Oya: In Praise of the Goddess by Judidth Gleason

Review by: Oyekan Owomoyela

Research in African Literatures, Vol. 20, No. 2, Special Issue on Popular Culture (Summer,
1989), pp. 270-272
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618234 .
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270

Book Reviews
Caamaba, Caanabanous avons
"
Jom Maayo
"
JaltaaBe
LamTooro
"

Tyamaba, Tyanaba (titre)

Diom Mayo (3)
dialtabe (11)
Lamtoro(18)

Enfin, il est souhaitable d'uniformiser le vocabulaireethnonymique en donnant

la primaut6 aux termes autochtones: Pullo, FulBe, ToroBBE, Pular, et en limitant
I'usage des "synonymes": Peul, Fula, etc. L'alternanceentre des mots tels que fulanisants, Peul, etc., non seulement masque la complexit6 de l'aire ethno-culturelle
etudiee, mais elle crde aussi une certaine confusion pour le lecteur lointain, qu'il
soit des Caraibes, du Canada, du Japon, ou d'ailleurs.
Dans l'ensemble cependant, un travailserieux qui actualisepour l'anthropologue
comme pour le lecteur curieux la polysimie du mythe Tyamaba, et partant, la recherche sur l'enchassement reciproque et l'imbrication complexe entre histoire et
mythologie dans la culture Pular.
Tierno S. Bah

Judith Gleason. Oya: In Praise of the Goddess. Boston: Shambala Publications,

1987. viii + 305 pages.
Some ethnographic studies reflect the authors' transcendentalor sublime relationship to the objects of their investigation, with its concomitantopenly contemptuous,
or indulgently tolerant attitude. Judith Gleason's is one of the exceptions. Her study,
consistent with her earlier works, is a sincere quest for wisdom and truth, and she
presents her findings with the zeal of an apostle who has been touched and claimed
by Qya and who wishes to spread the gospel, especially among women.
The author insistently represents the goddess as the ultimate feminist, most interesting in the human context for "her refusalto stay out of the enclavesof cult and
culture preempted by male authority" (9). She makes no secret that her most important project is to "wrest woman's fire back from Promethean culture-bearers"
(30) in spite of CarlJung and Gaston Bachelard, to put women and men in their
respective proper places in the order of things, an order slightly different from the
stereotypical.
Qya lends herself well to Gleason's purposes. According to a story she cites (5960), once beset with formidableenemies, Sango, Qya's husband, sent her to a nearby
power (in this version the king of Bariba, but in others Esu) for the medicine for
thunderbolts. Oya was to transport the medicine under her tongue back to Sango
(see "Shango and the Medicine of Eshu" [79-82], in Harold Courlander, Tales of
Yoruba Gods and Heroes: Myths, Legends, and Heroic Tales of the YorubaPeople
of West Africa [New York: Crown Publishers, 1973]). Divergences in the available
versionsof the storynotwithstanding, in sum Oya appropriatedsome of the medicine
before delivering it to Sango, thus claiming for herself the prior right to thunderbolts. The Promethean agent is female, not male.
An appeal to mythology counts for little with the scientificallyminded, who would

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271

BOOKREVIEWS

in all likelihood permit women the satisfaction of claiming precedent on such authority in this regard because men surely know better. But Gleason turns to meteorology for arguments that even science sanctions. Oya is the goddess of tornadoes
(Iji), and a scientific analysis of cyclonic activity, the intertropicalfront, and their
associated thunder and lightning reveals that lightning, Oya's metier, outstrips
thunder in preeminence, whateverour illusion might be; "to Oya belongs the light
[and the wind] and to Shango the sound of nature's most theatrical production"
(61). To Oya the power, to Sango the bluster.
Her discussion of egi~ngin (67-151) recounts how the mysteries originated with
women only to be appropriatedby men (71). "It would seem," she writes(110), "as
though . . . men had borrowed more and given less." It is an appropriation, or
misappropriation, to which women have become reconciled and which they have
quietly endured, understanding as they do the psychical insecurity that motivated
the theft (but withal the retention of the feminine symbolism and aspects of the
egi?ngin shroud, ag&)and the implied acknowledgmentof the indispensable power
of the female principle in nurturing life and enabling human achievements. Moreover, despite their theft of the masqueradeand their almost total exclusionof women
from its secrets, men still acknowledge that when matters seem most intractable,
women make more powerful carriersof the mask than do men (106).
One of the great paradoxesof the study of African religions and traditions has
been the domination of the field by Christians,very often Christianclerics, the likes
of Placide Tempels, Alexis Kagame, Geoffrey Parrinder,and Bolaji Idowu. Even at
their most sympathetic, they have been in no doubt as to the truth of their calling,
which requiredthem to believe and proclaimthe errorsof those who have other gods
besides that of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Judith Gleason is not handicapped by
such uncertainty of allegiance. One of the appeals of her enterprise is her wholehearted immersion in the subject, her embraceof the goddess in her many manifestations and the culture(s) she rules over as the great Mother. One consequence of
that embracesurfacesin her occasionalobservationson the distance that people have
interposed between themselves and nature and the ominous repercussionsof the
estrangement. For example, she sees, in the recent droughts in the sahel and in one
old sage's dream about the return of water, a prescriptionfrom Earth for all of us:
"a getting in touch with where we live" (29-30). Whereas whereverone turns today
in Africa everyone seems in a mad rush to embrace their god, their fathers' god,
here comes a strangerfrom acrossthe seas who expressesthe hope that African traditional religions will surviveforeign imports (56) and who laments the cessation of
sacrificesto the Niger because of the stricturesof Islam (58).
In contrast, moreover, with the familiar pronouncements of Africa's new generation of development-minded intellectuals that the old intuitive way, in all its ramifications and with all its implications, must yield to new technological habit (with
all those entail), here is someone who has observed the technologicaloption at close
quarters and who expresses misgivings about it. The transformationshunting has
undergone presents her with an occasion for decryingwhat civilization (or modernization, to use a less offending word) has engendered. In place of poison-tipped
arrowsand snares, we now often have "increasingly lethal weapons brought in by
obtrusive European big-game hunters and the African poachers . . . who decimate

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272

Book Reviews

herds for the sake of ivory" (162). Such people ruin the hunt, give the animal not a
chance, and make a mockeryof "the crucialsubtext of the venatic activity." A powerfully eloquent passage paints a picture of the future that is alreadyvery much the
reality in much of Africa, "specters of lumber-jacketedtypes lugging 'pieces' and
six-packsinto what remainsof our wildernessafter the conglomeratesand developers
have turned off the ignitions of their bulldozers."
And, she might have added, after the clandestine toxic waste contractorshave
buried their lethal poison where it will have the most effect:
Fifty barrelsof toxic waste accruefor every automobile manufactured.Yet the
person who buys a car doesn't consider these part of his bargain. Neither, of
course, does the manufacturer.Throw them out anywhere, those fifty barrels,
and get on with the next chassis,for in a couple of yearsthe customerwill want
a trade-in.
(276)
Her respectfor "worldviewssupportiveratherthan destructiveon this planet" (167)
is wholesome, and she is her own best example of how the ethnologist's "participatory observation" sometimes (by no means always)results in an appreciationof "the
intuitive, magical (in no pejorativesense) embeddedness of human beings in a living, breathing world" (167). If Oya and feminism offer a correctiveto our malaise,
well may they thrive!
Africa's new rationalist philosophers find in the African sages' occasional reply
to questions about the rationale of their traditional practices, "that is the way our
fathers did it," evidence of a lack of will to think. Gleason suggests a likelier story:
it is a subterfuge for "protecting the secret until it is ready to hatch into a personal
truth" (273). (A mother's petulant "Because!" to a child's incessant and tiresome
"Why?" is not necessarilya sign of mental deficiency.) That insight cannot suggest
itself to even a "son of the soil" whose point of departureis the ordainedinsufficiency
of non-European concepts, whom wild buffaloes could not drag into the mysteries
whereby personal insertion would reveal the truth.
The book is richly textured and erudite. By turns it treats the reader to informed
scientific dissertationson naturalphenomena, scholarlydeconstructionsof traditional
tales and legends, and privileged glimpses into closed mysteries, either through
personal experience (her initiation into the eging~un cult as an Ato, for example)
or through her access to well-placed and well-informed sources. Some might object
that there is too much of the author in the text for a dispassionatetreatise on Oya,
or that her portrayalof culturessuggests a seamlessness(Oya is Nyal6, is Artemis, and
so forth), but then she might respond that her projectis partly a personaltestimony,
a witnessing, and partly a celebration of those things that unite rather than divide
humankind.
I wish she had included the Yoruba texts of her Ifa verses(for reasonsthat call for
an anecdote, but which space does not allow), and that her etymologies and translations of Yoruba words and texts were more precise. But the errorsare not critical,
and only Yoruba speakerswill notice them.

OyekanOwomoyela

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