The Mother of Nine
Oya, who causes the leaves to flutter
Oya, strong wind who gave birth to fire while traversing the mountain
Oya, please don’t fell the tree in my backyard
Oya, we have seen fire covering your body like cloth.
— Praises of Oya collected by Fela Sowande and Fagbemi Ajanaku, in Orúko Ámútòrunwà
A spiritual practice without the acknowledgment of death and dying is one that is bereft of meaning. Our ancestors bare the face of the dead who have not died but who instead arrange themselves in a jostling rapturous body of thousands winding behind us. With eyes in the otherworld, the ancestors possess a translucid vision, one that includes the future memories of their descendants.
“Are your eyes open?” or “Did you open your eyes?” my mother would respond in one of two ways whenever I asked for help when I lost something as a child. It took years of her refusal to assist me and time spent searching for missing objects when I suddenly ascertained the double meaning in her speech, and that which she was referring to, a spiritual vision that allowed one to access the inner eye.
One late evening at the age of fourteen I would come home from a religious sermon to an invisible seige. A disturbing trace of an attack left in an otherwise ordinary living room. The thrilling sound of a cricket rubbing its wings together blowing the whistle on metaphysical danger. I methodically scoured the area, grabbed a tall broom and dipped its head into the hollow of a curtain rack and struck a bag of bad muthi (medicine) that had been placed there. I only thought of my mother’s whispers.
Indigenous African orature discloses that people have three eyes. One is the eye with which spirit is seen, the two remaining ones are used for the material world. This way of seeing is not reduced to a simplified understanding of clairvoyance, it refers instead to the access of “dark knowledge”. The secrets of the night, the depths of blackness as the source of origins, and the ability to see inside and outside. An arcane power of seeing adept at navigating and detecting the imperceptible with only the light from within.
Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification by Barbara McCullough, 1979. Image description: A black and white photograph of a black woman sitting down with her hands cupped together holding an offering. Her head is semi-covered with a scarf and she is wearing a dress. She is in front of a ceremonial circle with a central goddess figurine directly opposite her. The circle is comprised of pieces of debris, a flower, and other natural and man-made objects.
Oya meaning “she tore” is the Òrìsà of Transformation. Her praisename is Áàjálayé, the Winds of the World. What does she tear? Luisah Teish states that Oya “brings about sudden structural change in people and things. Oya does not just rearrange the furniture in the house — She knocks the building to the ground and blows away the floor tiles.” Red Buffalo woman, an emanation of Oya, is a tutelary spirit for the year 2025. Oya’s primary symbols are storms, hurricanes, thunder, lightning and tornados. She sometimes spits fire from her mouth.
Her arrival to this year as the Mother of Nine marks the fury of the wind itself and the accelerating destabilisation of near-death empires. She is a shapeshifting ineffable force with tremendous physical and spiritual power who stands at the edge of life and death. A double goddess. Without root work, the diligent excavation of the origins of psycho-spiritual pathologies and their asphyxiating legacies, the dream of reworlding the Earth will be fruitless. Rebirth is laborious effort. Dying is a dangerous rite of passage and the reprise of its cycle is laden with precarity. Oya wields the pair of swords that will sever the fidelity to our ignorance and at last clear the air.
The Ifa sign for Red Buffalo woman is Osa-Ogunda. In this oracle, Oya’s buffalo hide is stolen by the Chief of Hunters who becomes enchanted with her when he witnesses her metamorphosis from buffalo to woman. He pleads with Oya to marry him and she agrees as long as her secret is never uttered. But Oya’s true form is exposed after a several years of raising and bearing children with the Chief of Hunters and how this comes to be fluctuates based on the living story being spoken. When Oya learns that her husband has betrayed her, she locates her missing skin and charges into the forest but not before coming to her children who will wail in terror when they see her.
“When her children saw her coming along the path, they began to run, crying, "Please don't hurt us!" "See," buffalo woman said, stopping to pull the hide away from her cheek, "I'm your mother!" "No, you're not, you're a buffalo," screamed the children. "Leave us alone! Won't you please go back to the forest?" "Of course, it must be so," replied buffalo woman. "I am going back to the forest." But first she broke off a little piece of horn from her head. "Let me give you this," she told her children. "Whenever you want me to do something for you, just ask this. Call me properly, call Oya, for that is my name and I will always answer to it. Should anyone act with malice toward you, just let me know — Just call on me, call Oya, Oya! "Farewell, my children," she said pulling the hide back over her face.
Her children do not recognise her. Her wildness is estranging and incompatible with the image of their mother. Who of us would dare stare into the bone black face of mystery unnerved and marvel in the divine abjection of her power? A power that disobeys the spiritual dismemberment that sliced our umbilical cord from the womb of the earth and smears the cracks between worlds with a touch of a finger. Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror describes that abjection is “not a lack of cleanliness or health but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, or rules”. The horror of the abject is that which confounds the apartheid of life and death, self and other, inside and outside and leads into a “secondary universe”.
Disorientation is not an obstruction to change, rather it is a foundational reassemblage of the self, a blurring of dichotomies, a shedding of taut skin, an embrace of death’s call, a blessing of rot. It is a soul-expanding sojourn that insists on the disorder of prior selves, to begin life anew. After red buffalo woman departs from her children, she visits the chief of hunters for a final time. She considers ending his life but when he offers her praise proclaiming her divinity, she chooses instead to be merciful and reminds him that he too may call her if he needs her. “Know that I am this sound — Oya! This form — Red buffalo woman. Know that I am this power.”
Worlds have ended before, despite the imperial lie of colonial rule, there has never been just one world. The Mother of All is returning (the global south knows that she has never left) and the structures of misrecognition of her divinity that have shaped the West’s psycho-spiritual adolescence, a culture of the uninitiated who threaten to burn down the earth just to feel its warmth, is drawing its last breath. Do not be afraid of a world ending... At the very least, guard your spirit from being eaten by fear. Devote yourself to the dreaming of liberation for all beings. You have the will, the imagination and the capacity. Use your vision. Some of us have never had any other choice.
This old Creek town appears empty except for the trees
And the story of how wind will come to clean
The earth, of the takers who took
And never gave back.
One day, my grandfather used to sing
A fresh world will rise up
To take the place of a society
That didn’t love the earth.
— Joy Harjo
Sources
Cartwright, K. (2006). “To Walk with the Storm”: Oya as the Transformative “I” of Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-Atlantic Callings. American Literature, 78(4), 741–767.
Ford, C. W. (1999). The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa. Random House Publishing Group.
Harjo, Joy. (2021). Poet Warrior: A Memoir. National Geographic Books.
Kristeva, Julia. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.
Teish, Luisah. (1985). Jambalaya: The Natural Woman's Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. Harper Collins.