Histories, of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts And Soyinka's "Abiku".(Critical Essay)

Histories, of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Abiku Texts And Soyinka's "Abiku".(Critical Essay)


The corpus of written Nigerian literature contains at least thirty works in which abiku or ogbanje play some sort of pivotal role. (1) Most are in English, and among them are canonical texts by Tutuola, Achebe, Soyinka, Clark-Bekederemo, Emecheta, and Okri. These abiku writings constitute a major tradition within Nigerian literature, so it is surprising that no study has been done which reads them together and orders them historically as such. Indeed, existing studies of abiku literature lack any kind of historical perspective. They are limited to thematic and stylistic comparisons of canonical written texts, by-passing the relationship of these texts to oral abiku literature, to nonliterary abiku discourses, and to the concerns and anxieties surrounding their historical circumstances of composition. Symptomatic of these studies' lack of historical perspective is the reliance of their interpretations upon insufficiently considered accounts of abiku. Such accounts (sometimes they are just hasty definitions) often mix facts about abiku with facts about ogbanje, represent abiku as homogeneous across time and space; fail to distinguish between popular and expert, official and heretical, indigenous and exogenous discourses of abiku; assume that the belief in abiku has a psychological rather than ontological origin; and hastily appropriate abiku to serve as a symbol for present-day, metropolitan concepts and concerns. (2) The upshot of all this has been to establish and encourage a practice of literary exegesis that not only occludes the historicity of abiku--its embeddedness in specific times, localities, discourses, concerns, and circumstances that render it inalienably heterogeneous, politicized, and protean--but also occludes, in turn, the historicity of the literature that takes abiku as its subject.

The first aim of this essay is, therefore, to retrieve some sense of abiku's rich and varied history. To this end, I consider in detail one "traditional" Yoruba theory of abiku offered by a senior Ifa babalawo, demonstrating its politicized nature by situating it in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Yoruba society. The second aim of this essay is to look at some oral Yoruba abiku literature--to look at it as literature, that is, rather than as part of the anthropological catalogue. I thus consider some of the formal and thematic features of abiku names, oriki, and narratives, while also relating these aesthetic features back to the orthodox Ifa discourse and its nexus of historically contingent concerns. The third contribution of this study to existing scholarship is to show that some detailed knowledge of oral abiku representations and their history is indispensable to understanding the dynamics and significance of twentieth-century abiku literature written 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 abiku texts and Yoruba politics), even as it is also shaped by its own historical circumstances of production (Soyinka's nostalgia for home in 1950s London). In the end, I want to show that the formal and thematic differences between Soyinka's poem and the oral literature are largely traceable (though not reducible) to their embeddedness in different "histories of errancy," histories of straying (geographically and ideologically) from hegemonic sociopolitical forms.

Abiku 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) Ifa babalawo apply the term to children who have secret plans to die at a certain time in their upbringing, only to be born again soon afterwards, repeating this itinerary of death and birth until they are spiritually "fettered" (de) by their parents and forced to stay in the world. At present, the term abiku enjoys a hegemony in Yoruba cultural discourse over other extant and current terms used by the Yoruba for the same phenomenon, such as ere, emere, elere, egbe orun, elegbe, l'olowo-omo, abafeferin, elemiikemii, and ejinuwon. (4)

According to Babalola Ifatoogun, a senior Ifa diviner from the Oyo-Yoruba town of Ilobu, abiku are "thieves from heaven ... They come from heaven to steal on earth" (Awon si lole orun ... Awon yii lo wa jale laye latorun). (5) More precisely, abiku are an egbe ara orun, a "club" (egbe) of "heaven-people" (ara oun) whose founding purpose is to siphon off riches from ile araye, the "houses" (ile) of the "world-people" (ara-aye). Abiku further the aims of their robber-band by using children as a cover for their criminal operation. Each abiku is born into an ile and poses as a child that is either sweet-natured and beautiful (and therefore likely to be lavished with good things) or sickly and disturbed (and therefore likely to be the beneficiary of expensive sacrifices). In such a way, the abiku quickly accumulates money, cloth, food, and livestock. Then, at a certain time and by a certain method prearranged secretly with its egbe, the abiku dies and takes the spiritual portion of its loot back to heaven. After dividing the spoils with its egbe, it prepares to re-enter the world and fleece the same or another ile.

The only way for an ile to stop being robbed by an abiku is to "fetter" (de) it spiritually, just as one physically fetters a thief or similar low-life, such as a goat or a slave. (6) To fetter an abiku, the ile must first discover its "sealed words" (ade ohun), namely, the binding and top-secret (ade) oaths it swore to its egbe regarding the specific time, circumstance, and method of its return to heaven. Because these contractual statements are "secrets" (asiri), only an Ifa "father-of-secrets" (babalawo) can "hear" (gbigbo) them and "disseminate" (tu) them to the ile. Knowing the abiku's sealed words enables an ile to fetter the abiku in one of the following three ways: by "blocking" (di) the precise conditions necessary for its death, as one blocks a road or a womb; by "publicizing" (tu) that the abiku's secret aims have been discovered; and by disguising (amin) the abiku so that it will not be recognized when its egbe comes to abduct it from the ile. If an ile successfully fetters an abiku and "forces it to stay" (da duro) in the world, the abiku's egbe will try to "snatch" it (yo) from the house and bring it back to heaven. "`Snatching from the snake-pit' (yiyo lofin) is what the egbe calls picking up (wa mu) one of its members from the world. In their eyes, a house in the world (ile aye) is a prison (ewon); one of their members is doing time there, so they come and snatch it away (yo o kuro)" (Yiyo lofin ni awon n pe ki egbe won wa mu enikan kuro laye. Bi igba tenikan wa lewon ti won wa yo o kuro nibe nile aye ri loju won).

Ifatoogun's account of abiku matches, not only in its substance but in much of its detail, the accounts given by other Ifa babalawo. (7) In particular, Ifatoogun's key oppositions--geographical (orun vs. aye), sociopolitical (egbe vs. ile), informational (ade ohun vs. asiri tu), and kinetic (de vs. yo, forcible restraint vs. forcible dislocation)--are shared by other babalawo, just as they also share his keywords for defining these oppositions. Even Ifatoogun's organizing metaphor of banditry is not unprecedented. Other babalawo know abiki as agba ole or "master thieves" (Babalola 63-21), a term used in common parlance to denote bandit kings and other merciless and successful robbers. Moreover, all Ifa babalawo stress that the egbe ara brun profits unethically from the ile araye, primarily referring to abiku as elere (owner-of-profit) or emere (drinker-of-profit). (8)

If pressed to use one English word to characterize abiku, Ifa babalawo might well call them "errant," a word that combines the two interrelated senses of vagrancy and delinquent behavior. That is, abiku are geographically nomadic, wandering in egbe-groups between orun and aye, unclaimed by any one geographical place; and abiku are wayward, straying delinquently and willfully from the norms defining the ile, profiting unethically by exploiting the ile's constitutive attachment to definite geographical locations (houses, villages, ancestral cities) and practices (having children and perpetuating the patrilineage). When the ile attempts to fetter (de) abiku, it is attempting to normalize them both spatially (to halt their itinerancy) and sociopolitically (to shift their allegiance from egbe to ile). According to Ifa babalawo, errancy (the state of being itinerant/delinquent) is the essence of the egbe ara orun, just as normalization (the process of fettering to place/ lineage) is the essence of ile araye. Such, then, is the official discourse of abiku offered by Ifa babalawo.

This official representation of abiku as an errant egbe robbing the fixed ile is far from politically innocent, if only because egbe and ile are loaded terms in the context of Yoruba society and political history. Ile means not only one's current house and town of residence, but also one's entire patrilineage past and present, and the ancestral city to which the lineage traces its historical origins. The foundation of every ile or "house" in all of its senses is sexual reproduction; having children maintains the lineage's history and extends it both temporally (into the future) and geographically (into new houses and towns). Egbe, by contrast, denotes any elective club or association based not upon lineage, ancestral city, marriage, or procreation, but upon an activity or project shared in common by the members (such as hunting, selling wares in a market, or worshipping an orisa) and to the secrets associated with that activity or project (skills, sacred texts, rituals, records, or the activities themselves). Such clubs/associations often start as groups of friends, tend to be separated along gender lines, have an elected leader, often meet on a weekly basis, and are neither hierarchically organized nor constitutively tied to a particular geographical location. Traditionally, they included benign gangs of neighborhood children, professional/trade associations (e.g., hunters' guilds), orisa cults (e.g., awo Sango), and groups whose activities and membership were more covert and ultra-secret, such as witches and thieves. (9) Ile and egbe thus constitute two contrasting templates of sociopolitical organization among the Yoruba: the male-dominated ile is based on marriage, lineage, procreation, geography, and hierarchical structures of seniority and inheritance; the male-or female-only egbe is based on voluntary membership, mutual benefit, pursuit of a shared nonreproductive purpose, and group secrecy (the keeping of esoteric or specialized knowledge, practices, skills).

Potential rivals in theory, egbe and ile historically interpenetrate in local Yoruba politics, with people having loyalties to both. A single egbe is composed of people from many different ile (patrilineages, ancestral cities) and can cover a wide geographical area. One of the primary aims of some egbe, such as the Egungun cult or female worshippers of virtually any orisa, is to protect or restore women's fertility--the material basis for the ile's hegemony. Egbe (in the form of orisa cults, hunters' guilds, or the ogboni) have historically played a pivotal role in maintaining or shifting the balance of power between different ile, sometimes bolstering the authority of chiefs and kings belonging to one ile, but sometimes also undermining it and opening the way for political resistance and change. (10) Similarly, one's ile can often determine to which egbe one belongs; one becomes a warrior or a worshipper of Sango because one's parent or patrilineage belonged to the warrior profession or the Sango cult. Despite this practical interpenetration of egbe and ile, most Yoruba today would say that one's membership in an ile is more important than and takes precedence over one's membership in an egbe.

The ile as a political ideology has dominated much of Yoruba history. Historically, it is tied to the royal empire of Oyo, an empire that thought of itself and elaborated its structures of rule through ritual metaphors of marriage, procreation, and geographical origin (Laitin 171-77; Matory 8-13). At its apex in the mid-eighteenth century, the empire of Oyo covered all of what is now Yorubaland, enriching itself and extending its power by controlling the major north-south trading routes and by selling domestic slaves and captives of war to buyers on the coast through Dahomean middlemen (Law 341; Morton-Williams, "Slave Trade"). The capturing and selling of slaves thus constituted an important feature of Oyo's commercial activity, just as it would later be an important focus for the smaller, war-like polities of Ibadan and Abeokuta that helped precipitate the final fall of the Oyo empire around 1830. When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the British colonial authorities sought to implement Indirect Rule in Yorubaland, they resurrected the Oyo monarchy and, with it, the ideology of ile upon which its political structures was based. In short, the ile has been hegemonic in Yorubaland for much of the past three hundred years.

But during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the ideology of ile was challenged by egbe structures of rule from two quarters. First, the new polities of Ibadan and Abeokuta which came to dominance in the early 1800s during the fall of Oyo were modeled on the egbe. Relatively small and mobile groups of mixed lineage were led by charismatic, skilled leaders and competed with each other for wealth, power, and followers through warfare (expanding territory and capturing slaves) and transatlantic trade (slaves again being the major export commodities, the major imports being cloth and iron). Second, the decline of Oyo was accompanied by a pernicious and ubiquitous rise in banditry and slave-raiding--activities carried out by geographically vagrant egbe. These egbe raided villages and ambushed itinerant traders to gain material wealth and sellable human captives. They posed a threat to the structures of procreation and geographical stability at the heart of Oyo's ideology of the ile, as the eye-witness accounts of Ibariba banditry offered by Captain Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander make clear (Clapperton 60; Lander 284). The threat posed to the ile by these egbe is related to the rise of Ibadan and Abeokuta, for these political economies largely depended upon the success of their own itinerant egbe, mostly warriors and slave-raiders. In short, the ile's hegemony was, during the nineteenth century, undermined and superseded by a hegemony of the egbe.

By representing abiku as an errant egbe that threatens the stable ile, then, Ifa babalawo would have, during the nineteenth century, intervened in an on-going debate between two rival templates of sociopolitical organization, taking the side of the ile over the egbe. That Ifa's official account is historically embedded in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conflict between egbe and ile seems clear enough: not only was this the most recent (and perhaps only) period of Yoruba history in which the ideology of egbe usurped the ideology of ile, but it is also the period in which errant egbe formed for the purpose of making wealth and children disappear from the ile (slave-raiding gangs) were ubiquitous and definitive of economic and social life. It is surely no accident that the terminology and imagery of slave-raiding ("fettering" [de] and "snatching" [yo], capture and abduction, strangers from the bush who lure children away from their homes) is central to Ifa's account of abiku as an errant egbe. (11) In short, re-situated within the context of nineteenth-century Yoruba history, Ifa babalawo's official theory of abiku strikes us as highly politicized. On the one hand, it implicitly disparages the rise of egbe-based polities and egbe-based banditry that accompanied the fall of Oyo and the height of the transatlantic slave trade. On the other hand, it propagates the ideology of ile, harking back to the stable rhythms of procreation, marriage, and lineage-perpetuation that undergirded Oyo's violent indigenous imperialism.

Having thus briefly considered Ifa's official representation of abiku, its main tropological coordinates, its relationship to one aspect of Yoruba history, and the politics of that relationship, it now remains in the first part of this essay to consider Yoruba oral literary texts pertaining to abiku. Since the Ifa divinatory system at one time "governed almost every aspect of Yoruba life" (Abimbola, "Ifa" 101), it should come as no surprise that oral abiku texts are strongly shaped by the official discourse of Ifa. (12) These texts include names (oruko), salutations (ikini), descriptive acclamations or "praise-names" (oriki), proverbs (owe), songs (orin), folktales (aalo), historical narratives (itan), and Ifa divination verses (ese Ifa). (13) Like Ifa's official account of abiku, this literature is governed by metaphors of spatial opposition (orun/aye, wandering/stasis) and represents abiku, either implicitly or explicitly, as a spatially and socially errant egbe that must be forcibly assimilated to, or rejected from, the ile. The human and the good are defined by geographical fixity and commitment to structures of lineage-perpetuation (especially child-bearing and honoring parents); the nonhuman and the bad are defined by geographical vagrancy and commitment to furthering the aims of one's egbe (especially when they conflict with procreative ideals). But the oral literature does not merely rehash the official discourse. Instead, the oral abiku literature takes up and elaborates the tropological coordinates of the discourse in a way that (wittingly or unwittingly) undermines Ifa's hierarchical valorization of the ile over the egbe, revealing the ile's internal contradictions, ideological fractures, and historical contingency. The larger and more complex the oral text, it seems, the greater this problematization of the ile. Below are four examples from the corpus of oral abiku literature that make this case: names, salutations, oriki, and Ifa itan.

Abiku names are perhaps the most well-known and widespread genre of oral abiku literature. Whether take they the shape of derogatory insults, veiled threats, or plangent supplications, these names, like the Ifa discourse itself, represent the abiku's social errancy--its repeated deaths and births--in spatial terms. (14) Exemplary in this regard is the much-used abiku name Aja, meaning "dog." Among the Yoruba, dogs are generally considered to be dirty, feces-eating animals whose unconstrained wandering is a source of trouble--spilt pots and stolen food. A child named Aja is thus a child whose delinquency is construed as spatial vagrancy. We find similar metaphors of itinerant space at work in other, less insulting abiku names, such as Ayorunbo ("One-who-goes-to-heaven-and-returns"), Malomo ("Don't-go-anymore"), or Durojaye ("Stay-and-relish-the-world"). Here, the spatial terminology of Ifa (e.g., orun, aye, lo, duro) is not only explicitly deployed, but the child's unsettling powers of vagrancy are implicitly acknowledged, even as they are also denied and dispelled through the imperative, incantatory grammar of the appellations.

That the spatial imagery of the names is tied to Ifa's theoretical opposition between egbe and ile is clear when we consider the purposes behind the appellations. Obviously, a name like Aja is designed to shame a child into giving up its dog-like errancy and staying in one place. But the name is also meant to disguise the abiku, the idea being that its egbe will mistake it for some worthless thing and give up their attempts to rescue it from the prison of the ile. In a similar fashion, imperative supplications like Durosomo ("Stay-to-bear-children"), Kokumo ("Don't-die-anymore"), and Matanmi ("Don't-deceive-me") are plainly meant to make the child feel guilty for dying too often. Such names are also incantations, attempts to bring about a new state of being in which the child no longer goes away. Most important, however, such names are asiri tu: by publicizing to heaven-people and world-people alike that the child's secret abiku identity and secret abiku plans have been discovered, the names work to separate the abiku from its egbe and fetter it to the ile. In short, the camouflaging and publicizing purposes behind abiku names imply, and serve to reproduce, the antagonism between errant egbe and fixed ile central to Ifa's official discourse of abiku. The popular politics of abiku naming conforms closely to the Ifa's ideology of ile.

Things become more complicated when the names are placed within the larger salutations to which they belong. For example, Aja o maa ja'kun, dakun ma lo Aja, ("Dog, don't break your leash; don't go, please, Dog" [Verger 1455]), deploys the same metaphors of spatial vagrancy and fixity that the simple name of Aja implies. But where the name was politically straightforward, the salutation is more ambiguous. On the one hand, it says that the child is a valued member of the ile, the elders calling out the salutation want the child to stay there and be a part of it--a positive attitude consolidated around the surprising address of dakun, "please," to something supposed to be dirty and subhuman. On the other hand, the greeting 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 pieces of property because they do not always respect our control and confinement of them; they chew through their leashes or run away. In this sense, the salutation amplifies the derogative insult of the name Aja, warning the child to be docile and obedient like a piece of property, not unruly like a wild animal. This calculated ambiguity between affirming and rejecting the abiku child is underscored by the salutation's tonal play. For example, the second part of the salutation inversely mirrors the first part--dakun ma lo Aja is epanaleptically opposed to Aja o maa ja'kun--and this rhetorically powerful construction is surely meant to evoke and aggrandize the abiku. But the same rhetorical mirror also creates a verbal sense of confinement and precise control, like a trap lifting and snapping shut again; it is a way of capturing and subduing the abiku. Moreover, we find Aja gnomically encapsulated in o maa ja'kun (think: o ma-aja-kun), as if the dog (aja) has been penned in between "you-don't" (o maa) and "break-leash" (ja'kun) or else were redefined as "[one who] does not break the leash."

At once formally and thematically ambivalent, then, the salutation both affirms and rejects the identity of its abiku addressee; it welcomes the abiku inside the fold of the ile, but does so on the condition that the abiku becomes something different and less errant than it is. As an oriki, the salutation evokes and affirms the powers of the abiku; as an incantation, it tries to reverse the flow of those powers and bring a new reality into being. The salutation's central trope--the spatial confinement of a errant subhuman ("Dog, don't break your leash")--is thus a self-conscious instrument of normalization, an attempt to reform a hypermobile delinquent (the abiku) into a stable citizen embodying the values of the socially hegemonic ile. But this normalization is, as we have seen, inherently equivocal: it opens the boundary between the normal and the abnormal, the worthy and the worthless, the fixed ile and the errant egbe, even as it also reaffirms and fortifies that boundary. The Aja-salutation exemplifies a form of linguistic capture that draws attention to its own nature as a capturing device. It enforces those boundaries between acceptability (a spatially confined "person") and unacceptability (a spatially unconfined "dog") that constitute the ile, but does so in a way that advertises the contingency and vulnerability of those boundaries, the chance for them to be otherwise. This kind of ambiguous textuality works to deconstruct the politicized opposition between errant egbe and fixed ile upon which Ifa's orthodox account of abiku relies. (15)

We find a similar aesthetic elaboration of political concerns to do with errant egbe and stable ile in the following oriki, chanted extemporaneously in April 1970 by Akande, a member of the Egungun cult in Ipetumodu (16):



Ooto ni.
Aiyeronfe, Aiyeronke
Oruko merin l'abiku.
Jalugbo.
Polesu.
Alada-o-si-n'le.
Omo Oloko-re'nu-oko.
Omo Koto-akan-ni-ko-se-wo.
E pe a ko ni rahun gbehin.
E e ni si'ju wo orori omo yin l'aiye dandan.
Emi naa o ni si'ju wo orori omo mi.
E ri i bi?
Bi a a ba ni p'aro,
T'a a ni ooro abuku,
T'a a ni fi'gba kan bo kan,
Oju orun t'eiye ifo lalai f'apa kan ara won.
Ile mi to mi i pe lalai pe baba onibaba.
It is the truth.
The world [aye] has something to love, the world has something
to pet.
Abiku have four names.
Run to the bush.
Full of Esu.
Owner-of-the-cutlass-is-not-at-home [ile].
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 [orun] is wide enough for the birds to fly in without
their wings touching each other.
There is enough material about my lineage [ile] for me to chant
without my having to praise someone else's father.


This abiku oriki is, like the Aja-salutation, concerned about errancy: about vagrancy and normalcy, about maintaining boundaries between the ile and its alternatives. The non-ile spaces of "bush," "crab hole," and "farm" are counterpoised with the human ile and its activities: having something to love, putting one calabash into another, telling the truth. The abiku is seen to unsettle the boundary between these two opposed spaces. Its delinquent vagrancy ("Run to the bush ... Full of Esu") is in tension with norms of procreation and lineage-perpetuation that are policed and protected by the chanter's fellow Egungun-egbe members: "You [Egungun] say that we shall 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 fellow Egungun members to maintain boundaries unsettled by the abiku, boundaries that work to propagate the ideology of ile: boundaries between "truth" and "lie," between the value-encoded spaces of "home" (ile) and "bush" (igbo), between the productive and unproductive use of a tool ("put one calabash into another"; the sexual, procreative symbolism is not to be missed here), and between "my own lineage [ile]" and "someone else's."

It should also be pointed out that Akande's chant is a tissue of quotations, a deliberate re-presenting of publicly circulating oral abiku texts, particularly abiku names. As Carmina Davis points out, the line "The world has something to pet" is an innovative variation upon the well-known name for a female abiku, Durooriike, "Stay and you'll be petted," just as "Child of owner-of-the-hoe-is-away-to-the-farm" freshly paraphrases the name Kosoko, "There-is-no-hoe [i.e., to dig your grave]" (Davis 228). The latter name is an apparently innocuous observation (i.e., we have no grave-digging tools), but it conceals a rather aggressive threat (i.e., we will not bury you if you die again). Akande's aesthetically delightful twisting and apposition of well-known abiku names culminates in his coining of a new name: "Child of the-crab-hole-is-impossible-to-enter." This coinage clearly warns the abiku that if it dies again its parents will cut off one of its fingers (a standard mutilation-treatment for abiku children), just as a crab will eventually cut off a child's finger if the child keeps poking it in a crab-hole. There is also the more arch and grotesque suggestion, here, that the mother's vagina ("crab-hole") is a place that bodies should exit but not enter--that the abiku should stop trying to reverse the normal direction of female fertility lest it be disciplined by the mighty Egungun, the protectors of procreation. In short, Akande is interested in reminding us that abiku should be contained because they upset spatial boundaries, boundaries between exit and entrance, between home and bush, between one lineage and another. His oriki thematizes the threat posed to the socially hegemonic ile by the errant outcasts--by those who, like abiku or thieves or dogs, have no regard for the spatial and evaluative distinctions that work to normalize people as maintainers of the ile.

Akande's text, then, conforms in one sense to the politics of Ifa's official discourse of abiku; it sides with the values and forms of life underpinning the ile's structures of rule. But it does so by affirming the importance of the Egungun cult--an egbe--within those structures. What Akande's representation of abiku masterfully discloses is a contradiction fundamental to the ile: its structures of procreation and lineage-perpetuation depend for the smooth functioning upon a nonprocreative, nonkinship, rival template of sociopolitical organization (the egbe). Indeed, the oriki--by the very fact of being an oriki--affirms the essence and existence of abiku, thereby also affirming the vagrant egbe as a sociopolitical form. In such a way, the abiku chant of Akande is both determined by and subversively engaged in a particular history of errancy: the history of contention between egbe and ile in precolonial Yoruba society.

As a final example, consider Ifa divination verses (ese Ifa) pertaining to abiku. Forty-six of these have been collected, but there may be as many as 256. (17) The central part of each Ifa divination verse (ese Ifa) is its historical narrative (itan), a story putatively about real-life events from the past that serve as a precedent for the problems facing the babalawo's client. The itan is also the only part of an ese Ifa where babalawo afford themselves imaginative freedom to improvise, elaborate, and play upon what has been remembered by rote. If there is any heterodox side to babalawo's accounts of abiku, it will therefore be found in the itan of abiku divination verses.

The abiku histories (itan) of Ifa are preoccupied with geographical dislocation, espionage, delinquency, capture, and abduction. Like the names and the oriki, they deploy the spatial metaphors and tropological coordinates characteristic of Ifa's orthodox account of abiku to dramatize the problems posed to the ile by errant egbe of "thieves from heaven." For example, a great many of the Ifa itan conform to the following pattern. (In what follows, the abiku is gendered female for the sake of narrative simplicity.) While in heaven or the bush, an abiku conspires with her fellow egbe members to be born as a child into the house (ile) of an important personage (usually a king or the god/founder of Ifa divination, Orunmila), then to die and return to her egbe at a precise time. She journeys to the world and executes her plan successfully several times, much to the consternation of her human parents, whose pocket books and patience are quickly sapped by the many sacrifices, medical consultations, and initiation fees incurred each time she appears. The parents are puzzled because none of the sacrifices and medicines prevent the child from dying. After dying for the nth (usually third or seventh) time, the abiku readies herself to enter the world again. On this occasion, however, someone (usually either a father, a hunter, or Orunmila himself, and usually after consulting an Ifa babalawo) takes up a hiding place in heaven or in the bush. He overhears her confiding secretly to her egbe about the precise time, place, and method of her death and return to heaven, then bragging loudly that her parents can do nothing to weaken her resolve to die. Her egbe promises to come and rescue her if she is captured by the ile. The intrepid spy then returns home (ile), reveals the intelligence gathered in his espionage mission, and prevents the abiku from returning to heaven by preventing the precise conditions necessary for her death from ever coming about. For instance, if the abiku had planned to die as soon as the wood lit after her birth was consumed, the parents would use a banana-tree trunk instead of normal firewood, because the banana trunk burns so poorly that it would never be consumed, thus preventing the abiku's death. By thus using her secrets against her, the parents and the babalawo are able to fetter (de) the unwilling abiku and confine her to a house of the world, a place she does not want to be.

Not surprisingly, this narrative pattern reflects and reinforces the orthodox account of abiku offered by Ifa babalawo. It deploys Ifa's key tropological oppositions to tell a comedy of intelligence: an intrepid hero discovers hidden facts about the world and devises an ingenious plan to foil the egbe that threatens the ile. The ile is implicitly associated with domestic, familiar, human spaces and activities: village and shrine, ritual and sacrifice. The egbe, by contrast, is associated with what is alien and demonic: the perilous geography of the bush, the evil activities of conspiracy and deceit. In one sense, then, the Ifa itan encode the history of conflict between egbe and ile in a way that propagates the ile's ideology of parentage and procreation.

But the abiku itan also break down Ifa's official opposition between egbe and ile. As with the abiku salutations and oriki, the itan blur the value-laden spatial boundary between world and heaven, domicile and bush. Inverting the abiku's journey from heaven to the world and back again, the babalawo or hunter journeys intrepidly from ile to bush/heaven and back; and whereas the abiku's journey is a keeping of secrets, the hero's journey is an unlocking and dissemination of them. The most important factor in the success of the hero's journey is not his own resourcefulness and dedication to the ile, but the geography of heaven or the bush itself. The mysterious, occluding geography that harbors secrets that threaten the ile is the very thing that enables the hero's concealment, espionage, and eventual dissemination of those secrets. This common military tactic--using the enemy's strengths against it--is, of course, also a common literary convention, but its international ubiquity does not negate its particular effects in the abiku itan, which are, on the one hand, to confuse the official distinction between orun and aye and, on the other hand, to reveal the complicity between errant egbe and static ile, occult geographies and publicized locations.

To insinuate the ile's contradictory reliance upon those errant structures that it officially condemns is the heart of the abiku itan's politics. Not only does the hero rely upon the abiku's own shrouded landscape, but the hero himself is an errant egbe member (a hunter or babalawo that journeys afar) upon whom the procreative center of the ile depends. Moreover, the ile is portrayed as a cunning captor of children, forcibly dislocating them from the community to which they belong; the ile snatches abiku from their egbe and fetters them by means of deception and subterfuge (e.g., using banana trunk to fuel the tire). Such snatching, dislocation, and deception are the very practices for which the official, pro-ile discourse of Ifa demonizes the errant egbe. In such a way, the itan plays upon and dislocates itself from the orthodox discourse, representing the egbe and its errancy as a necessary condition for the ile's official stasis. There is a further irony, here, in that the moral of abiku itan as told by Ifa babalawo is, invariably, that Ifa babalawo (who constitute a geographically dispersed egbe that accumulates wealth from the tragedies of the ile) are the only ones who can stop abiku (another geographically dispersed egbe that accumulates wealth from the tragedies of the ile). Here, again, the ile is seen to be perilously reliant upon the egbe structures of organization it wishes to subordinate and control.

Finally, the abiku itan present the errant egbe as a vibrant alternative to the ile. This is especially evident in those set of itan which focus upon the leader of abiku (Iya Janjasa or Oloiko) and her preparations to enter the world, but is also evident in the set of abiku itan we have been discussing that focus on a hero's subterfuge of abiku. For even here we glimpse a kind of community claimed by the appealing values of mutual benefit, nonprocreative friendship, shared specialized activity, and geographical freedom--a community that exists outside of and in contradiction to the fixed ile that seeks to marginalize and subordinate it. Though this appealing side of the abiku's errancy is tucked into the background of the itan and scarcely acknowledged, its presence is enough both to denaturalize the ile, disclosing it as only one political form among others, not something eternal and necessary; and to demystify it, showing that its hegemonic position in the foreground depends upon its constant suppression and control of those alternative forms.

In short, the abiku narratives of Ifa, like the salutation and oriki discussed above, engage with a history of errancy through an aesthetic form that is itself errant, straying from a univocal affirmation of the ile to reveal its ideological fractures and contradictory reliance upon the errant egbe structures. Unlike Ifa's official descriptions of abiku as "thieves from heaven," oral abiku literature among the Yoruba is not merely propoganda for the ile, nor can it be simply construed as an uncomplicated depository of anthropological information. It is a politicized literature, at once determined by and intervening in the historical contest between egbe and ile that governed nineteenth-century Yoruba society. Its intervention in this contest is surprising, for it dissents from the very theory of abiku, the orthodox Ifa theory, whose tropes and terminology feed it.

What is even more surprising, perhaps, is that we find a similar combination of historical and aesthetic errancy embodied in a work of twentieth-century written abiku literature, Soyinka's "Abiku." Soyinka is an Egba-Yoruba who grew up in Abeokuta and Ibadan, the polities that during the nineteenth-century modeled themselves on the egbe. Given this fact, one might well expect Soyinka's "Abiku" to be in tension with the ile-centered discourse of Ifa, drawing upon the oral literature in a way that reproduces an ideology of egbe rather than an ideology of ile. But this is not what we find. For although Soyinka's poem owes much to its oral precursors--formally, it models itself on an abiku oriki, quoting Ifa narrative conventions and coining new abiku names; thematically, it explores the politics of errancy, engaging in matters of wandering and delinquency--we discover in the end that the poem has little to do with the sociopolitical tensions that so preoccupy the oral abiku literature. Instead, Soyinka's text is concerned with conflicts between family loyalty and individual self-creation, Yoruba structures of family rule dominating Soyinka's childhood and Western structures of political individualism that defined his first sojourn in London--a literary fact that only comes to light if we take into account where and when the poem was written. (18)

Soyinka's poem "Abiku" was first published in the tenth number of Black Orpheus, which appeared sometime in the last quarter of 1961 or the first quarter of 1962 (19):


ABIKU

In vain your bangles cast
Charmed circles at my feet;
I am Abiku, calling for the first
And the repeated time.

Must I weep for goats and cowries
For palm oil and the sprinkled ash?
Yams do not sprout in amulets
To earth Abiku's limbs.

So when the snail is burnt in his shell
Whet the heated fragment, brand me
Deeply on the breast. You must know him
When Abiku calls again.

I am the squirrel teeth, cracked
The riddle of the palm. Remember
This, and dig me deeper still into
The god's swollen foot.

Once and the repeated time, ageless
Though I puke. And when you pour
Libations, each finger points me near
The way I came, where

The ground is wet with mourning
White dew suckles flesh-birds
Evening befriends the spider, trapping
Flies in wine-froth;

Night, and Abiku sucks the oil
From lamps. Mothers! I'll be the
Suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep
Yours the killing cry.

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


If we flip back a page from Soyinka's poem, we see John Pepper Clark's poem of the same title, also making its first appearance in print. The deliberate apposition of the poems was an important event in Nigerian literary history, not only because it precipitated the West African pedagogic and academic tradition of comparing and contrasting the two poems, but because nothing like "Abiku" and "Abiku" had appeared in the pages of Black Orpheus before. (20) Their compressed language, dense imagery, self-conscious craftsmanship, and use of personae or "masks" must have surprised the journal's readers, accustomed as they were to the Whitmanesque effusions of Senghor, the crystalline structures of Okara, and the cool rhymes of Langston Hughes, all of whom shared with their imitators the Romantic convention of speaking about one's own experience in one's own voice. Soyinka's "Abiku" marks a radical break from this convention--a break toward the cryptic, compact, intricately allusive, and anti-Romantic language that would mark much of his subsequent verse and drama. Given these publication circumstances, it is easy to see why critics from the late 1960s until today have invariably read the poem as a kind of hymn to nonconformity, with its recalcitrant abiku clearly mirroring the cocksure iconoclasm of Soyinka himself--that maverick and upstart crow who, by 1961, was already something of an enfant terrible on the Nigerian literary scene. (21)

But if seeing the poem in the context of its publication yields one reading, seeing it in the context of its composition yields another. In a 1985 lecture, Soyinka tells us that he wrote "Abiku" in London when he had been suffering from "nostalgia":


Colin Garland was--still is of course--an Australian. He shared a flat in
Notting Hill with a West Indian actor, Lloyd Record, in the sixties, which
was how I met him. I came into his studio one day and--there it was--a
painting of "Abiku"! I entered the studio, stared and shouted: Abiku! He
stared back at me, not knowing what the hell I was talking about.

Of course there was nostalgia. After all, I had been away from home--for
the first time ever, and for over three years at that time. Any object,
voice, smell, sky-line, was available for conversion to my 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 study at 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 a mistake, because we know from Soyinka's Ibadan that he was on good terms with Colin and Lloyd well before his debut on the London stage in November 1959 (Brien; Parekh and Jagne 438; Soyinka, Ibadan 28). Thus, if the poem was written just "over three years" from Soyinka's initial entry into 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 Royal Court Theatre. Contrary to what is often assumed, then, the poem was not composed by a cocksure maverick strutting his stuff, the enfant terrible of the Nigerian literary scene. It was composed by an unknown, homesick, twenty-three-year-old, fledgling writer living in London, routinely encountering racism and alienation, as his London poems (e.g., "Telephone Conversation") and his memoirs of the period (e.g., Ibadan 27) make clear. Knowing this makes it barder to read the poem as a hymn to nonconformity that mirrors Soyinka's own maverick character and cultural praxis, and easier to read it as a traditional Yoruba oriki, a nostalgic evocation of the familiar past (abiku) in an alien present (London).

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


[Y]ou have to understand that I grew up with abiku [...] Abiku was real,
not just a figment of literary analysis. [...] I keep emphasizing the
cruelty of abiku once they realize their own power with their parents, with
their elders, how they use and abuse their power, and at the same time the
kind of intelligence of the abiku and their loyalty to their own group,
almost like children versus the adult world. (Wilkinson 107-08)


One of Soyinka's playmates as a young boy was also an abiku, and he tells us in his autobiography Ake: The Years of Childhood that she was characterized by 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 earthed her through
ankles, fingers, wrists and waist. [...] Like all abiku she was privileged,
apart. (16)

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


Soyinka's memories of abiku bear traces of the Ifa discourse. He represents abiku in terms of an oppositional tension between egbe and ile, "loyalty 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 [the abiku]"--the word "earthed" recalling de, Ifa's term for fettering abiku to the houses of the world. What is most striking about these passages, however, is that these traces of Ifa are subsumed within an overall focus upon the abiku as a individualistic child ("privileged, apart") antagonistic to the rule of parents and elders over children ("like children versus the adult world"). Not only is such a focus unanticipated by the Ifa discourse, but it also locates Soyinka's memories of abiku within a sociopolitical problematic different from that animating Ifa theory and oral abiku literature alike--a problematic having to do not with the rule of ile over egbe, but with the rule of adults over children, elders overjuniors, families over individuals.

Given the circumstances precipitating the poem's composition and given the memories upon which Soyinka drew, it should come as no surprise to us "Abiku" is preoccupied with the relationship between Soyinka's Western present and his Yoruba past, between Western-style political individualism and Yoruba-style familial rule. Soyinka's poem everywhere represents the abiku as an "I am," a self-defining individual that contests and resists being ruled by its parents and community. As critics point out, the presence of parents is implied by the constant mention of religious ritual. The putting of "bangles" on ankles, the sacrifice of "goats and cowries," the use of hot shell-fragments to "brand" the abiku, and the pouring of "Libations" all refer to community-defined rituals that parents would perform to "earth" an abiku. In this sense, the poem's ritual images are metonyms for the claims made on the individual by family and community, as well as synechdoches for the (sometimes violent and "brand"-like) mechanisms of normalization by which those claims are internalized and enforced. The abiku's "I" is represented as being detached from those claims, vagrantly slipping free from their emotive grasp ("Must I weep [...]?") and their physical imprint upon its body ("brand me"). Instead of submitting itself to the interests of its parents, the abiku is persistently self-defining ("I am Abiku," "I am the squirrel teeth") and self-determining ("I'll be the/ Suppliant snake"). What critics interpret as a generalized kind of "nonconformity" (dissent from any norm whatsoever) is therefore better interpreted as a particular kind of non-conformity (individualistic dissent from the norm of Yoruba family rule).

This self-ruling detachment of the "I" from structures of family rule is mirrored by the abiku's temporal vagrancy, its detached wandering between times. In the first stanza, "I am Abiku" protrudes as such a startling and memorable line in part because it asserts the abiku's presence not only as an "I" but as an "am" in the temporality of the present. This assertion of present time is immediately complicated, however, by the temporal indicators 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 the repeated time." In such a way, the "I" of the abiku is presented to us in the first 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) Abiku break down, complicate, and wander insolently back and forth across temporal distinctions, Soyinka seems to say, and this is reinforced for us as the poem goes on. The last line of 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 assertively to the present ("I am the squirrel teeth") before inviting us to the past time of memory ("Remember this"). This disjointure of temporality continues with the paradoxical assertion in stanza rive that an original event and its subsequent recurrence, "once and the repeated time," exist simultaneously, just as infancy ("I puke") and extreme age ("ageless") are coterminous. "Ageless" also means, of course, "timeless," suggesting that the abiku exists not only inside of time, persisting in spite of it like a timeless masterpiece, but also exists outside of time like an eternal god. In stanzas six and seven, the abiku's path into the world ("The way I came") is described not 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 the abiku's path back to its beginning, we are meant to understand that "Night!" is the abiku's temporal starting point, "Evening" its mid-point, and "mourning" its end-point. The abiku inverts the normal direction of time, in other words, a fact that the poem strikes home by re-inverting again what the abiku has already inverted, showing us "mourning" before "Night!" In short, the time of abiku is the time of vagrancy, a time that inverts or simply disobeys the normal rules of temporality, insolently jaywalking across temporal distinctions between past and present, history and eternity, even as it seems unequivocally to assert the present presence of an "I am." In such a way, the abiku's temporal vagrancy mirrors and underscores its individualism, its delinquent straying from the political structures of family rule.

But this disjointed time also complicates the abiku's contest against parental rituals. Since the abiku's "I" is fractured temporally from within, its self-assertive "I am" and self-determining "I'll be"--reliant as they are upon a definite present and definite future--are destabilized. The abiku's self-ruling individualism is thus seen to be contradictory, needing the very temporal distinctions (the "time" of parental rituals) that it truantly repudiates. The political value of individual self-determination is complexly intertwined, the poem seem to say, with the rule of individual selves by family and community.

The poem's insistence upon the time and the "I"--upon seeing the abiku's vagrancy as temporal and its delinquency as self-creating individualism--are clear departures from oral literature pertaining to abiku, which represents the abiku's vagrancy as spatial and its delinquency as egbe-like conspiracy. But the poem is also deeply indebted to oral literature. In particular, it belongs to the Yoruba oral genre of oriki, a genre germane to the poem's insistence upon the temporal. (23) For as Karin Barber points out, oriki are all about time: they invoke the past to affirm the present, aesthetically transcending the gap between past time and present time by textually demonstrating their continuity (Barber, I Could Speak 15). Fragmentary quotations from past texts--histories, songs, proverbs, local gossip, and so on--are cobbled together in surprising ways to capture whatever is most noteworthy and distinctive about a subject at the present moment. When performed by a virtuoso, an oriki becomes a dense labyrinth of quotations (Barber, "Quotation") that are tantalizingly disjointed and polyvocal: cryptic, name-like formulations are juxtaposed without any attempt at prioritizing one over the other or concealing contradictions between them, and "[t]he `I' of the utterance moves continually, speaking with different voices" that have no definite relationship with one another (I Could Speak 288). Thus, while oriki are politically conservative in that they affirm the present state of things by revealing its continuity with the past, oriki can also have a politically destabilizing effect: by holding open past contradictions and withholding a single authorial point of view, oriki show "the possibility of things being otherwise" (I Could Speak 288).

Soyinka tells us that he "grew up with" oriki (Wilkinson 100), and his poem has all the hallmarks of the oral poetic form: it is a cryptic and polyvocal tissue of quotations, evoking the Yoruba home of Soyinka's past in the alien present of his London sojourn. Let me take a few examples. To begin with, the poem is, like the oriki of Akande discussed above, a bricolage of innovative abiku names. To see this, one need only join the words together with dashes, or place the standard Yoruba name-making prefixes of "Omo" ("Child of ...")" or "O ni" ("One who is/says/has ...") before every second line. In the first stanza, "[Child of] In-vain-your-bangles-cast-charmed-circles-at-my-feet" is both an apt and delightfully surprising appellation for an abiku, capturing as it does the quality of boastful arrogance characteristic of Ifa'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 does the abiku's propensity to be born repeatedly and, when it is born, not to stay too long--"calling" understood here as "briefly visiting." The entire poem could be read in a similar fashion; each couplet, and sometimes each line, constitutes a name or name-like formula intended to capture something distinctive and noteworthy about abiku. In such a way, the individualistic abiku's self-definitions turn out to be community-derived appellations--identity-defining names or name-like formulas authorized by structures of family rule antagonistic to the abiku's individualism.

True to the poem's nature as an oriki, many of the name-like formulas cobbled together in the poem are cryptic and polyvocal. "The god's swollen 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 tree often associated with abiku. But other critics tells us "[t]he earth is said to be the footstool of God," so perhaps "the god's swollen foot" refers not to a tree but to a deep grave in the earth (Senanu and Vincent 191)--making the directive, "Dig me deeper still/Into the god's swollen foot," a sardonic piece of advice to parents, since everybody knows that burying an abiku will only encourage it--that tossing it disrespectfully into the bush is the 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 literally means "Swollen Foot." This invocation to Oedipus--hardly surprising given Soyinka's perennial interest and use of Greek mythology (see Bacchae; Myth; Zabus)--is multi-faceted. First, it condenses one of the central stories of Western literature into a cryptic verbal clipping that makes present another noteworthy quality of the abiku--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 among Yorubanists about which of three ancient civilizations (Egyptian, Greek, or Ife-Yoruba) was the origin of the other two (see Frobenius; Olumide; Parker)--a debate which persists to this day (see Bernal). Third, Soyinka's oblique allusion to Oedipus cross-references Freud's view (hegemonic in the West at the poem's time of composition) that a so-called "Oedipal stage" during early childhood (hatred of paternal omnipotence) leads a child to see itself as an individual "I" separate from its caregivers. Here, again, is the conflict between children and parents, between Western structures of individualism and Yoruba structures of family rule that governs Soyinka's representation of abiku. In short, "the god's swollen foot" is an exemplar of the poem's cryptic polyvocality, its incessant multiplication of not-entirely-compatible perspectives and voices, Yoruba and Western, past and present. Truly, "Soyinka's sources are not only heterogeneous, they also 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 stanzas of the poem. The abiku is referred to in the first person ("I'll be," "I crept") as well as the third person ("Abiku sucks," "Abiku moans"), for example, and theories about witches ("flesh-birds"), agricultural discourses ("the ripest fruit"), and Yoruba tales and proverbs about the spider ("the spider, trapping") are cited in rapid sequence. (24) "Suppliant snake" appears to quote Ifa's story about the snake killed by parents on their abiku-child's wedding day, but this authoritative source is soon buried in a heap of cryptic allusions that yoke different voices and different discourses together into a single utterance. The metaphor "warmth was cloying," for instance, yokes together descriptive categories as separate as temperature and taste, while "Mounds from the yolk" compares a human grave-site to the first stage in a chicken's life-cycle--a re-translation of abiku, "born to die," that is at once serious and arch. In short, the poem is relentlessly polyvocal, shifting in a labile fashion between different sources, voices, perspectives, and descriptive categories. This verbal vagrancy reflects the abiku's temporal vagrancy, which we have said is an integral part of its assertion of individualism, its straying from the stable time of tradition and ritual embodied by parental structures of control. In such a way, the confining conservatism of the names and name-like formulations is counterbalanced by a decentered multiplicity of quotations that make room for the abiku's will to individual self-determination.

Soyinka's oriki might be a tissue of many name-like formulations quoting multiple source texts, but there is also a sense in which the poem is a single quotation from a single source: a quotation of the boasts made by abiku characters in Ifa's abiku narratives. As mentioned earlier, almost every abiku narrative told by Ifa deploys the standard plot device of an abiku who brags about its secret plans, boasting that its parents can do nothing to stop it from carrying them out. This boast turns out to be a lot of hot air, however, because a hero, spying on it from a good hiding place, overhears the abiku's secret plans and uses this intelligence to capture it. Like the stereotypical abiku in Ifa's narratives, Soyinka's abiku is a loud-mouthed braggart who lists each thing its parents might do to keep it alive and rejects every one: "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 point it back to heaven. Handed this comprehensive, confidently uttered rejection list, critics have assumed the parents' efforts to be futile. But this rejection list is entirely conventional: it is the hot air of a braggart, and braggarts, as the Ifa convention says, get caught. Seen in this light, the governing irony of Soyinka's poem is not a tragic irony (we and the abiku knowing that the parents' efforts are futile) but a comic irony (we and the parents knowing that the abiku's oath is hot air). Some critics (e.g., Ogunsanwo 47) have suggested that the poem "parodies" oral abiku narratives and "mocks" their associated religious practices. But the opposite seems true: the poem belongs to and relies upon our understanding of Ifa's narrative conventions, conventions that undermine the abiku's boasting individualism.

If we are considering the poem as a single quotation from a single source, however, then it also unquestionably cites the well-known saying abiku s'oloogun d'eke, "Abiku turn herbalists into liars." According to Ifa babalawo, herbal medicines (oogun)--or whatever else a herbalist (oloogun or onisegun) might concoct--are pointless against genuine cases of abiku. (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 die at a certain time and by a certain method. Only an Ifa babalawo, through divinatory communication with Orunmila, can discover those secret plans and leak them to human beings. For this reason, Ifa is praised as Odudu tii du ori emere, "The savior who saves the head of emere [i.e., abiku]" (Akinyemi 184). Read as an elaborate improvisation on abiku s'oloogun d'eke, the poem does indeed mock and conceptually undermine parental efforts guided by herbalist rituals, thereby suggesting the triumph of self-ruling individualism over structures of family rule. But this triumph is vulnerably fragile, for the old saying (at least on Ifa's authoritative interpretation of it) also implies that the individual's private secrets are knowable and that, once they are known, parents and community authorities will again be able to regain control.

There is no question, then, that Soyinka's poem is an oriki, a tissue of quotations from past texts intended to encapsulate and affirm some of the abiku's more noteworthy qualities and capacities. But this oral Yoruba form is couched within a conspicuously Western lyric form of quatrains where the flow of ideas is--quite contrary to oral oriki practice--broken by unnatural enjambments ("Remember / This," "ageless / Though I puke," "I'll be the / Suppliant snake") or slowed down by the occurrence of periods and semi-colons within each stanza. (In Soyinka's final version of "Abiku," published in Idanre, however, these intrastanzaic periods and semicolons that punctuate the original Black Orpheus version are replaced with commas, dashes, or nothing at all in an effort to re-create that cascading effect of linguistic proliferation to which oral oriki artists aspire.) Also unlike oriki and typical of the lyric, Soyinka's poem is internally tied together and organized by patterns of imagery (e.g., images of time, of body parts, and of the animal world). We have said that the poem's "I" is fractured from within by its temporal vagrancy, but this "I" also creates a certain sense of univocality, of one voice speaking from a single perspective about itself a univocality typical of the Western lyric that exists in tension with poem's oral Yoruba polyvocality. In such a way, Soyinka complicates his deployment of the oral genre, staging at the level of genre the embroilment between Western individualism (symbolized by the lyric) and Yoruba family rule (symbolized by the oriki) explored throughout the poem.

All that we have been saying about "Abiku" is further complicated when we turn back to its circumstances of composition. In London, Soyinka was an abiku in the sense, handed down to him by the oral literature, 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: the spirit of Western-style individualism is subverted by its own temporal vagrancy and by quotations from Yoruba oral texts that embody the political value of family rule; and a conspicuously Western form of short-lined quatrains (England) strains to house his oral oriki (Yorubaland). In this sense, the poem strives to transcend time and geographical separation, strives to make Soyinka's Yoruba past present again and thereby affirm the hegemonic structures of expression (oriki) and political organization (family rule) that centrally constituted his Yoruba home--structures for which the abiku is both a metonym and a symbol. But the abiku is also London and the West, embodying a self-determining individualism ("I am") that pushes against the determination of one's life by parents and community elders ("Mothers!"). As an oriki to abiku the poem affirms this individualism, celebrating Soyinka's individualistic detachment from parents and family in his London present--but, problematically and paradoxically, it does so through a series of quotations from past Yoruba texts that together symbolize a nonindividualistic attachment to them, thus qualifying and undermining the very celebration they make possible. In short, Western and Yoruba forms, both political and aesthetic, are seen to be mutually entangled in uneasy alliances, even as they also conflict and undermine each other in a poetic peroration that is at once controlled and dizzying.

Soyinka's poem, then, is pervasively indebted to oral abiku literature. But it belongs to a very different historical moment and a very different political problematic than its precursors. Oral abiku literature is constituted by concerns about protecting the ile against rival egbe-like structures, embodying the contest in a way that affirms the ile while revealing it to be fragile, contingent, and beset with internal contradictions. By contrast, Soyinka's literate oriki is inseparable from the tensions between Western individualism and Yoruba familialism that it so perplexingly stages, affirming and denying both political values. The different histories of errancy engaged in by the oral texts and the poem are reflected in their different representations of errancy. In the oral abiku texts, the abiku's errancy is spatial and subversive: loyal only to its egbe, the abiku upsets the spatial boundaries between ile and igbo, between aye and orun, between one ile and another; and this spatial errancy undermines the ile's constitutive activities of procreation, lineage perpetuation, and the honoring of one's ancestral city. For Soyinka, by contrast, the abiku's errancy is temporal and indeterminate: the abiku is an "I am," no longer part of an egbe but an atomistic individual belonging to a disjointed time, attempting to determine itself rather than submit to the rule of parents.

If this essay has shown nothing else, it has demonstrated the need to historicize abiku literature, to situate it within the field of official discourses and 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 abiku are heterogeneous, politicized, and historically embedded. They work to reproduce the ideological mirages that accompany and underwrite hegemonic social and political forms, but can, as we have seen, also work to dissent from and resist them. Future studies of abiku literature would do well to keep this fact of historicity in mind, if only for the following two reasons. First, it would remind us that any "strategic choices exercised in filiation with indigenous resources" (Quayson 6) observable in abiku literature are not as deliberate and consciously planned as the phrase "strategic choices exercised" might imply, even though it is also true that authorial agency is in the end not reducible to the dialectic of base and superstructure or some other crude determinism. Second, critical attention to the historicity of abiku would help dispel the powerful temptation to interpret abiku in a way that reflects critics' own theoretical or political commitments rather than the commitments embodied by the literature. As postcolonial critics, for example, we might be tempted to appropriate abiku as a trope for postcolonial hybridity and liminality, for the migrant experience, for the defiant nationalism of decolonization, for "magical realism," or for the globally unjust distributions of wealth and power which importantly contribute to high child mortality rates in "developing" countries. Such interpretations, however conscientiously elaborated, are not only ahistorical, but also run the risk of quieting the multiple and varied indigenous histories of abiku with which the literature is intermeshed. At worst, such ahistorical, academic representations of abiku might come to stand for the indigenous varieties--a problem similar in kind and in urgency to the perennial problem of "metropolitan hybridity" standing for "subalternity" (Spivak 308-11, 358-62).

NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

I use diacritical marks throughout on Yoruba words that carry culture-specific meanings relevant to this study, except for proper nouns. Thus, the word abiku receives tone-marks and is italicized throughout, but "Oyo" (as the name of a town or kingdom) and "Soyinka" receive no tone-marks or subscripts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of this essay is based upon fieldwork (interviews and literature collection) carried out in Igboland and Yorubaland in 1999. This fieldwork would not have been possible without the kind and generous assistance of many persons and institutions. I am therefore very grateful to Mr. Tim Cribb and Dr. Ato Quayson of the 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 of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife; and to all those who generously shared their time and knowledge with me during the course of many interviews. For financial support, my gratitude goes to Mr. Evan Schulman; the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust; the Smuts Memorial Fund; and the UAC of Nigeria Travel Fund. For immense help with Yoruba orthography and for protracted etymological and hermeneutic discussions on key Yoruba terms, I am greatly indebted to Eniola Akinjobin-. My gratitu de also goes to Dr. Sola Ajibade of the Department of African Languages and Linguistics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife, Nigeria, for transcribing and providing rough English translations of my recorded interviews with Yoruba babalawo. Finally, I have benefited greatly from correspondence with Christey Lynn Carwile of the Unive rsity of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, who is cited 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; Schutze; Soyinka ("Abiku"; Ake Dance); and Tutuola ("Antare"; My Life; 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 Famished Road, but does not consider its relationship with oral abiku literature as such. Verger ("La societe") and C. C. Achebe ("Literary Insights") are exceptions to the general rule in that they construe the literature as a source of anthropological information about abiku and ogbanje.

(3.) The currently standard translation "born to die" appears to have been coined by Samuel Johnson (83). My gratitude goes to Eniola Akinjogbin-McCabe and to Dr. Akin Oyetade and Anya "Bola" Oed of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, for debating the linguistics of abiku with me.

(4.) See Abraham 135; Adeoye 38; Aworeni; Beier, "Spirit Children" 330; Fatoki vi; Ifatoogun; Ifayinka; Olanipekun; Renne 25; Verger, "La societe" 1455. Ere, emere, elere, egbe orun, elegbe are discussed elsewhere in this essay.

(5.) Everything in this and the next paragraph is derived from Ifatoogun. Other Ifa babalawo from whom extensive accounts of abiku have been collected are Aworeni, Ifayinka, Olanipekun, and Verger. Further important information on the Yoruba abiku can be found in: Abraham 7-8, 159, 162; Adebajo; Adeoye; Babalola; Bascom, Yoruba 74; Beier, "Spirit Children," "Geist-Kinder"; Crowther 2; 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, Peoples 2:358-9, 3:719-31; Verger, "La societe," Notes 163-70; Williams.

(6.) "To tie" (ide) an object for the purpose of making it "something/someone in bondage" (onde) seems connected only to a handful of currently or historically typical practices among the Yoruba: (a) the tying of goats or other domestic animals to stop them from roaming or causing trouble; (b) the penning in of a wild animal by a circle of hunters; (c) the capture and manacling of thieves, madmen, and slaves. The metaphorical usage of de by Ifa associates abiku with all of these spheres of Yoruba life. De is also used a ritual metaphor in the worship of some orisa. As Matory observes, Sango is praised as the hunter with chains who "catches children ... like a royal slave hunter" (Matory 190).

(7.) Verger's article is the only other published account of abiku by an Ifa babalawo--the unnamed babalawo in question probably being the one from Dahomey who initiated Verger into the Ifa cult. Adeoye's information also seems largely derived from Ifa. I have collected further accounts from Aworeni, Ifatoogun, Ifayinka, Olanipekun--all senior Ifa babalawo in different areas of Yorubaland.

(8.) See Abraham 159. Abraham cites emere as a synonym of elere, and elere as a synonym of abiku, but offers no etymological breakdown of emere. I have followed Eniola Akinjogbin-McCabe's tentative conjecture that: emere = e-mu-ere = "one:who-drinks-profit" (pers. interview). But it is also possible that emere is a loan word from the Arabic, Nupe, or even Igbo, for we know that borrowing of this kind has occurred (Gbadamosi 207; Matory 267; Renne 25).

(9.) On the egbe, 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 egbe on political life. It is the central argument of Apter's book on "critical" ritual groups and of Matory's reading of Sango worship.

(11.) This centrality of slave-raiding tropes to Ifa's theory of abiku--and to some Ifa-prescribed abiku rituals (such as the donning of iron manacles or saworo)-suggests that the slave trade may have been the material cause of abiku (as a separate phenomenon from, say, ibeji). There is not (yet) enough evidence to decide this issue finally, but the evidence--e.g., the fact that belief in abiku (children who die young and come back repeatedly) seems confined to West Africa and is at its most concentrated on the "Slave Coast"--is substantial and interesting enough to deserve treatment in a separate essay. A notable and germane account of children being lured away from their homes by egbe and sold into slavery is to be found in Ajisafe's History of Abeokuta (105). For more on the cultural 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 abiku 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 societe." I have collected additional names, oriki, songs, proverbs, incantations, and ese Ifa pertaining to abiku from Aworeni, Ifatoogun, Ifayinka, and Olanipekun.

(14.) For more on abiku names, see especially Adeoye; Johnson; Verger.

(15.) But see Barber ("Deconstructive Criticism") for a caution about using deconstruction 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 translation.

(17.) According to Ifayinka, "Every odu of Ifa speaks of abiku." Since there are 256 odu, there might be as many as 256 ese Ifa pertaining to abiku. Verger gives us eight of these; Bascom four; Adeoye one. I have collected thirty-four from four different Ifa babalawo; three of these ese Ifa are different versions of those already collected by Adeoye and Verger.

(18.) The term "individualism" is often used to characterize Soyinka's self-sufficiency or nonconformity (e.g., Quayson 73). But I use the term in its more particular sense of the political philosophy that privileges the individual above the group and enshrines the individual's right to self-rule rather than subordinating it to the needs and wishes of a community. The spirit of self-sufficiency and non-conformity can be found in nearly every society worldwide--but individualism as such is still only peculiar to and definitive of Western liberal democracies.

(19.) Date inferred. For a chronology of early editions of Black Orpheus, see Benson 289-90. Since the Black Orpheus version of "Abiku" is closer to the poem's historical moment of composition than subsequent versions, I base my analysis on it rather than on the Idanre version. The former differs from the latter in having no epigraph defining abiku and in being punctuated by periods and semicolons rather than by commas anti em-dashes.

(20.) Comparison of the poems "has been a frequent attraction for the West African Examinations Council's literature examiners, year in-year out, right from the `60s" (Ogunsanwo 46). For examples of this pedagogic tradition, see Maduakor 71-75; Nwoga 61-62; and Senanu and Vincent 192-93. Benson points out that the journal was an educational tool for teachers and a formative influence 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; and Taiwo 221.

(22.) In this sense, the poem is in tension with negritude and Soyinkan valorizations of cyclical/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 transition), see Soyinka (Myth 144). For a reading of "Abiku" that argues, contrary to me, that the poem's time is cyclical, see Osundare 98. On temporal disjointure 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 oriki. 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 critic has explicitly read the poem as an oriki or spelled out the implications of this fact.

(24.) On the subject of spiders, Ellis catalogues this Yoruba proverb: "When the spider intends to attack you it encircles you with its web" (231). Abimbola tells us that in the Ifa literary corpus the spider "is always referred to as master craftsman who weaves his threads with great expertise" (Ifa 218). These two, somewhat contradictory traditional representations of the spider are simultaneously cited by Soyinka to encapsulate different distinctive qualities of abiku-its predatory aspect (negative) and its crafty intelligence (somewhat positive).

(25.) Aworeni, Ifatoogun, Ifayinka, and Olanipekun are all in agreement about what follows. For an account which differs from theirs, but which appears to conflate Ifa babalawo with onisegun and other persons claiming to heal abiku, see Mobolade 62-63.

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Douglas McCabe is a Tidmarsh Scholar and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Cambridge, England.