Symptoms and strangeness in Yoruba anti-aesthetics.

Bi oju ko ba rohun bi okun Oju o le rohun bi i ide (If the eyes have not seen a thing like rope, The eyes cannot see a thing like bronze.)

--Chief Agbongbon Inaolaji of Ilora (September 3, 1998)

Receiving, giving, giving, receiving, all that lives is twin. Who would cast the spell of death, let him separate the two.

--Ayi Kwei Armah (1973:xi)

When I arrived in Nigeria for my third visit in 1998--a time then widely regarded as the lowest moment in that country's history--the celebration of classicizing grace that colored Yoruba art historical scholarship of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s seemed pretty much out of the question. This was the Nigeria of General Sani Abacha, a president considered by most Nigerians to be a despot, a thief, and a murderer. After taking power in 1994, Abacha instituted self-serving political and economic programs that plunged Nigeria into profound disintegration. When Death came for Abacha in June 1998, the naira, once valued at two US dollars, was worth about a penny. Universities were drastically underfunded, prompting strikes by students and professors alike. The national electrical and communications utilities were crumbling, and a relentless government-manufactured shortage of petrol plagued the country. Uncertainty held sway in every arena of economic, social, and cultural life. In this all-but-ruined nation, the preservation of personal property was the order of the day: "It's hard to get," said a friend of mine in Ile-Ife, "it's hard to keep, and everyone wants to take it from you." It is no coincidence that theft and armed robbery increased dramatically in Nigeria during the late 1990s. (1)

This is the "ethnographic present" that frames this study of Yoruba aesthetics. Now, let us address beauty.

Models of Perfect Existence

The objects that have been discussed under the privileged banner of Yoruba art history, the graceful arts of royalty and religion, do not offer us a complete picture of Yoruba aesthetic practice. In Yoruba culture, we know, the beautiful object is a visual guidepost of moral excellence; an object such as the altar figure for the divinity Osun in Figure 1, intricately carved by Lawrence Ayodele of Ile-Ife in 1998, proffers in form the attributes and rewards of good behavior. As the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka has observed, "Yoruba classical art is mostly an expression of ... human beneficence, utterly devoid, on the surface, of conflict and irruption." However, he continues, "The deft, luminous peace of Yoruba religious art blinds us ... to the darker powers of the tragic art into which only the participant can truly enter" (1998:443-4).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The objects briefly outlined in this essay do what other forms of Yoruba sculpture cannot: They draw a participant-viewer directly into the matrix of those transformative "darker powers." They depict in clearly articulated symbolic form those persons who have radically deviated from Yoruba moral and ethical ideals and who, tragically or not, will be compelled to live in a condition of social estrangement as just punishment for their transgressions. Such objects enunciate the symptoms of pathology, the "conflict and irruption" that cannot be accommodated within the idealizing frame--that is, the "deft, luminous" ideological surface--of a Yoruba aesthetic canon.

In Yoruba representations and presentations of the human, the uniqueness of a person or thing is always positioned within an intersubjective framework that tempers absolute identity. The individual, ideally, chooses to associate him- or herself with enduring qualities of excellence that transcend particularities of uniqueness. Within this framework, specific identity is mediated by a sense of corporate identity. This complex conception of personhood, articulated in Yoruba philosophy as ori (the head as the site of one's destiny) and iwa (the recognition of the "essential nature" or "character" of a person or thing), is well illustrated in Yoruba visual culture. (2)

For example, in a photograph of Aderemi Fagbade of Okeigbo (Fig. 2), the babalawo, or divination specialist, chose to present himself to my camera in a posture that has become a standard in Yoruba portrait photography (Sprague 1978:54). Fagbade arrays himself in his finest embroidered garments, "cools" his facial expression, and arranges his body in idealizing symmetry (idogba), (3) as would a king or a powerful chief or elder. In this way, the individuality of the portrait's sitter is acknowledged, but also it is transfigured, as it were, by his self-identification with a category of persons. Fagbade expresses his unique iwa through a screen of conventionalizing attributes by which others can recognize him as a person. There's no paradox here: The individual at once embodies self and other--in dialogue, interdependent.(4) In canonical Yoruba sculpture, too, this idea holds, even today. For example, in such well-known Yoruba object types as the arugba, the kneeling altar figure (Fig. 1), standard posture and classic style modulate uniqueness, proffering responsive interdependence as a social ideal (Abiodun 1989:14; Thompson 1974a:80). In such models of perfect existence, we see ourselves as we might be, and as we might want others to see us: blessed with children, materially wealthy, granted the gifts of strength and good health, ennobled of character.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Let us turn now to another type of object, a thing that sees and is made to be seen (Fig. 3). Throughout southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba men and women create objects called aale to protect their properties-farms, gardens, market goods, piles of collected firewood--from the ravages of thieves. (5) Rowland Abiodun (1994:78) has called aale ase-impregnated sculptural constructs." This is a useful definition because it suggests that in aale, ase--the generative "power to make things happen" that lies at the heart of Yoruba cultural and social discourse--resides not only in the invisible interiors of things, but also is enacted through visual processes, in the creation and reception of surfaces. Canonical style has no place here--there is no visual clue as to any sort of "ethnic" Yoruba origin. But don't be fooled: These sculptural constructs are as loaded with culturally specific power as any gracefully carved shrine image, and their distance from canonical style is significant.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

In "symbolic" aale--aale ami, sign aale-the most mundane object is extracted from its ordinary context and displayed within a new one. In one such deliberate contextual shift (Fig. 4), pepper, the Yoruba flavoring par excellence, becomes a harbinger of pain. Its ripe red color also works at a linguistic level: pon, bright redness, is at the core of iponju, suffering. The broom fiber piercing the pepper makes doubly sure that the object will be seen. Aale such as these are warnings and must be seen in order to be effective, to be registered in the consciousness of potential thieves before they become actual thieves. The aale image bears moral weight--"Do not steal from here, or this will happen to you." Vision is fundamental in transporting that moral message, for as the Yoruba proverb says:

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]</p> <pre> Bi ko ba si loju, ki i kan si aya

If it is not present to the eyes, it does not weigh on the mind.

(Owomoyela 1988:172) </pre> <p>All symbolic aale threaten suffering as the consequence of transgression: the suffering of disease, loss, barrenness, paralysis, accident, madness, fruitless labor, or death. As such, madness objects are often the useless residues of things that were once positively valued--they index the histories of their own depletion. In aale, a useless object is transvalued--brought again into the field of vision, it is reinserted into the network of useful things--as a sign of uselessness. Thus, for example, empty snail shells constellated around a bamboo pole (Fig. 5) suggest bodies voided of vital fluids, drained of life. Alternately, they signify a punishment of infertility, their hollow containers likened to the ultimate dishonor of a barren womb. One snail shell displayed as aale is sufficient to get the message across--multiplied, it gets worse.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Visual analogy (afiwe) is central to the proper functioning of an aale. (6) This analogy is not merely iconographic, but performative, dialogical. If these objects share "suffering" as a constitutive element, it is because they already have been made to suffer. As Alhaji Ojuade of Okeigbo pointed out, "The work of each aale is the power that each one brings into view." (7) In their uselessness, the objects used in aale liken the power of the aale's creator to that of the person who dragged the broom across the filthy floor, who stepped on the old shoe, who tore the whole cloth into rags, who stripped the corncob of its husk and kernels, and so on (Fig. 6). Purposefully extracted from their respective spheres of use and brought into view, they suggest in miniature the capacity of these actors to irrevocably transfigure the life of a thief. (8)

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Seeing and Being Seen

Aale are intended by their creators to prompt moral identification through acts of vision. As vehicles of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1991:170), aale do not stand as self-contained nodes of representational might--they are not commandments, authoritatively uttered and passively received. Rather, aale engage the recipient in a visual dialogue with an object that has been structured as a conscious subject, a vigilant thing. Aale have eyes. They also have faces that stand as the indexical proof of power's presence in a landscape now become an arena of moral representation and reception (Fig. 7). It is no coincidence that the word for eye, oju, also denotes face, index, and presence. Let's put that into a single sentence: Aale, like Yoruba sculpture more generally, are indexes of the presence of power that is always greater than, and constitutive of, the individual subject; they are its eyes and its face.

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

In this face-to-face dialogue, seeing and being seen, an aale calls forth a recipient who actively interprets intention from the fragment, recognizing a meaningful correspondence between the creative source of the object, the context in which the object is framed, and herself. (9) In the visual display of such an object, a would-be thief is interpellated through a communicative act (Althusser 1994:139, n. 17), made subject before the eyes of centralizing power, and expected to respond appropriately, by locating herself within that gaze--as a suspect.

With this in mind, we can return to analogy. In these assemblages of battered objects (Fig. 8), a would-be thief is invited to recognize an abstract portrait of himself--not as he is now, perhaps, but as he may become. Chief Olagbade, the highest-ranking medicinal specialist in Okeigbo, outlined this process:

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]</p> <pre> [Aale] give a description (apejuwe,

lit., "that which calls out what the eyes see clearly") of something to the person who has come to steal from there. Because if it is a worn out shoe, the person will look at the suffering the shoe had undergone before it was worn-out. Won't he look at a broken bottle and see that his own life will be shattered like that? (10) </pre> <p>The aale, then, encompasses (fiwe) its subject via a range of metaphorical likenesses that together address that person's lived experience and inner character.

Each object possesses a potent descriptive force, an analogical (afiwe) force that implicates the viewer as the subject: "Steal, and you will be like this." (11) A combination of objects ensures legibility. As one babalawo said, "If a thief doesn't understand the meaning of the first object and get frightened, he will look at the second. If he still doesn't get it, when he sees the third, he will pause and think ..." (12)

This pausing and thinking is significant. Ultimately, it is the recipient who activates the efficacy of the objects used as aale by interiorizing their conventionalized symbolic messages at a moment of critical choice, relating them to a moral code, the Law that is always already inscribed in consciousness as conscience. In Yoruba, conscience is denoted by the term eri okan, translated as "it sees one's thoughts or mind," or "they see one's thoughts." Its implications are clear. In conscience, the hidden structures of appropriate and inappropriate behavior are revealed to inner vision or oju inu, the inner eye; one sees oneself being seen by others. As Babalawo Ifatoogun of Ilobu pointed out, "The only way an aale won't work is if the person doesn't have a conscience." (13) And a person who has no conscience, he continued, is already stripped of his humanity, as a corncob has been stripped of its clothes and children (Fig. 9).

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

What a Faceless Life Looks Like

In Yoruba, a thief is described as "having no face" (ko lofu). To be convicted as a thief is to live a "faceless life" (aye ko loju), in which one no longer participates as an effective member of the community. For the thief, there is no longer a possibility of significant dialogue with her community--oro re ko ni loju, "her words have no face." The captured thief is publicly de-identified--stripped not only of the clothing that distinguishes him from animals, but also of his civilizing name--and re-identified only as "thief" (Okediji 1991:36; Olurode and Olusanya 1994:158-9). As "descriptions" of thieves, aale call individual thieves by the name they hold in common, the name by which they are known and recognized. Further, they offer would-be thieves an opportunity to recognize themselves in advance of their actions as the named subject of that de-identifying call. This call is uttered in objects that have been abstracted from their respective spheres of use, and that are themselves abstract--that is, they bear little to no resemblance to the human form, let alone to that of a particular individual. The aale becomes individuated as a portrait when the would-be thief completes the utterance, recognizing himself as the subject portrayed in the aale's ruined, coded objects. An aale-portrait, then, is a kind of spot in the field of vision, the point in the picture that indicts the viewer, disrupts and returns his voracious gaze in a flash of self-recognition (Lacan 1981:97).

Being Finished

In a foundational text of Yoruba aesthetics, Robert Farris Thompson (1974b:37-42) locates didan as a central term in both the creation and criticism of Yoruba carvings. Translated by Thompson as "shining smoothness," didan denotes not only the beautiful "luminosity" of surface (Fig. 1), but also the sculptor's painstaking final procedure of "polishing" the object. The resulting object is the palpable index of the care that went into its manufacture. Such an object will prompt further care--it will be treasured, and so it will endure. A "finished" object, like a well-turned human being, is in continuing performative dialogue with the culturally appropriate expressive behavior of caring persons. Thus structured upon a conventionalizing template of excellence, responsive to the call of that intersubjective, reciprocative network, both object and person will be said to possess iwapele: good, beautiful character.

Conversely, if a person is entirely dissociated from that network, she will be assessed as eniyan burewa a person of bad character, and thus an un-beautiful person. It goes further: A thief, especially, is no longer regarded as a person as such. For the person identified as a thief--the person who has been compelled to identify himself as a thief--there is no access to the transcendental means of power, the dialogical networks of authoritative discourse and righteous human engagement. There is instead only a future of estrangement and social uselessness. The thief, like a corncob dangling from a string (Fig. 10), has become an object, absolutely. This is another way of being "finished."

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

Symptoms

In their conversion into aale, useless things index the capacity of powerful hands to transform materials and persons into meanings, into aworan, images "we look at and remember" (Adepegba 1983:14; Drewal and Drewal 1990:1-4; Lawal 1996:98-99; 2001). They also make visible those pathological elements within Yoruba society that cannot be articulated in canonical form.

As cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek has explained, the symptom is a "point of breakdown heterogeneous to a given ideological field and at the same time necessary for that field to achieve its closure, its accomplished form" (1989:21). As portraits of "the thief," aale are themselves symptomatic--they are precisely the points at which the ideological field of smooth, gleaming surfaces breaks down. Yoruba society, like all societies, is not devoid of "conflict and irruption"--except in models of "perfect existence," the surfaces through which it represents itself to itself as balanced and whole. Aale, in the strange and ugly finality of their pronouncements, stand in opposition to the equilibrium proposed in Yoruba "classical art" and in Yoruba canons of moral propriety and ethical comportment. In aale, all that is excellent is transformed irrevocably into its antithesis, in visual terms appropriate to the nature of the social pathology to which they refer, and fortified by the lawful intentions of their creators. In this appropriateness, they too are regarded as "beautiful." (14) Without aale, the canon is ultimately incomplete--indeed, it is unthinkable.

The aale object, at once "finished" and "unfinished," continuously oscillates between seeming antitheses: beauty and ugliness, care and abandonment, usefulness and uselessness, power and impotence. It is in this oscillation that aale can be regarded as a Yoruba anti-aesthetic. Even as they articulate the power that sustains the most tenaciously held laws, beliefs, and practices of Yoruba culture and society, aale--like the criminals who repudiate those treasured norms, and whose futures they foretell--forever depart from it.

[This article was accepted for publication in October 2005.]

This essay is a modified version of a paper presented at the "Emerging Scholarship in African Art" conference held at Columbia University on April 23, 2005. It distills the material contained in my Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, "Vigilant Things: The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Southwestern Nigeria" (Doris 2001). Principal research funding was provided by a Fulbright Award (1998-1999), administered by the Institute of International Education. Writing support came as a two year Ittleson Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts in Washington DC (1999-2001) and later, as a Smithsonian Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the National Museum for African Art (2002-2003). I will always be grateful to both institutions. Further subsidy for recent research and writing was supplied by a Humanities Block initiative Fund grant at the University of Michigan (2005), for which I offer large thanks to the Department of the History of Art and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. Gratitude is due in large measure to: Rowland Abiodun, Glenn Adamson, Sold George Ajibade, Martha and Thomas Armstrong, Ned Cooke, Donna, Robert, Zachary, Sammy and Shayna Delvecchio, Arlene and Martin Doris, Henry Drewal, Sheree Johnson, Kellie Jones, Ray Silverman, John Szwed, Diane Mark-Walker, and to the Yoruba men and women who so generously shared with me the riches of their intelligence. This essay is affectionately dedicated to Sarah M. Adams and Capt. Sherman Powell, to Robert Farris Thompson, and to Melissa A. Doris.

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(1.) For some disturbing accounts of Nigeria in the 1990s, see Falola 1999, Maier 2000, and Soyinka 1996.

(2.) On the qualities and constitution of ori and iwa, see, e.g., Abimbola 1973; Abiodun 1987, 1990; Gbadegesin 1998, 1991; Hallen 2000; Idowu 1995:180-4; Lawal 1985; Makinde 1985; Thompson 1983, passim.

(3.) The term idogba, as discussed by Drewal (1980:15), connotes symmetry, balance and equality in the disposition of sculptural form. It is strongly related to such central concepts as ifarabale (composure, the reasoned control of self) and iwontunwonsi (moderacy; closely translated as "the measure of right, the measure of left").

(4.) Rowland Abiodun has observed that iluti, "good hearing," is a fundamental attribute of iwa, "character." The term is richly suggestive: it "refers to qualities such as obedience, teachableness, understanding and, above all, the ability to communicate" (1994:72-3; see also Abiodun 1990:78-9). To be regarded as a person in full, then, one necessarily exists within a reciprocative network of engagement with others. For a pivotal discussion of this engagement as it unfolds in arenas of Yoruba social and religious practice, see Barber 1981.

(5.) Beyond two brief mentions of aale by Abiodun (1994:78; 2000:10), a treatment by Refine (1994; also 1995: 214, n.9) and a discussion in Sheba's unpublished master's thesis (1986), aale appear nowhere in the literature of Yoruba art history as such. To date, the most extended treatments of aale are those of historians Olomola (1979, 1991) and Opadotun (1986), as well as another unpublished essay by Sheba (1997). See also Falola and Doormont 1989 for a translated historical account of aale, originally written in 1914. Other historical sources are noted in my Ph.D. dissertation (Doris 2001).

(6.) For a useful, compelling discussion of analogy as a connective, interpretive process in modern and contemporary Western visual culture, see Stafford 1999.

(7.) Alhaji Ojuade of Okeigbo, interview, Okeigbo, July 23, 1998.

(8.) Regarding this particular representational moment of an object's agency, see Gell 1998, 1999.

(9.) In this way, aale function much like proverbs (owe); they presume and require the complicity of a knowledgeable receiver. There is a Yoruba proverb that addresses this very issue (Owornoyela 1988:4): "Half a statement is all one makes to a well-bred person; when it gets inside him it becomes whole" (Abo oro la nso fomoluwabi; bo ba denu e a dodindi).

(10.) Chief Olagbade, interview, Egbeji of Okeigbo, Okeigbo, July 31, 1998.

(11.) Abraham (1958:662) notes that afiwe, here translated as "analogy," may signify visual resemblance (as in ojuure fara we temi, "your face resembles mine"), as well as mimesis (as in o fara we mi, "be imitated me"); also, it signifies relational "comparison" and "contrast" more broadly conceived.

(12.) Babalawo Ifatoogun, interview, Ilobu, July 26, 1996.

(13.) Ibid.

(14.) Babalawo Kolawole Oshitola (interview, Agugu Oja, Ibadan, October 2, 1998) offered this elegant discourse on the "beauty" of aale:

   If you only think of the rubbish components of aale,
   and think the beauty is not needed, [what about]
   the beauty in the righteousness of the aale authority
   [i.e., of the aale's justified creator]? You know, righteousness
   too is beautiful. More beautiful than even
   physical beauty. This righteousness is even more
   part of the components, so beauty itself can scare
   away things. Even though they are beautiful, people
   still expect them to ... Take care. Where there is
   beauty ...