A number of Ifá divinations (or Odu Ifa) in all the 16 main divinations of the Yoruba religious corpus explicate and aid the revelation of hidden challenges or unforeseen circumstances one is likely to confront, which might pose significant threats or even an end to the ultimate revelry of one’s existence.One of those important verses that holds weighty interpretations in application to an individual’s trajectory is Odu Òyèkú or Òyèkú Meji.
Òyèkú, an elision of the phrase “O yeye Iku” (Spirit of the Mother of the Death) , in its loose translation, means: Averting Death. As the second chapter of Ifa corpus after the Eji Ogbe verse, which focuses predominantly on themes of solace, Òyèkú starkly portrays darkness and hidden aspects of life. Apart from other characteristics and hierophantic meanings of this verse that reveal the unknown, it mainly signifies death or the end of a cycle. Other than that, it calls for caution or reflection. It is this exact premise of mortality and death that informs and sums up the newly-published chapbook of Olumide Manuel: Òyèkú, Mother of Death.
The invocations in this oeuvre of 10 short poems are jarring, succumbing, and sometimes defiant in its oneiric quality. Death is both a monolithic and permeable structure. Despite the misgivings that bedevil the speaker in the poems, Olumide capitalizes, even while attempting to refute existential sufferings, on familiarizing the readers with the understanding of the mystic and immutable manifestation of fate in man’s life. While the speaker struggles to segregate their life from the excruciating pangs of fate, there’s a disappointing or rather a humble surrender to its brutalities—rendered despairingly yet empathetically.
Whereas, in the first poem, end, that opens the collection, the speaker fiercely pronounces their grit in the sight of fate’s mishaps. With resilience, punctuated with so much vigour, it protests:
“i have betrayed nothing but the burden
of fate, in refusing my name
inside a torrent of shame, old as blood,
raging like hell. i farm a destiny
out of ploughs of patience, tending its seed under Orupá”
These utterances, as Olumide outlines in the poem, exemplifies a life that has long suffered myriads of challenges but now wilful in its resistance against them. In the next ending four lines, the resistance builds up to a certainty that signals a destiny removed from the clutches of ordainment and driven to its desired fulfillment—“the moon melts inside my eyes, i scrub // them red to forlong the naked darkness. // now, my harvest is ripe— // i have come undone”. The last line, i have come undone, segmented into a standalone stanza, nevertheless carries an ambiguity that leaves one pondering the possibility of this proclamation. is the speaker expressing their doom or freedom? is this perhaps a syntactic blunder that has eluded the poet’s sight?
One could have thought this sense of resolute attitude grounded in defiance will be carried henceforward; whereas, our faith in the character loses its steadfastness in the succeeding poem, Life, as we descend into a life “minute as a grain in the scheme of stars, // specks of light, all dust bodies // sharding from a lineage of fine // brokenness” and resignedly surrender to “death, the mother whose embrace is the cold of // graves, the creak & the clamp of spinning doors”. We can’t ascertain if this is Olumide’s poetic habit of employing his poetic licence in whichever way he deems fit or him indulging our understanding in the antithesis that encompasses the universe—marked between good and evil, success and failure, life and death (the latter, by line of narration, mostly close to the truth). Nonetheless, it holds up the reality of the duality of man. In Sphere, the continuum is expanded to contain the two ends, even though the poet-persona struggles to emerge victorious, reducing the potency of death:
i am caught between two separate stillness of a juncture—
dawn & twilight, overflowing with
forest mimosa & the food served at the
birth ceremony & the bristles of horsetail & the money
sprayed at a funeral. regardless i bud fresh grace, tetherless—
my life is a debt to myself, not to death, not to endless pursuit,
my life is my debt to myself, not
a mortgage unto grave.
In Death, an uncertainty lingers towards the end (after the beginning lines that muse on the inexorability of death): “I do not know if it is death chasing me; or I chasing it”. Nevertheless, the divisive exploration between life and death does not end here, rather it manifests throughout the book—as in Chroma where the speaker vows to “live out the despair” of their life “in all partitions of rainbow, in light, in shadows” or in the poem, Immortality, where death affords comfort for them, professing ardently: “but if death is final,
how relieving is that?”.
The Interactions of Motifs in Correspondence with Odu Òyèkú Méjì
It is imperative and also satisfying to note that the recurrent motifs embedded in the narration or interpretation of Òyèkú Méjì in Ifá corpus are present in Olumide’s collection. As the poet exposes to the readers of a life under the duress of fate, grief, and seemingly incessant tribulations, the symbols that represent these ordeals in the narrative that surrounds the Òyèkú verse such as “darkness”, “end”, “death”, “mortality”, and suchlike are encountered—almost superfluously. We can see many of these motifs deployed in the titular vers libre, Òyèkú, where Olumide abundantly enunciates the characteristics of Òyèkú while seeking refuge from its manifestation:
Oyeku/ mother of death/ mother of cycles
you mother/ the end in beginnings/ the music
eating silence/ you everlasting womb of mysteries/
you consume to reborn/ (stanza 1)
o mother of the spirit of death/
tarry/
from this body/ tarry from this home/ tarry from this soul (stanza 2)
Take another instance from Knife:
go ahead, my soul,
sharpen all the knives the Blacksmith sheathed
under your skins. break the rust of
the despair of death blunting
you into oblivion.
—the sense of ‘end of a cycle’ and ‘death’ is imaginatively portrayed.
Besides the interactions of these motifs, the spatial relationship of the book and that inherent in Òyèkú verse is enthralling—in the sense that both are tied to a numinous or esoteric plane. Part of the divination explaining the Òyèkú suggests that an individual, who has sought the consultation of Ifá, will experience hardships or misfortunes, as the case may be, but if they can tolerate these discomforts with necessary sacrifices made to the deities, they will overcome their trials. In the same eponymous poem, Òyèkú, Manuel writes:
here I come/ palms reddened with/ amaranthus
veins/neck-crested in mimosa/to shadow the calvary
/from every crossroad/ & plead the blood/the blood/
for a token of grace
These lines above demonstrate some sort of sacrifice offered to Òyèkú in order to avert the possibility or severity of the hardships that are already described in the preceding poems while signalling the tolerance developed for these problems.
As a matter of fact, in the Ifá cosmology, the Odu Òyèkú narrates a good deal of conducting rituals as outlined by Nanan Buruku and Èsù deities to protect against misfortunes. Some of the myths tying the verse are offering red and white cloth, seeds or small potted plants, yam, salt, water, and palm oil to Nanan Buruku, the keeper of transitions and Godmother of all deities, to invoke blessings and maximum protection. Other necessary parts of the DIY rituals that are to be performed by an individual whose divination is Òyèkú in order to ward off any future tribulations include: preparing yam mixed with palm oil; placing seeds on red and white cloth acquired; offering the prepared yam to Nanan; and burying the seeds in a sacred space. We can see some of these symbols captured by Olumide in lines such as:
out of ploughs of patience, tending its seed under Orupá.
the moon melts inside my eyes, i scrub
them red to forlong the naked darkness.
now, my harvest is ripe—
Or
like the amaranthus
stretching under the cool of tall plants,
I’m spent into it with weights of ambitions,
This phenomenon is a diligent approach that Olumide incorporates to explore the possibilities and impossibilities of the narrator without departing from the central theme of grief he intends to interrogate.
In the thread of grief, collective or personal, that a few poetry collections, published recently, have taken to express their thematic concerns, Olumide Manuel’s concise renditions trace the same to express personal grievances. Despite its unsteady lineation and figuration, Olumide’s “Òyèkú: Mother of Death” is a hauntingly philosophic chapbook that captures powerful messages of angst, loneliness, and mystery that center on the consciousness and reality of man.
Eniola Abdulroqeeb Arowolo is a poet and essayist. He won the 1st Edition of Wanjohi Prize for African Poetry, received a honourable mention in 2024 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Contest, and was a finalist for Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize. His works have appeared in 2024 Small Fictions anthology, Bacopa Literary Review, Weganda Review, The Republic, ANMLY, Nigeria Review, and elsewhere. He currently serves as a Poetry Reader for Chestnut Review.