The Òrìṣà: Foreword
Stories have always been important to me.
For as long as I can remember, there was always a book nearby waiting to be discovered. I grew up on the regular ones, books by Enid Blyton, Edward L. Stratemeyer and co. Books of mystery, adventure, myth, young people doing daring things–-I really liked The Famous Five. Something fundamentally changed, though, when I picked up a book that had been left in our house, maybe a gift, I never figured it out. What struck me was the cover: it was a girl, brown skin, with long dark hair and vines criss-crossing around them. I looked at the title and I was even more shocked! The author had a name that I could recognise as one of our own. I read through that book so quickly and it completely shattered everything I had ever thought about stories, and a whole new truth dawned on me–we could write stories as well, about mystery, adventure, myth, and young people doing daring things. Every year I would re-read the book and it would feel like it was the first time, I just couldn’t believe it at the time, that our worlds, the fantastic, magical ones, were also allowed to be written about. That, maybe is the interesting thing about doing novel things as an African, till you do that thing, we don’t know what’s possible, and when you do, you are validating a whole people, freeing them from chains they didn’t even know were there. The author is Nnedi Okorafor (@nnedi) and her book is Zahrah the Windseeker, the first book I ever saw myself in.
I would say I started writing at 13 and it was inspired largely by me interacting with the first writer I ever met in person, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, a literary giant in our eyes who just radiated a good nature that made us all feel comfortable during the time he taught us English, and again it was the same validation. Yes, I knew writers existed, but in my mind, they were like moose–I never expected to see one right in front of me. Seeing one then gave me a confidence that maybe I could also be a writer myself. It was around this time that I had found the work of Rick Riordan, another giant who took classic myths we knew and turned them into something personal, something special. I read every single thing he wrote that I could find and read them over again, just to make sure. And then, there was Neil Gaiman, who flipped everything I knew about myth and story and making them yours, he pushed the envelope further and warped reality itself somehow in the words that he wrote, evoking the old gods and making them manifest right on the page. I read hundreds more stories and books and articles and in all of those, one thing I always felt that was fundamentally missing was us. Where was Ṣàngó, where was Amadioha? Where were all the gods and spirits that our people held close? Where were their statues? Where were their stories?
And so, I decided to start penning down my first story, which would become my first book, The Fall of the Gods, chapters of which would be published on Brittle Paper, 4 years later, a feat that 17 year old me couldn’t quite believe. Many thanks always to Ainehi Edoro for making it happen and helping me craft the beginnings of that story. I’ve always had this obsession with our gods and our myths, but there was always this disconnect. All the sources I found to read about them were always disjointed and incomplete, like a book with pages missing in it. This makes sense–a lot of our history was transmitted orally from generation to generation, which sounds very poetic but makes working with the source material a bit trickier. Our gods, our stories, always felt far away to me, like they were just out of my reach and I think that’s why my first fantasy story was about a cataclysmic event that brought them down to earth–I think that was my way of trying to make them relatable, understandable. By literally bringing them down to earth, I felt like then I could interrogate them, and properly understand more about these figures I felt drawn to.
It would take 3 years to write the book and by that time, when I read the final product, I was not impressed. I was not very disciplined at the time and so the story fell flat, giving the energy of a piece of work that was written by 3 different people at 3 completely different points in time. My next efforts were far more focused, working tirelessly on my next book, and the next one, and the next one, tightening my craft and understanding of the stories–hard work, but I felt fulfilled. I’ve written six books, all dripping in magic, myth and who we are spiritually. It is work that over the past 10 years I am very proud of.
One thing I also recognised was that our visual libraries were lacking when it came to information about these figures. I’ll demonstrate it to you now: Picture Thor, the Norse god of thunder, in your head right now, and your mind instantly goes to the Marvel incarnation or maybe the other dozen you’ve been in contact with all your life. Now, do that for Ṣàngó, the Yorùbá god of thunder, picture him in your mind…no doubt, this image is a bit blurry, almost grey. Details are hard to pick out. With Thor, you could almost feel that red on his cape, but with Ṣàngó, it’s hard to even pick out the details in his face.
And maybe that’s why as I learned to paint, I needed to start depicting the gods in my own way. Now, doing this, like writing, is also a very sensitive matter, because you want to do the best you can to be true to all your sources, and, at the same time, present the subject in a way that is new, and fresh and relatable–a way that people can feel, can understand. That, I think, is the great challenge of work like this, the balancing act of tradition and style.
My first attempts were full of heart, but they didn’t quite touch the source the way I wanted. The stories were in my head but my skill set was severely lacking.
My next attempts were far more successful. But still lacking in something that I couldn’t name. Still, now the details were coming clearer into my mind. It was almost like I was living with these gods and could hear the voices, feel their personalities. My Ṣàngó was a tortured hero, a burden of greatness placed on his back, while Èṣù was a wily trickster who had only his interest at heart–chaos. The stories kept overlapping each other over the years, providing me this strong backdrop for what would be my latest attempt to depict them.
I would now like to note that this is in no way the “accurate” depiction of what these gods looked like–I am not a historian, I am a storyteller and I’ve shifted a lot of things to make the narrative more compelling and I hope I have also been respectful in doing so. And this is what I believe: that our stories need to be bravely told, and retold and adapted and stretched to places we didn’t even know were possible. It’s how I believe stories can last. Call this the Theory of Story Evolution: it’s not the oldest of stories that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change. And I feel like ours have a lot of catching up to do.
I have been writing and painting and now, sculpting these myths for most of my conscious life and when you see these pieces, that’s what I’d like you to acknowledge, before anything else, that this is years of love made manifest. Love for the gods, the spirits, the myths, our culture. Love for the stories that bore them. Love for us that told them.
The Òrìṣà are coming this weekend, in a new and old way, and I hope you like them. I know I do.
Your friendly neighborhood writer/artist,
Anthony Azekwoh
