7 - Disjunction and Transition

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Oriki mark individuality. They are imprinted with signs of idiosyncrasy through which they evoke and recall the differences between entities. But at the same time they are the means by which boundaries between entities are crossed. We have seen how the actual utterance of oriki opens a channel between speaker and addressee: a channel which is also a bond, both intense and allengrossing. Through it, power flows. The individual human recipient of oriki experiences an enhancement, thought of as a translation beyond the normal human condition. Egungun are revitalised by oriki chanting, oriṣa are empowered. The dead are given the impetus to return and bless the living, their latent presence actualised.

Women, the principal bearers of the oriki tradition, are the ones who cross - as rara iyawo so poignantly observe - from one compound to another, and often from one town to another, when they marry. They combine two different lineage identities, in an ambiguous conjunction that is never fully resolved even on death. But if they cross boundaries between groups, they are also, as we have seen, the source of structural differentiation within them. Not only do they provide the points at which a patrilineage segments, they also introduce to their own children alternative networks of relationships which other members of that lineage do not share. They sometimes, also, import their own oriṣa which after their death will have to be taken over by someone else in the compound. The frequent statement made in oriki, that ‘If the father is important, so is the mother’, and ‘Who can salute the father without first saluting the mother?’ is not a mere piety. It encodes the fundamental principle of alternatives in society. It is the woman that makes differentiation possible and that offers the social actor alternative paths to pursue.

It is the disjunctiveness of the discourse of oriki that makes it possible for them to assert identities and at the same time to cross boundaries between individuals and groups. The discussion of oriki opened in Chapter 2 with the observation that they are a mode of discourse that is essentially and genetically disjunctive, an accumulation of utterances of different origins and intents, juxtaposed in performance but not fused into a single coherent statement.