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fischamoth · 9 months

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Review of IFE IYOKU,THE TALE OF IMADEYUNUAGBON by Kwasi Shade.

"Obatala's patient suffering is the well known aesthetics of the saint." Wole Soyinka, Fourth Stage.

The return of Obatala is not what you'd expect and in "IFE-IYOKU, THE TALE OF IMADEYUNUAGBON" by Ekpeke Oghenechovwe Donald, the virtue of the king of the sky is creatively wielded to interrogate, at first glance, the value of community. Global or otherwise. Yet at the center of this story is a delicate want to reconcile western and African conceptual schemes. To determine, perhaps, what is Truth.

We are first presented with a community that thrives on coalescence; persons are conjoined by a sense of duty. This is underscored by the Weaver, the mother of the community, who recounts the tale of a great war among the world's greatest nations which devastates an innocent Afrika. The surviving Afrikans who gather in Ilé-Ifé, Afrika, go to Obatala, who, in turn, goes to his father, the Almighty God, to ask for help. God gives his son his DNA. Obatala returns to Ilé-Ifé with God's DNA which he blesses with his DNA. The Afrikans consume the Godly DNA and also use it to purge Ilé-Ifé of the effects of the war. It strengthens them and fortifies them in a hidden community.

Seeing the rest of the world in suffering, the merciful sculptor of men, Obatala, shares what remainder of the Godly DNA there is with the rest of the world.

*ONE GOD, MANY PEOPLE. ALL MEN EQUAL UNDER GOD. ACTS 17:25 "... And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth…"

The storyteller ends her history lesson with a promise made to the faithful and innocent; Obatala will return when they are most in need. And so introduces the primary argument, (Immanence versus transcendence) which comes too with a revelation; the community is Obatala. Obatala is their duty to survive.

The patriarchal figure, the father of the community, with little to no faith, misunderstanding his duty as self preservation, exploiting the sense of duty felt by the community, betrays Obatala. He exerts control thinking himself more equal than others and engenders this sensibility in the community.

The Palm wine reference signaling Ooni as Obatala's mistake is especially cute or poignant.

When Imadeyunuagbon faces him in the Forest of Fears and becomes Obatala, she knows herself and in knowing herself, is strong enough to invite the community into her person.

A compelling and nuanced narrative, the modern Orisa, Imade, champions the author's interrogation well. She asks: What is duty? What is one's duty to the community or Obatala/(God)? What is one's duty to self?

Our duty is Truth. Our duty to community is our duty to self: to be who we are meant to be.

Oba tala iwo Baba!

#caribbean #laughwme #trinidad #godscissorer #black-artists #writing #review

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mumblingsage · 3 years

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Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki has won the 2020 Otherwise Award for “Ife-Iyoku, the Tale of Imadeyunuagbon” (in Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Zelda Knight and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Aurelia Leo, 2020). This novella was a unanimous favorite of the jury.

In the winning story and the Honor List, several overlapping themes stood out. Like “Ife-Iyoku,” many of the Honor List stories treat gender in the context of intersectionality—we see how racialized, national, and ethnic identity, as well as disability, affect gendered experience. Several stories grapple with the fact that trans men, trans women, nonbinary people, and other embodied entities walk different paths than cisgender people, and that affects how they experience the world as gendered beings.

We also saw a number of stories that deal with queer elders, including City of a Thousand Feelings, The Seep, and The Four Profound Weaves. Though science fiction and fantasy have a long tradition of celebrating wise elders, whether they are high-level wizards or ancient AIs, it is rare to see them explored in a queer context. These stories demand we acknowledge that one doesn’t stop growing, healing, hurting, or being lost and in need of re-forging community and place with age. They also describe ways that queer elders provide models to the young, how they may fall short, and how younger generations engage with them, while also celebrating the different ways each generation expresses themselves.

Given the events of the past several years, perhaps it is no surprise that exile was a theme that came up in these stories over and over: in “Ife-Iyoku,” “The Moon Room,” Depart, Depart!, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, City of a Thousand Feelings, and Four Profound Weaves, we meet characters who have been cast out of their homelands and are searching for a way back. As they struggle with their sense of dislocation, our heroes and antiheroes must find a way to construct new kinds of home, with their chosen communities. Often, this sense of exile is compounded by environmental destruction associated with climate change—another theme in many of these stories, which grapple with the multi-generational legacy of industrial production and agricultural waste.

The environment isn’t just a force “out there”—it affects our bodies, both physical and political, as well as our social roles. In these stories, we can feel those effects. We meet people who can wring rain out of the air, build floating cities, transform themselves into clouds of gas, merge with machines, and transcend the world altogether. We feel the heat and moisture and sickness that come with a carbon cycle that is perturbed beyond all measure. Our identities do not end where our skin meets the air, but instead are part of ecosystems. And when those ecosystems are under attack, so are we...

The Otherwise Award honors stories that expose the many ways we experience gender in this world and others. This year we were thrilled to see so many brilliant authors taking a nuanced, complex approach to the topic—giving us characters we will never forget, in worlds as alien as our own.

#Otherwise Award #to read #gender in spec fic

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