I am hated, therefore I am

The Enemy in Yorùbá Imaginary

Bibliographic Data

ID9286252
AuthorsAbimbola Adelakun, Abimbola A Adelakun (0000-0002-9641-4907, The University of Texas at Austin, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume3
Issue1
Pages1-18
Publication date2021-12-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueYoruba Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2473-4713 • E-ISSN: 2578-692X
PublisherGeorge A. Smathers Libraries (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.32473/ysr.v3i1.129928
OpenAlexW4205099061
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited11

This essay will study how the Yorùbá conceptualize “ọ̀tá” or the enemy, a trope that recurs in various cultural phenomena such as music, prayers, and other social rituals. The Yorùbá worldview of the enemy has profound implications on the way they frame issues that affect their mental, physical, social, and general well-being. Health studies, religious studies, and social ethics studies and analyses have mostly tried to investigate the enemy as a concept borne out of Yorùbá cosmology which serves as a conduit for superstition, fear, and other seemingly irrational behavior. In this essay, I frame the concept of “ọ̀tá” through the theatrical dialectic of antagonist/protagonist theory. The enemy, I argue, is the way the Yorùbá metaphorize all kinds of antagonism—material and immaterial ones—into an imaginative texture that gives it the tangibility they need to triumph against those situations. This essay will interrogate how this personification of antagonism is achieved by studying Ifá texts, Yorùbá popular music of a period, and contemporary Pentecostal prayers

Adversary · Aesthetics · Dialectic · Epistemology · Irrational number · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Philosophy · Psychology

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