1 Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle Transcultural and Scientific Implications Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju CompcrosComparative Cognitive Processes and Systems "Exploring Every Corner of the Universe in Search of Knowledge" Abiola Irele
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Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics : Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications
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7/23/2019 Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics : Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications
A general assessment of Irele's career, followed by an exploration of the significance of
Negritudist concepts of rhythm in metaphysics as expounded by Abiola Irele,in relationto Irele's ideas on linear and non-linear science and metaphysics from within classical
Yoruba/Orisa cosmology with brief summative comments by two readers on Irele's
work.
Multidisciplinary Dynamics Realized through the Architectonics of the Essay
Abiola Irele is a philosopher, critic and theorist of literature, music and culture, an
educator whose writing is remarkable for its elegance, profundity and range, and whose
career is striking for the scope of his participation in the development of modernAfrican intellectual culture, from its formative years in the 1960s to the present, on
different continents.
The elegance of his writing emerges in his unique demonstration of the architectonics of
the essay.
In his best work, the sentence, as a building block of the essay, achieves a
communication of ideas that is both luminously logical and beautiful.
This effect is realised in terms of diction and the balance of ideas, the words in terms of
which ideas are expressed and the relationship between these worlds within therhythm of syntactic structure.
The entire essay itself becomes a cathedral of ideas, composed of numerous, intricately
interlinked concepts, yet suggesting depths of possibility of which the superstructure
realized by the expressed ideations are but the exposure to light of a complex
foundation which may yield to careful study.
Disciplinary, Temporal, Institutional and Geographical Scope
The range of his work is evident in its scope across philosophy, literary criticism, music
criticism and cultural criticism, as well as theoretical expositions in relation to these
fields.
His career embraces the formative years of modern African intellectual culture, and its
development to the present, its representative central institutional organs, represented
by editorships in the pioneering journal Black Orpheus in the 1960s, to editorship in
later years at Research in African Literatures and membership of the editorial board
of Transition, all these publications being central points in the development of modern
African thought, these being those journal editorial commitments I know about, as well
as an academic career spanning Nigeria, Ghana and the United States, contributing to
shaping the various strategic situations in the fortunes of Africanist scholarship as it
achieved a distinctive identity in its international representation, from Nigeria, to Ghanaand the United States.
7/23/2019 Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics : Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications
"Rhythm is the architecture of being, the internal dynamics which gives it form, the
system of waves which it sends out towards Others.
It expresses itself through the most material, the most sensuous means: lines, surfaces,colours, volumes in architecture, sculpture and painting; accents in poetry and music,
movements in dance.
But in doing so, it guides all this concrete reality towards the light of the spirit.
For the Negro-African, it is in the same measure that rhythm is embodied in the sense
that it illuminates the spirit".
Irele comments on these lines:
"Moreover artistic expression and religious feeling are inseparably linked, in so far as
art is conceived primarily as an epiphany of the sacred, of the cosmic energy with which
the visible world is permeated.
Art is the imaginative restitution of the fundamental network of relationships which
exist between the various manifestations of this cosmic energy.
This is the foundation of the African's mystical participation in the universe".
Sublime.
An ideal, however, rather than a statement of empirical fact of how Africans generally
have lived at any time.
A vision of an ideal that is evident, not only in accounts of African cultures but in
philosophies from Asia to Europe, but expressed in a manner distinctive to various
writers.
This summation does not mention science, the other great pole of investigation that
parallels the arts, but Irele supplies the reference to science in another essay, "The
African Scholar", written decades later, and which does not address Negritude but
locates similar ideas in modes of thought evident in classical African and non-African
cultures as these are correlative with modern scientific thought.
Linear and Non-Linear Thought as Embodied by Esu
Let us look at brief extracts from Irele's summations in "The African Scholar" :
"... the analogy between the new scientific spirit as described by [Gaston ] Bachelard –
7/23/2019 Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics : Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications
Is there any basis for Irele's confidence in the figure of Esu in Yoruba cosmology as a
unifier of these ideas in mythic thought beyond Western and perhaps Asian mythology,
these being the geographical boundaries of the kinds of societies I expect he is referring
to?
There is.
This basis emerges in the association of Esu with ase, the cosmic force that enables
existence and development in Yoruba cosmology.
This unique embodiment of ase is demonstrated in Esu being described as acting as a
mediator between all forms of being, humans, non-human spirits and the creator of the
cosmos.
This act of mediation is demonstrated in terms of the balance between various forms of
being, a balance demonstrated through sustaining the stability of existing norms as well
as upsetting that stability, at times in ways that lead to establishing another orientation
towards the order of things.
This summation is an interpretation of Esu's variety of dramatizations in ese ifa, Ifa
literature.
His association with cosmic force establishes the ideas of an order that unifies all of
existence, particularly since ase, cosmic force in Yoruba cosmology, is understood as
demonstrated in all forms of being, enabling their creative capacity.
Esu's description as a mediator between forms of being demonstrates the idea of
interrelationship within an ecology, metaphorically speaking, that foregrounds thequestion of the range of sentience, of modes of being and their interrelationships.
Esu therefore embodies the systemic orientation in terms of relationships between
conventional order and disruption of this order, as described by Irele.
Irele goes further to exemplify his understanding of Esu and of the potential of Esu for
projecting ideas relevant to a scientific cosmology centred in dynamic systems and the
balance of chaos and order through an enigmatic oriki, Yoruba praise poem, in honour
of Esu.
I present the entire poem from Jack Mapanje and Landeg White's Oral Poetry in Africa:
"Eshu turns right into wrong, wrong into right.
When he is angry, he hits a stone until it bleeds.
When he is angry,he sits on the skin of an ant.
When he is angry, he weeps tears of blood.
Eshu slept in the house-
But the house was too small for him;
Eshu slept on the verandah-
7/23/2019 Abiola Irele and Negritude Aesthetics : Rhythm as a Metaphysical Principle: Transcultural and Scientific Implications