Ogun & Duende (revised)

once i woke up in the middle of the night and Ogun was there, crouching in the corner of my room. his body was blacker than the darkness and emanating from his pupil-less eyes were beams of hellish light that split the room with a horizon of blood.

my image of Ogun, the Yoruba orisa (spirit/god) best known as the patron of war, has always been terrifying. i always tried to avoid him because he was associated with violence and, in my mind, brutality. but yesterday i realized that i've been making my way closer and closer to the abode of this orisa for almost a year now.

it's been happening as i become angrier and angrier about oppression. there is a rage in me that i have ignored for a long time. but now it's beginning to make itself known. wage labor will do that to you. hahaha. it's been a real struggle figuring out what to do with anger. my first step was to (re)read Audre Lorde's "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." she writes:

Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.

but how? but how? but how? sometimes i felt my anger unhinging me. the abyss stared back. my survival is/was threatened by oppression and by my not knowing how to orchestrate the fury. words often failed me. dialogue collapsed. i found myself unable to articulate the tremendous force growing in me.

it was then that i discovered duende and, through it, rediscovered the Word. duende, simply defined, is the dark creative force. it is a force of creativity that cannot be brought out through calm, elegant or contemplative art/thought. instead it emerges in desperation. creation as an act of survival, necessity, even agony. one is not "inspired" by duende, one struggles with it for survival (for it is liable to tear one apart). art is produced through struggle with duende, not as a peaceful partnership with it.

such a force--sometimes manifesting as anger, sometimes as despair, sometimes as yearning--rips through our elaborate facades of identity and pretense. gone are the easy, gregarious words and thoughts that we used to stave off the impending darkness. our sense of self begins to dissolve, the world gathers close at the smell of blood. what will we do?

in order to fight with the dark creative force, you must shriek and mourn. you must utter a dirge that makes words tremble and melt into their primordial forms.

the Word comes when the poet is trembling, begging for relief from the relentless meanings of 'objects' that take up residence within, denying any space for a 'subject'. when the sheer immensity of perception threatens existence, when the senses become so full and sensitive that the consciousness of being one who perceives is almost blotted out, the Word is an act of survival that bids the world to have mercy that commands the world to make a place for consciousness among and within perception itself.

when i stopped using words to escape and began to use them to survive; when words became extensions of suffering and hope rather than tools for communicating suffering and hope; when i broke with the smug comfort of those who call language "arbitrary" or "symbolic" and realized that my words were my experience, then i found that i could struggle with my duende. i found my voice again (or perhaps for the first time).

and with that voice i began to weep, caress, struggle with, beg, and transform the world. such words are radical. they are the words of which Paulo Freire speaks; true words which, when spoken, change the world.

enter Ogun...

yesterday i was writing a journal entry about being a nomad and a single line brought me face to face with the orisa from whom i have run so long: "In choosing migration over accomodation," i wrote "the vagabond can, if s/he is brave, open the road to freedom." it immediately struck me that i was talking about Ogun, the orisa who "opens the road" with his machete. any other time in my life i would have fled from the invocation of Ogun in my work or my life. but now, as a result of being acquainted with duende, i am prepared to open myself up to the spirit of Ogun.

i began doing research into the meaning of Ogun. the most interesting stuff i found was around the work of Wole Soyinka, African novelist and playwright. this is what one author understands of Soyinka's reading of Ogun:

god of war and the hunt, of iron, protector of artistic spirit, god of transition, the explorer god, the god of the road. Ogun is contradictory, a being of compassion and anger whose reason for being is the impossible--to close the gap of understanding between gods and people, between cultures, and ideologies. ("Following Wole Soyinka")

and Soyinka himself writes

On the arena of the living, when man is stripped of excrescences, when disasters and conflicts (the material of drama) have crushed and robbed him of self-consciousness and pretensions, he stands in present reality at the spiritual edge of this gulf, he has nothing left in physical existence which successfully impresses upon his spiritual or psychic perception. It is at such moment that transitional memory takes over and intimations rack him of that intense parallel of his progress through the gulf of transition, of the dissolution of his self and his struggle and triumph over subsumation through the agency of will...We have said that nothing but the will (for that alone is left untouched) rescues being from annihilation within the abyss. Ogun is embodiment of Will, and the Will is the paradoxiacal truth of destructiveness and creativeness in acting man. Only one who has himself undergone the experience of disintegration, whose spirit has been tested and whose psychic resources laid under stress by forces most inimical to individual assertion, only he can understand and be the force of fusion between the two contradictions." (Soyinka, "The Fourth Stage")

the connection between this idea of Ogun and my own life for the past two years is incredible. my attempts to try new ideas, to connect spirituality and politics, and to express my rage and my love; my migrations, depressions, joys, and refusals to accomodate myself to a world that negates me---all of these have been journeys into and beyond the abyss.

Frederico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, wrote about the role of such abyssmal struggle in the truly human creative arts. For him duende was the essence of certain art forms, particularly cante jondo (deep song), the passionate music of the Andalusian gypsies (a music form carried on, in some ways, by flamenco). He wrote this (a favorite passage of mine) about a woman whose song was moved by duende:

Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

the "negroes of the Antilles," of course, were Black orisa spiritualists. Santa Bárbara is actually a representation of Chango, rather than Ogun, but the allusion to Black/African based manifestations of this same spiritual source is there.

the point here is that human beings have developed ways of engaging these profound experiences and forces. art and religion, with their powerful ritualism, seem to be the heart of this cultural wisdom.

Audre Lorde tells us that we must learn to orchestrate our anger in order to survive, these traditions offer us guidance as to how this can be done. overcoming my fear of rage/anger i now see that an exploration of Ogun is essential to my development.

perhaps i shall make my cast iron pot a home for Ogun after all...