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A Walk Through Wole Soyinka’s ‘Àbíkú’

August/September 2024NigeriaReadingvol8-no3
Àbíkú

Wanderer Child. Photo Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref:  Yoruba mother and child figures. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART / SMITHSONIAN LAB.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / POETRY DEPT.

A Walk Through Wole Soyinka’s ‘Àbíkú’

An anthropological attempt at unravelling Wole Soyinka’s rewardingly obscure poem, ‘Àbíkú’.
Àbíkú

Wanderer Child. Photo Illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref:  Yoruba mother and child figures. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN ART / SMITHSONIAN LAB.

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / POETRY DEPT.

A Walk Through Wole Soyinka’s ‘Àbíkú’

An anthropological attempt at unravelling Wole Soyinka’s rewardingly obscure poem, ‘Àbíkú’.

Some eve or unholy hour in the early 1960s, as I like to imagine it, perhaps in London, a broad-nosed, impecunious, bilingual, frostbit and homesick young African felt the unmistakable pang of inspiration and produced these beguiling lines: 

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

Let us try to make sense of it all. 

This is hauntingly beautiful surrealistic poetry, if, at first glance, elliptical. There is a sense of the mystical, with ‘charmed circles’ and the quasi-religious imagery of bangles above the feet, around the ankles. The ‘first and the repeated time’ evokes an idea of cyclicality—perhaps even of rhythm, which is underscored by the alliteration and the limping metre. This also heightens the mystery of the passage. There is at least, for some identification, a name or title of some kind: Àbíkú. Thus, the idea of a voice, not entirely disembodied; there are those ‘feet’. But each observation leaves questions begging: whose feet, whose faceless voice, and who is being addressed (the mysterious ‘your’), and to what end? Is it a male or a female voice; is gender important at all? 

Moreover, why, in the rest of the poem, which has an additional seven quatrains, are there shifts in the narrative voice, with Àbíkú (is this even a name?) referring to themselves variously in the first and in the third person: ‘Yams do not sprout in amulets to earth Àbíkú’s rings’; or in the final lines: 

Where I crept, the warmth was cloying.
In the silence of webs, Àbíkú moans, shaping
Mounds from the yolk.  

And where is this poem set, in what parcel of time? We are unsure whether to read for verisimilitude, or to look for religious or psychological symbolism; a Freudian or maybe a Jungian reading of the images of eggs and birth, bangles and rings, would perhaps be indicative. We could deconstruct; we could merely focus on syntax. Certainly, it would be possible to hinge on one kind of reading, parse and then extrapolate; the poem is ‘open’ in that sense, but the very possibility of a multiplicity of readings renders each one inconclusive. Ultimately the question of what the poem is ‘about’, if a poem can really be ‘about’ anything is left unsatisfied. I have merely tried to demonstrate here the questions that any attempt at reading without context raises. The point is that without a key, without an understanding of the axis upon which the poem turns, it is impossible to appreciate what exactly it does, and what it communicates. Perhaps in this sense, the over-curious reader is guilty of a lack of negative capability, but it is surely useful to delve into some background information to see if this may provide some illumination.

THE PROTEAN IMAGE

The author was, of course, a young Wole Soyinka, who was making perhaps the first full-blooded articulation of the world as he saw it; which is to say, as a mythopoet, filtered through his eclectic experience. He recounts the story first in his 1985 lecture, ‘Climates of Art’, of how he stumbled upon a painting in the dingy studio of his acquaintance, Colin Garland, also an artist young and broke. Upon seeing Garland’s painting—who, being Australian, was not likely to have known anything about Àbíkú, and confessed as much—Soyinka was jolted by the shock of recognition; the figure in the painting was unmistakably Àbíkú. (For readers to whom this Àbíkú personage remains a mystery, I will not divulge the identity just yet.) At this anagnorisis, the acquisitive impulse took over and Soyinka decided to buy the painting off Garland, though he could not afford it immediately. As fate would have it, he returned a few weeks later to look at the picture, only to find that Garland, for want of canvas for new work, had wiped off the painting and started on a new composition. The young poet, thus disappointed, was so beside himself that Garland was compelled to try to reproduce the image, which he managed to do, more or less, but not quite as with the arresting aura of the initial instance. So that the painting was born again, a copy of its former self, at this ‘repeated time’. The loss of the original painting was an instigation, all the same, and in fact led directly to the composition of Soyinka’s poem. As Soyinka puts it in the aforementioned lecture: 

But then, the ensuing symbolic conceit, an extension of Àbíkú’s mythic metaphor: when I returned a few weeks later, believe it or not, Colin, that familiar figure of the struggling artist who can ill afford paint, brushes and canvas, had cleaned out the painting and was using the canvas for a totally different subject I think that the moment he admitted what he had done was the closest I had ever come to a crime passionnel at that time. I felt that his parents deserved to have an Àbíkú in their family, so they would understand the dimensions of his cultural crime. No matter, there was little else that could be done; a few weeks later I consoled myself by writing the poem ‘Àbíkú’.  

Sometime later still, Colin read the poem and – truly remorseful and better informed, I like to think – painted something else around the same motif. Àbíkú was indeed repeating its accustomed role even in an alien clime, staging its petulant rounds of appearances and exits to a surrogate artistic mother. The cruelty is part of the mythology of Àbíkú, the sadism of incomplete consciousness – indeed I should have pitied the artist who had unwittingly been made an instrument of the wilful child. The new painting was certainly not the original, but the understanding, the sensibility was there. It remains my very earliest acquired painting – Colin let me have it for – think I remember the exact figure – thirty-five pounds, which I thought extortionist since it was not the very painting I had responded to so instantly and completely. However, since I only paid him ten pounds down, and he is yet to collect the rest after these twenty-five years, I consider myself having come off best in the exchange. 

WANDERER CHILD

The attachment to this image by the hand of an alien artist was not just aesthetic preciousness. Anyone who has had to live away from home recognizes that yearning, that constant heaviness in the core similar to heartbreak, that follows one around like a black dog, so that one begins to see apparitions of home in the most unlikely places. What moved Odysseus to weep on Calypso’s Island, why was Dante’s heart aggrieved as he found himself marauding up and down alien stairwells, tasting the salt of foreign bread? 

In Soyinka’s own words, from that same lecture: 

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.  

This was Soyinka’s first real stint of exile, after all. He had passed into maturity away from home, in a cold country, away from parental oversight and from the pastoral and animistic comforts of the society he grew up in. Have many writers written more evocatively about the world of their childhood? A case could be made for reading Soyinka’s body of work as an extended retrieval mission for the idyll of childhood, perhaps in vain, from the position of a poet perpetually in exile, who returned home to find it despoiled, irretrievably.  

From this superficially biographical standpoint maybe we can begin to set up allegories. Perhaps Àbíkú is the writer’s persona, or perhaps it is his country. With the understanding that the poem can be read as a pining for motherland the earth imagery becomes rather fecund (‘to earth Àbíkú’s limbs,’ ‘the ground is wet with mourning’). 

Widening the lens a bit more, we can place the poem within a milieu which came to maturity at the tail end of high modernism. This (primarily European) artistic and intellectual movement can be roughly characterized as being concerned with questions of reinventing tradition in the face of cultural disintegration brought about by the Industrial Age and the First World War. Modernism was characterized for better or worse by allusiveness, hermeticism, a turning inward, and concomitantly, the disintegration of the myth of the coherent self. It is not difficult to see why there would have been young African writers, Afro-modernists if you like, in Soyinka’s milieu, who were influenced by this movement, finding themselves in cultural and socio-economic watersheds as they did. Maybe this accounts for the style of the poem somewhat, for its abstrusity. 

Interestingly, Soyinka also shares his preoccupation with the specific subject matter of ‘Àbíkú’ with other writers of his milieu, perhaps most notably J.P. Clark. Clark’s own poem on the subject incidentally bearing the same title, was published in the very same issue of Black Orpheus as Soyinka’s ‘Àbíkú’. It is hard not to draw comparisons. Clark’s rendition is similarly obscure, if slightly less dense, and slightly more stilted. It is also somewhat easier to make sense of, as it includes an explanatory footnote: ‘Àbíkú: a spirit child, one fated to a cycle of early death and rebirth to the same mother.’ 

I have been somewhat elliptical myself; I must confess now. Soyinka’s own poem is sometimes published with a similar note, but it all serves to strengthen my point; some explanation is always needed. He says: ‘Wanderer child. It is the same child who dies and returns again and again to plague the mother.’ 

With this little explanatory note, we begin to glimpse the mythological background of this subject matter; the note itself is a prompt, somewhat gnomic—it stokes the curiosity somewhat, one is impelled to carry out some research. Furthermore, why has this concept preoccupied both these writers so similarly? 

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ÀBÍKÚ IN CULTURAL CONTEXT

Incidentally, not only Soyinka and Clark have explored this phenomenon. The African literature scholar, Douglas McCabe, observes in his 2002 article, ‘Histories of Errancy: Oral Yoruba Àbíkú Texts and Soyinka’s “Àbíkú”’, that over 30 works of Nigerian literature have taken up this theme of Àbíkú, which is in fact a Yoruba concept (or the analogous Igbo concept of Ogbanje). This estimation, 20 years old, does not even account for contemporary authors like Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ or Akwaeke Emezie. It has been done, really, to death. How does one scrutinize this culturally specific preoccupation? It is clear that close readings alone, entertaining as it may be to speculate on the inherent ambiguities and aesthetic qualities of the poem alone, and even biographical information, are not enough. Questions abound even beyond the meaning of the poem qua literary exercise, points of enquiry pertaining to its relevance of sociological and anthropological background. 

Simply put, and finally for the benefit of the non-Nigerian reader, Àbíkú is exactly as Clark defines it: more or less a spirit child who preys upon women of childbearing age. The method is as follows: a pregnant woman who is unfortunate or foolish enough to walk by the shadowy corners of town or bush in which Àbíkú spirits lurk leaves herself vulnerable to their parasitism. Seizing its chance upon an unsuspecting mother-to-be, the Àbíkú leaps into the woman’s womb and dislodges the original fetus (it is not totally unlike the European changeling in this impostorship). The mother is unwitting until at some point in its childhood, the spirit suddenly takes ill and dies, plunging the family into despair. Before long, another child is conceived and born; this child ends up dying too, for in fact it is the very same Àbíkú who has returned. Thus ‘Àbíkú’ is translatable roughly as ‘born-to-die.’ There is almost nothing that can be done to stop this cycle; the Àbíkú trumps the Babaláwo, the master of the arcane arts, and scorns attempts to cajole it to stop its morbid cycle, from lavish gifts and pampering to being given entreating names. There is in fact an entire catalogue of Yoruba names for Àbíkú children ranging from the obsequious to the endearing or the exasperated, which are in themselves linguistically and anthropologically fascinating, as can be seen, for example, in Timothy Mobalade’s concise treatment in Volume 7 of African Arts, ‘The Concept of Àbíkú’. For instance, in my preferred translation: Rotimi, which is to say, ‘stay with me’, or Kilanko, ‘what is the point of naming?’ 

 Perhaps the only way to deter this enfant terrible is to mark or maim it: although this marking does not always work, blemishes are understood to ostracize the Àbíkú from its spirit community. A marked Àbíkú is said to be reborn with the marks intact; the scars are permanent. This also serves as indicting identification. (Let me confess now my personal preoccupation with this subject. My own mother, an Igbo by blood, was born on the day of her four-year-old sister’s death from privation during the Biafra War. She bears a small mark on her temple; pre-emptive ritual scarification engraved by a relative to dispel the peevish ogbanje impulse. Her siblings bear the same marks and so do many people I encounter in Igboland; a living record of tragedy that one can’t help but notice when one knows about it.) 

Indeed, the Àbíkú’s spirit community is quite important to its teleology, for besides the schadenfreude it derives from this sadistic reincarnation, the sorrow of the parents translates into spiritual wealth and clout. This is in addition to the wealth it amasses from being pampered and entreated in life, as well as from ritual sacrifices and libations made after death for supplicatory purposes. 

The information I have just relayed, intangible cultural knowledge which is mostly recounted orally, and which is general knowledge to Yoruba people, of which ethnic group I am a member through my father, is catalogued in Mobalade’s article. Although he provides no direct sources (indeed, who does one cite as the central authority on a generally held belief in a culture without a strict sense of authorship?); his position as a native Yoruba is intriguingly persuasive. 

Really, who does one cite as the authority on a myth? McCabe employs a more ‘scholarly’ method, at least by Western academic standards, and employs the expertise of a non-Western scholar; a Babaláwo: 

According to Babalola Ifatoogun, a senior Ifá diviner from the Oyo-Yoruba town of Ilobu, àbíkú are ‘thieves from heaven’ […] Àbíkú are an egbe ará orun, a ‘club’ (egbe) of ‘heaven-people’ (ara orun) whose founding purpose is to siphon off riches from ile araye, the ‘houses’ (ile) of the ‘world-people’ (ara-aye). 

This is more or less what I have defined and is essentially what Mobalade elaborates. McCabe observes, ‘Ifatoogun’s account of àbíkú matches, not only in its substance but in much of its detail, the accounts given by other Ifá babaláwo.’ McCabe’s linguistic deconstruction is the major defining factor in his report, but I will return to that later. For now, it serves to further emphasize the prevalence of this belief (or the awareness of it) in the society from which it comes. 

A 2004 survey carried by the demographer Peter Olasupo Ogunjuyigbe, ‘Under-Five Mortality in Nigeria: Perception and Attitudes of the Yorubas Towards the Existence of “Abiku”’, (which incidentally cites Soyinka, among other works of literature, for a definition of the phenomenon), found that 57 per cent of mothers in a sample population from the Ondo-Ekiti region of Nigeria confessed a belief in the existence of Àbíkú. A further 12.9 per cent expressed ambivalence. The limitations of this kind of study are evident; the data was collected between 1999 and 2000, and only speculates on what the effects of urbanization and education have had on perceptions (the factors will have increased exponentially in the last 20 years). The sample size is ample though, with 1,695 participants, which does suggest that whether people believe it or not, this phenomenon is central to the society’s habitus. This is even despite the numerous literary works dealing with the subject, as well as people who believe themselves to be Àbíkú. Take for example the case of the self-mythologizing Osogbo multi-media artist, Twins Seven-Seven, the only surviving child after seven sets of twins were born to his mother. 

It is clear to see that such an ingrained aspect of culture has far-reaching consequences in people’s self-perception and the perception of others, even beyond the realm of poetry. Mobolade goes on in his article to suggest that the myth of Àbíkú will have unceasing relevance to Yoruba society even with waning belief due to modern science explaining away biological or environmental factors that cause infant mortality (such as the sickle cell gene or germ theory). This has been explored, for example, in a 1983 article, “Sickle-Cell Anaemia: An Explanation for the Ancient Myth of Reincarnation in Nigeria”, by the physician James Onwubalili (whose surname means, rather topically, death brings suffering). 

But to return to poetry. How does our newfound understanding of the Àbíkú myth frame our reading? It is possible now to place the voice of Àbíkú, a genderless, numinous voice, speaking from the chthonic realm, in its arrogance and sardonicism, as well as a tinge of nostalgia. We get a sense of an address, most likely to the mother-prey; we understand the ‘once and the repeated time,’ the ‘ground wet with mourning.’ We can imagine the unfortunate parents pouring ‘libations,’ offering ‘palm oil and the sprinkled ash,’ sacrificing ‘goats and cowries’ in supplication. And this, of course, all in vain: ‘in vain your bangles cast…’ Thus, we glean a psychology, so densely woven by Soyinka, of a creature which is at once ancient and infantile (‘ageless though I puke’). We can understand the need for, the appeal of obscurantism.  

We can go further. Soyinka, of course, was not writing in a vacuum; I have alluded to his milieu. But it is possible to trace the origins of this composition from a historical perspective, as McCabe does exhaustively, in his linguistic analysis of the Àbíkú which I mentioned earlier. Taking the information from his Babaláwo sources, McCabe Centres on the terms ‘ilé,’ natural home or homestead, and ‘egbe,’ elective association that is not tied to genealogy. He poses the Àbíkú as an ‘errant’ liminal figure which moves between ilé and egbe, vagabondage which is much maligned in canonical Yoruba literature (that is, in the Ifa literary corpus), which places natural ties over elective ones. However, as he explains: 

Unlike Ifá’s official descriptions of àbíkú as ‘thieves from heaven,’ oral àbíkú literature among the Yoruba is not merely propaganda for the ilé, 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 ilé that governed nineteenth-century Yoruba society. 

The subversive oral Àbíkú literature he speaks of is a genre of oríkì, a uniquely gnomic, open-ended oral-poetic phenomenon in Yoruba culture which defies definition. Karin Barber (the renowned British anthropologist and scholar of Yoruba society) underscores its obscurity in her 1984 essay, ‘Yoruba “Oriki” and Deconstructive Criticism’: 

Since oríkì are characteristically cryptic and obscure, the hearer, to understand them, needs to know the separate background story of each one. But hearers also need to know how the words refer to this background—directly, ironically, as history, or as parable. 

McCabe argues in fact that Soyinka’s poem is written in the oríkì tradition, which is traditionally obscure, and which similarly calls for background information to be understood, as I have tried to outline so far. He says of the poem: ‘Formally, it models itself on an àbíkú oríkì, quoting Ifá narrative conventions and coining new àbíkú names; thematically, it explores the politics of errancy, engaging in matters of wandering and delinquency.’ (This additional background is enlightening as well. For example, the lines ‘I’ll be the/ suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep/ Yours the killing cry,’ may refer back to an Ifa story about a snake which was killed on the wedding day of a reformed Àbíkú; Soyinka, however, leaves the allusion ambiguous by identifying the Àbíkú with the snake. 

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THE POET AND HIS WORLD

Soyinka is a post-colonial modernist, composing consciously and syncretically within both Yoruba and Occidental (as well as other) poetic traditions. As the ever-astute Biodun Jeyifo (critic and erstwhile student of Soyinka) explains in his 2003 monograph, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism: 

though, he has not particularly cared to refute the charge of divorce from oral, communal roots and from his poetry, a spirited disavowal of the charge of divorce from oral, communal roots and from a public vocation is a theme that recurs in nearly all of the three of four essays of Soyinka dealing exclusively or substantially with poetry and the search for a vital poetics in modern African writing. 

Anthropologically informed reading provides a kind of key to the cipher, with which we may begin to decode and intuit the significance of the arrangement of words, and which sets us on a path of discovery which broadens our cultural knowledge as well as our understanding of poetry, each feeding back on the other. I have tried to dramatize this process of hermeneutic discovery. Ultimately, it is as Barber says, ‘By attending to what people say themselves, through the concentrated and oblique refractions of oríkì—and through what they say about oríkì—we learn how people constitute their society. There are similar sentiments in J.P. Clark’s provocatively titled, ‘Another Kind of Poetry’, if they are not too fulsome: 

In fact, the whole system of values, the entire social structure with its mores, its beliefs and practises stands revealed with skill in these songs, perhaps fuller and more convincing than any anthropologist can supply in several volumes of treatises. 

For a difficult poem like ‘Àbíkú’ we need to do ‘homework’ to understand it. We need to do this kind of homework if we are to hope to understand any so-called ‘difficult’ literature, to wantonly condense George Steiner’s ‘On Difficulty’ (1978). In Steiner’s words, far more often than not we signify by ‘a difficulty’ something that ‘we need to look up’. We may discern, from sight unseen explication de texte, qualities of melopoeia, the aural harmony, or phanopoeia, the sequence of images, certainly, but the heart of the poem, its meaning, is barred to us unless we are willing to do the work to ascertain logopoeia, the actual sense of things. Soyinka, even being a lifelong critic of the impulse to paint African literature with a broad anthropological brush, demonstrates how much can be achieved when a dense poem is approached with humility. 

But we should listen when Steiner warns us that, even then, even with looking up, meaning is never guaranteed. The ‘contingent’ difficulty that can be resolved partially by looking up things is only one kind of difficulty in Steiner’s theory, besides the modal (questions of taste and convention), the tactical (the poet’s wilful derangement of language), and the ontological (fundamental questions of what a poem is really, and what a poem does or should or can). You see the range. And one begins to get a sense that these difficulties touch the very heart of poetic endeavour.  

The poet has a right to obscurity; there is no particular imperative to provide footnotes or make one’s meaning known. We should not need to rehash Édouard Glissant’s (the Martinican poet-philosopher) useful valorisation of opacity to see this, or of the virtues of errantry. Neither do we need to dredge up the numerous proverbs, African and otherwise, that underline that anything worth knowing is worth the striving to understand, and that enlightenment does not come easily. This is much in the spirit of the arcane practice of oríkì. With this background, we are able to speculate upon a subversive work that explores what it means to write modern African poetry, as well as the Àbíkú-like vagabondage of writing from a position of exile, both physically and linguistically; and what it means to apply myth or poetry to our own lives⎈

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