Setting the stage
Figure 1: Commemorative Egungun
I have found myself, through the course of my research, wanting to summarize all that I have found into one tidy bundle. I want to come up with one paragraph that explains the Yoruba people’s cosmos, and another paragraph that describes their aesthetics, and yet another paragraph that lists succinctly each god and goddess and their respective roles in the Yoruba pantheon. I want my research to fit into the clean epistemological compartments that I built and brought into the research process. But in reality the Yoruba cosmos is much bigger than a blog. It demands a larger scale. In fact, what it demands is a type of performance, one as rich and varied as the Egungun. Rather than creating a Wikepedia page about the Yoruba cosmos and aesthetics I will try and call on the individual tiny threads of knowledge I have found as they relate to the larger context of Egungun performance. They are placed here as a starting point, a springboard. Books upon books upon books have been written about the Yoruba people and their amazing cultural products. But these cultural products lose so much in translation. They are not meant for the dusty halls of the academy. They are meant for dusty towns in Nigeria where men--possessed by the spirits of honored ancestors--wear prismatic costumes verging on sculpture, and chant, dance, run, twirl through the streets. They terrorize, make jokes, deliver incantations, move their bodies to and fro, undergo miraculous transformations. They both terrify and delight. They build bridges between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and in so doing engage in the larger work of crafting individual and corporate identities, epistemologies, and ways of interacting with the world.
the egungun tapestry
The oft-used analogy of the tapestry is helpful here in understanding my overall approach to studying the Egungun. A tapestry is a whole made up of many, many individual parts. On their own, each of these parts is rather basic: threads of varying thicknesses and colors. However, when woven together with skill and care on a loom these individual threads become something greater than the sum of their parts. They meld together to create a unified picture. The study of a tapestry, then, requires that one look at both the overall image and each thread that makes that image possible.
Egungun masquerades work in much the same way. They are, as the following pages will show, total theatre. Each individual element (dance, drumming, song, speech, cloth, mask, etc.) has its own individual power. However, when combined in and on the body of the performer within the context of the Egungun festival, these elements combine to produce something terrifying, mysterious, entertaining, and above all, powerful. The total theatre of the Egungun masquerade, then, is tapestry-like, a palimpsest of varying influences and styles, layers of meaning and symbol, strata of rhythm and color, all of which combines to create a performance of great theatrical, spiritual, and ontological power.
As a newcomer to the field of Yoruba studies, I have attempted to examine Egungun ritual in the same way one would study a tapestry. The following pages are my attempt to follow the journey told by this tapestry through extracting and examining some of its major threads. The words ‘extracting’ and ‘examining’ make my process sound scientific, as if I am performing an archaeological dig. On the contrary, Egungun masquerades, since their inception, have been dynamic and fluid styles of ritual performance. My work here is not to set hard and fast rules and oversimplifications, it is instead an attempt to tease out trends, make connections, and map generally the world of Egungun ritual in a spirit of discovery and exploration. My hope is that this method will help to elucidate for the reader the incredible interconnectedness of the Egungun masquerade, its inherent complexity and dynamism, its status, indeed, as a form of art.
Beginning this project I had no knowledge of Egungun performance, and had only heard of Yoruba culture in passing. Thus, this scrapbook is a record of my attempt—my small, foolhardy attempt—to map the ontological journey of Egungun masquerades. The Yoruba people often conceive of ritual as a journey (M.T. Drewal 1992). The egungun masker undergoes a radical transformation from subject to object. The self is effaced as the masker’s body becomes the vessel into which the possessive spirit of an ancestor is poured. At the end of the performance the spirit leaves the body of the masker, having changed its host in some profound way. In her book Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, noted anthropologist and performance theorist Margaret Drewal describes this and other Yoruba ritual journeys as ontological, that is, relating to the nature of being, existence, reality. Rituals in Yorubaland (and indeed in all human societies across all times) can be seen as ontological journeys. They are journeys that construct our individual and corporate realities. Ritual, through their sacred times and spaces, shape who we are in this world, define our cosmos. In addition, rituals are improvisatory and deeply linked to our religious, cultural, political, economic milieu. Finally, and most importantly, rituals are transformational. They serve as social markers of liminal time, moments when we move from one mode of being to another.
This scrapbook is my attempt to weave together all that I have learned about the Yoruba performance of Egungun masquerades. It is an incomplete tapestry, woven here with a few clumsy threads. But, as Margaret Drewal writes at the end of her book, “the journey continues” (200).
Egungun masquerades work in much the same way. They are, as the following pages will show, total theatre. Each individual element (dance, drumming, song, speech, cloth, mask, etc.) has its own individual power. However, when combined in and on the body of the performer within the context of the Egungun festival, these elements combine to produce something terrifying, mysterious, entertaining, and above all, powerful. The total theatre of the Egungun masquerade, then, is tapestry-like, a palimpsest of varying influences and styles, layers of meaning and symbol, strata of rhythm and color, all of which combines to create a performance of great theatrical, spiritual, and ontological power.
As a newcomer to the field of Yoruba studies, I have attempted to examine Egungun ritual in the same way one would study a tapestry. The following pages are my attempt to follow the journey told by this tapestry through extracting and examining some of its major threads. The words ‘extracting’ and ‘examining’ make my process sound scientific, as if I am performing an archaeological dig. On the contrary, Egungun masquerades, since their inception, have been dynamic and fluid styles of ritual performance. My work here is not to set hard and fast rules and oversimplifications, it is instead an attempt to tease out trends, make connections, and map generally the world of Egungun ritual in a spirit of discovery and exploration. My hope is that this method will help to elucidate for the reader the incredible interconnectedness of the Egungun masquerade, its inherent complexity and dynamism, its status, indeed, as a form of art.
Beginning this project I had no knowledge of Egungun performance, and had only heard of Yoruba culture in passing. Thus, this scrapbook is a record of my attempt—my small, foolhardy attempt—to map the ontological journey of Egungun masquerades. The Yoruba people often conceive of ritual as a journey (M.T. Drewal 1992). The egungun masker undergoes a radical transformation from subject to object. The self is effaced as the masker’s body becomes the vessel into which the possessive spirit of an ancestor is poured. At the end of the performance the spirit leaves the body of the masker, having changed its host in some profound way. In her book Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency, noted anthropologist and performance theorist Margaret Drewal describes this and other Yoruba ritual journeys as ontological, that is, relating to the nature of being, existence, reality. Rituals in Yorubaland (and indeed in all human societies across all times) can be seen as ontological journeys. They are journeys that construct our individual and corporate realities. Ritual, through their sacred times and spaces, shape who we are in this world, define our cosmos. In addition, rituals are improvisatory and deeply linked to our religious, cultural, political, economic milieu. Finally, and most importantly, rituals are transformational. They serve as social markers of liminal time, moments when we move from one mode of being to another.
This scrapbook is my attempt to weave together all that I have learned about the Yoruba performance of Egungun masquerades. It is an incomplete tapestry, woven here with a few clumsy threads. But, as Margaret Drewal writes at the end of her book, “the journey continues” (200).
picture sources
Header image: Found on http://personal.georgiasouthern.edu/~jpellegr/teaching/egungun.htm (from The Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the University of Wisconsin
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UWDCNew/view/uwdc:TIRIS.1992.09.001)
Figure 1: http://www.clarku.edu/~jborgatt/yorubamsq.htm
Figure 2: http://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2012/09/ouidah-benin-birthplace-of-voodoo-and.html
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UWDCNew/view/uwdc:TIRIS.1992.09.001)
Figure 1: http://www.clarku.edu/~jborgatt/yorubamsq.htm
Figure 2: http://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.com/2012/09/ouidah-benin-birthplace-of-voodoo-and.html