By Mary Karr
Sunday, May 4, 2008; BW12
Slave traders who ransacked Yoruba villages in West Africa solely for labor missed out on the tribe's magnificent artistic tradition, in which a poet or singer could rank with a great hunter. Yoruba artists fed the people's spirits and kept channels to the capricious gods flowing.
The Yoruba's chain of "talking drums" carried news vast distances, and here, in a poem called "Death," the weight of grief gathers through incantatory repetition:
I cannot carry it.
I cannot carry it.
If I could carry it,
I would carry it . . .
In Heather McHugh's Broken English, I found Ulli Beier's translations of these ancient songs succinctly moving. The arresting turns in "Memory" lucidly capture both the nature of consciousness and how the stories we inherit shape us:
Whatever I am taught,
let me remember it.
When the big fish comes out of the water
we can see the bottom of the pond.
When the big toad comes out of the water
we can see the bottom of the well.
When the kingfisher dives into the water
his brain becomes clear.
When the cheek of the pregnant antelope was marked
her child was also marked.
If there is one piece of meat left in the pot
it will surely be taken by the spoon.
Everything the landlord does
is known to the swallow.
Everything that is in your brain,
my father,
let it be known to me.
The poem begins with a longing for permanence: Let me hold inside what I learn, for experience shapes me. In leaving the water of experience -- as the fish and toad do -- the water clears. But it's only in returning to the water of experience, plunging back through memory -- as the kingfisher does -- that the mind clears. In a single instant of recall, the poem argues, we can experience all our time, all our tribe's time.
From this transcendental instant, the poem shifts to very practical concerns: how much meat is in the pot and the dishonesty of one's landlord. But it closes with plaintive longing for permanence and connection: Let me profit from the contents of my father's brain, which is one eternal Yoruban treasure that colonialism couldn't destroy.
(Heather McHugh's "Broken English" (Wesleyan, 1993) celebrates "Yoruba Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional Poems," compiled and edited by Ulli Beier. Cambridge Univ. Press, copyright 1970.)
Mary Karr is a poet and the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
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