20 pages long single spaced, and is only the shorthand notes that don't contain the full sacrifices, stories, songs, etc. I'm going to try to use this next week to catch up on all of the verses I haven't completely memorized yet, but we'll see how far I can get.
In other news, I’m in Ibadan right now, and I’ll be going to Lagos early tomorrow morning. Aunty Bimbo came to pick me up from Ife yesterday, and we’re just hanging around my grandparent’s old house on Agbeka street for the day because the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is really terrible on the weekends and Sunday in particular. When I get to Lagos I’m going to buy a whole bunch of fabric to start making clothes because there’s only about a week left until I come home briefly for Christmas! I think it’s going to be pretty weird when I come off the plane because it’s bee over 80 degrees every day here and the sun is really intense, so it’s tough for me to imagine something like snow...
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