The chant a Yoruba bride performs in the days before she leaves her father's house, its three-part structure, the social situation that produces it, and what she actually says about the marriage ahead of her.
Ẹkún ìyàwó is the chant a Yoruba bride performs in the days and nights before she leaves her father's house for her husband's. She goes from house to house saying farewell to her kindred, and at each house she chants: thanking her parents, praising herself, reciting her lineage, asking for blessing, and weeping while she does it. It is one of the most emotionally direct genres in the tradition and one of the least well presented in English, usually reduced to a picturesque detail of a wedding rather than read as what it is, which is a young woman's formal statement about a transition she did not fully choose.
The name means the bride's weeping, from ẹkún, tears or crying, and ìyàwó, bride or wife. It is also called rárà ìyàwó, and Karin Barber uses that form, defining these as the valedictory oríkì chants a woman performs as she goes round saying farewell to her kindred and announcing her impending change of state, and noting that it is the first type of oríkì chant a woman learns .
The etymology of ìyàwó itself is obscure. Yoruba scholars have proposed ìyà (suffering) plus wó (to collapse), ìyà plus Ìwó (the town), and ìyá (mother) plus wò (to look), and none of these is convincing . The corpus does not adopt any of them.
The performance is not a single event at a wedding. It is a circuit lasting days.
As the departure date nears, usually ten to fifteen days before leaving, custom requires the bride to pay a final symbolic visit to members of her nuclear and extended family: maternal and paternal aunts and uncles, distinguished elders of her neighbourhood, her parents' close friends, the parents of her friends, her own friends, and her father and mother . At each house she is expected, since word has gone ahead, and people gather with gifts.
At every threshold her unmarried age-mates announce her arrival in a sing-song tone, and the expected response is a chant in return . Nearly every place visited and every person addressed is handled in poetic rendition . She has a chant ready for everyone she may meet: her friends, former suitors, rivals, her stepmothers, people who dislike her mother, her grandparents and her detractors .
The final stage is the going-away itself, carried out at night. A group of her unmarried friends and a few older wives of her family bring her to her husband's house with dancing and singing, and in those songs her mates challenge and provoke her on matrimonial responsibilities and expectations, to which she must respond in kind, proving that she is ready not only physically but intellectually and socially .
Two features of this are worth pausing on. First, the bride performs the chant in actual tears, and onlookers are commonly seen weeping too . The tears are not stagecraft, and they are not simply sorrow either; the performance sustains a simultaneous jocund mood, which one analysis reads as reflecting the fifty-fifty chance her future represents . Second, the whole thing is competitive. If she meets another bride on a similar circuit, a contest ensues between the two parties, which is one reason families hire professional wailers to train their daughters .
This is not improvised. The repertoire is large and the mastery takes years.
The bride must have a song or chant for everyone she meets, so the quantity of material required is considerable and a great deal of time must be given to learning it, spanning months or years of her unmarried life . Ladele and Faniyi describe the training as lengthy and rigorous and conducted mainly by rote learning . Families sometimes hire professional wailers to train the bride and also the other girls in the family who will be leaving soon .
There is a second, less comfortable element in the record: girls are sometimes given metaphysical assistance, charms and preparations intended to boost accurate recall of the verses and to give them boldness in the presence of adversaries, so that the occasion becomes a display of memory and supernatural fortification together, in the way that a masquerade chanter fortifies himself . Set against that, another account holds that ẹkún ìyàwó needs no formal training or pupillage, mastery being achieved by continuous practice and repetition . Both are probably true of different places and different families, and the disagreement is left standing here rather than resolved.
The structural point behind the training is formulaic. The girl is free to substitute her own wording from the stock of epithets she has learnt without disorganising the structure of the chant , which is why collected versions vary. She learns a frame and a repertoire, not a script.
Ẹkún ìyàwó is unusual among Yoruba genres in combining three components that other genres carry only in part. It brings together ìwúre (prayer), ìbà or ìkíni (homage and salutation), and oríkì orílẹ̀ (lineage praise) in a single performance . By comparison, ìwì egúngún opens with prayer and dwells minimally on lineage praise, while ìjálá is marked by salutation and homage with minimal oríkì .
It also has set phrases peculiar to it, such as Ire lónìí orí mi àfìre, "may good fortune attend my inner head today" And its subject matter is distinctive: verses commenting philosophically on the bride's own condition, her gratitude to her parents, her fear of the unknown, expected hostility from co-wives, and supplication for fertility . Although the chant touches on many topics, the underlying subject throughout is the bride herself .
Ìkíni, salutation
Kò kò kò àgò onílé. Bẹ́ẹ̀ làgò mi ìí ṣe alágò tíí gbàtòrì o. Àgò mi ìí ṣe alágò tíí gbẹ́rẹ̀. Bẹ́wúrẹ́ bá ṣílé wò yóó gbẹ́rẹ̀, Bágùntàn bá ṣílé wò á gbàtòrì o.
Ìwúre, prayer
Èèmi ọmọ bíbí inú ìyá ò, Bàbá mo wá gbàre mi. Mi ò mọ̀ níí ṣílé wò ní tèmi o. Ire, àní n má fàbíkú ṣọwọ́, Ire, àní n má yà nísọ̀ àgàn o.
Oríkì orílẹ̀, lineage praise
Mo ní n ó kí bàbá mi o, Àkẹ́-ẹ̀kún-yá ni mí. Ìlókó nìyá mi o, Ìkó ni mí olókùn ọ̀là, Ìlókó ni mí, ọmọ Àrélù. Ẹrúmọṣà ni mí, mà jọba lólele.
Knock knock knock, may I come in, householder. My greeting is not the kind of greeting that gets whipped. My greeting is not the kind that gets beaten. When a goat looks into the wrong compound it gets a beating, when a sheep looks into the wrong compound it gets the whip.
I, the true-born child of my mother, Father, I have come to receive my blessing. May I never look into the wrong house. Blessing: that as a first-timer I will not trade in born-to-die children. Blessing: that I will never turn aside at the stall of the barren.
I want to salute my father. I am of the Àkẹ́-ẹ̀kún-yá household. Ìlókó is where my mother comes from. I am of the Ìkó lineage, owners of the string of wealth. I am of Ìlókó, offspring of Àrélù. I of the Ẹrúmọṣà stock will be tough when I am made king.
Yoruba text and English translation as printed by Mábàwònkú and Udoinwang, who label the three segments; the literal gloss is by the compiler of this corpus .
The opening is a doorway formula, and the goat and sheep lines are doing something precise: an animal that wanders into the wrong compound gets beaten, and she is asserting that she is not that, that her arrival is legitimate and she comes by right. The published translation renders ṣílé wò in the prayer section as "may I not marry from the wrong compound", which imports marriage into a line that literally says looking into a house; the ambiguity is real and the compiler has kept the literal sense in the gloss and flagged the reading here. Àbíkú is the child born to die and be born again, the recurrent infant death treated in yoruba-ibeji and in the naming file; "trade in born-to-die children" is the Yoruba idiom for repeatedly bearing children who do not survive. The stall of the barren, ìsọ̀ àgàn, is a market image: she asks not to end up standing where the childless stand. The last line is startling in a bride's chant and the published translation preserves its oddity: she claims she will be tough when made king. Lineage praise borrows the vocabulary of rulership without literal claim, and this is the kind of line that shows ẹkún ìyàwó drawing directly on the oríkì orílẹ̀ stock described in yoruba-oriki.
Three long passages, in the fullest published sequence available, show the range. The Yoruba below is printed in the source without tone marks or subdots, and it is reproduced here in that form rather than being silently diacriticised, since supplying tone marking would be supplying a reading of an ambiguous text. This is a real limitation and it is stated rather than concealed.
Original (as printed, undiacriticised)
Babaa mi, Iyaa mi, e seun lae Eku kike ti e ke mi Eku gige ti e ge mi See so pe o ya kin maa rele oko? Eni o tasiko ki n kuo loode? Ki n lo file onile sele? Kin lo feni eleni se baba? E sure fun mi, ki n ma kelesu lohuun Ki n ma kagbako nile oko Orogun ti mo ba ba Ki won o fe mi bi omo won Ki n ma fabiku se wo Ki n ma bi mo abigbin bi ogede Omo ti mo ba bi, ko sehin bo wa sonike eyin
My father, my mother, I thank you always. Thank you for the care you gave me, thank you for the nurture you gave me. Do you say it is time I went to my husband's house? That the hour has come for me to leave the compound? To go and make another person's house my home? To take another person's man for a father? Bless me, that I meet no evil person there, that no calamity finds me in my husband's house. The senior wife I will meet, may she love me as her own child. May I not lose my children to àbíkú, may I not bear children and bury them like plantain suckers. May the children I bear come back to repay your goodness.
Yoruba text from Ladele and Faniyi (1978), as adapted and translated by Alfred Adeniyi Fatuase .
The four rhetorical questions in the middle are the heart of the passage. She does not assert that she is being sent away; she asks whether that is what is being said to her, four times, and the repetition is the grievance. Fatuase's phonological reading is worth recording: lines 1 to 3 are dense with the open vowel /e/, which he reads as the open mouth of disbelief, and with the bilabial nasal /m/, which he reads as murmuring and sobbing, while the plosives /k/ and /g/ in lines 2 and 3 reflect words sticking in the throat as she weeps . Whether or not one accepts the iconic reading, the sound pattern is there in the text. Abigbin bi ogede, burying children like plantain suckers, works because a plantain sucker is cut from the parent stem and planted separately: the image is of offspring detached and put in the ground, one after another. The senior wife line is not sentimental, it is realistic: she is entering a polygynous household and asking for the one thing that will determine her daily life.
Original (as printed, undiacriticised)
Mo nie jade wa e wa wo mi na! Emi Ibironke Aduni omo Ajenifuja, Emi lomo peleyeju, omo Ibadiaran, Kin ni mofi seja To ni n ma we ninu ibu o? Kin ni mo fi se konko To ni n ma we lodo? Kin ni mo fi se Baba mi Akanmu o? Won ni ki n jade nle, won ni ki n maa lo! Emi Eyinmenugun, Aponbepore, Mo mo lese bi olele awe Baba ko mi lare mo mare; Iya ko mi lowo mo mowo Mo mo ka aro, mo mo lee tunse Mo lamu laya ti mo le fomo mu; E weyin mi pele, e wo badii nu bebere, Mo le gbomo pon doja Mo kuro lomode agbekorun roko. E je n maa lo!
I say, come out and look at me! I, Ibironke Aduni, child of Ajenifuja, I am the child of Peleyeju, child of Ibadiaran. How did I offend the fish, that it forbids me to swim in the deep? How did I offend the frog, that it forbids me to bathe in the river? How did I offend my father Akanmu? They say I should leave the house, they say I should go! I, Even-Teeth-Befit-the-Mouth, Fair-as-Palm-Oil, clean-heeled, comely as breakfast olele. My father taught me wit and I have wit, my mother taught me trade and I know trade. I can cook àrọ̀ and I can set the house in order. I have breasts on my chest with which to nurse a child. Look kindly on my back, see how broad my hips are. I can carry a child on my back to the market. I am no longer a girl who goes to the farm with a bundle on her neck. Let me go!
Yoruba text from Ladele and Faniyi (1978), as adapted and translated by Fatuase .
This is the passage that makes people uncomfortable and it should not be softened. She is advertising herself: naming her lineage, listing her competences, and describing her body in terms of its fitness for childbearing and childcarrying. Fatuase reads it as an appeal to her parents' investment and simultaneously an advertisement to her husband's family that they are getting a rare find, with any unmarried girl within earshot meant to take instruction from it . The fish and frog lines are the genre's characteristic move: a complaint about banishment displaced onto creatures who could not possibly have banished her, which lets her say she is being driven out without accusing her father directly, and then in the next line she names him anyway. Àpọ́nbépọreẹ, fair as palm oil, and ẹyìnmẹ́nugún, even teeth befitting the mouth, are conventional beauty epithets from the oríkì stock. The closing E je n maa lo, "let me go", is the same phrase a person uses to take leave, and after twenty lines of self-praise it lands as both a request and a resignation.
Original (as printed, undiacriticised)
Ilo ya mi, o dile Ajibola Ajibola omo Baba Alaso Omo Iya Onileke nita oja Odede Akanmu lemi re, omo Olateju, omo Popoola Won ni ki won o pe mi wa ninu ile, Mo ni koree mi bami kalo N o sehun ekufu, ki ni n kiye sekule si? N o loju sile Asipa; N ee sore alagbede Ofiki Akanmu omo Po'ola, mo n bo loode re!
My going has come. It is to the house of Ajibola, Ajibola, son of the cloth seller, child of the bead seller at the market square. To the house of Akanmu I go, son of Olateju, son of Popoola. They say let them call me inside the house. I say let my age-mates come with me. I have done nothing shameful, why should I look back in fear? I have no eye on the house of Asipa, I am no friend of the blacksmith of Ofiki. Akanmu, son of Popoola, I am coming to your compound!
Yoruba text from Ladele and Faniyi (1978), as adapted and translated by Fatuase .
She names the husband's family by trade, cloth seller and bead seller, which is how a person is placed. Then, unprompted, she denies two specific attachments: she has no interest in the house of Asipa, and she is not the blacksmith of Ofiki's friend. These are named men, and the denial is public and pre-emptive, delivered in front of everybody on the way to her marriage. Fatuase notes she meets former suitors on this circuit . The refusal to be called inside, insisting instead that her age-mates accompany her, is her keeping the protection of her group at the threshold.
Ìyá tún ṣe púpọ̀ lórò mi o, Ìyáà mi wá ṣe púpọ̀ lórò mi o, Ìyáà mi tí mo ní tòótọ́, Ìyáà mi wáa ṣe púpọ̀ lórò mi. Bàbá mo wá gbàre mi. Ègbón mi, ègbón mi, Ṣó ń bẹ ńlé àbí ò sí ńlé? Bó bá ń bẹ ńlé, ẹ wí fún mi. Bí ò bá sí ńlé, n bẹ̀sẹ̀ ṣòrò.
My mother laboured much on my account, my mother truly laboured much on my account, my mother whom I truly have, my mother laboured much on my account. Father, I have come to receive my blessing. My brother, my brother, is he at home, or is he not at home? If he is at home, tell me. If he is not at home, let me go my way.
Yoruba text and English translation as printed by Mábàwònkú and Udoinwang .
The fourfold repetition on the mother is the emotional centre of the whole genre, and it works by accumulation rather than by saying anything new: the same line four times, with small variations, is how the chant registers what cannot be said once. Tí mo ní tòótọ́, "whom I truly have", carries an implicit contrast with the other wives of the household who are also called mother, and it is the most quietly loaded phrase in the passage. The brother section is the practical business of farewell rendered in the same register: is he in, if so tell me, if not I am going. The chant does not modulate between high feeling and logistics, and that refusal to separate them is characteristic.
Four functions, stated as the sources state them.
It is a rite of passage. A transition from girlhood to womanhood, and a lament and nostalgia for what is being left . The comparison the scholarship reaches for is the dirge: it is a song for a departure, and it treats the departure as a kind of death .
It prepares her for a hard situation. Fatuase's argument is that the chants create moral armament and stamina for a distressful transition, deploying language to build the willpower to go through it with courage , and that the practice helps a new wife adjust to marital shocks that otherwise lead to crisis or divorce . Kolawole notes the Yoruba matrimonial structure was largely polygynous, so the bride will likely encounter a rival wife on arrival, and the daily verbal warfare that follows is itself reason enough for sound training in what he calls musical artillery and matrimonial polemics .
It is a display of competence. She demonstrates memory, verbal skill, knowledge of her family history and panegyric, and the training that certifies her as culturally well brought up and ready .
It is a public statement of a private grievance. This is the part that gets lost. The chant lets her say, in a form nobody can object to, that she is being sent away, that she does not know what awaits her, that she is afraid of the co-wife and of losing children, and that she has done nothing to deserve banishment. Kolawole's remark that her future is a fifty-fifty chance , and Kolawole Mary Kolawole's observation quoted in the womanist reading that young men enter marriage feeling triumphant while the girl expects the worst , both describe what the chant is managing.
The genre is not extinct but it is much diminished, surviving in performance at some traditional weddings, in recorded and broadcast form, and in the work of professional chanters who keep it going commercially. Fatuase's own argument is for reawakening the custom through electronic media, for revitalisation and dissemination .
Two cautions for a reader coming to it fresh. First, ẹkún ìyàwó is evidence about a marriage system that was arranged, patrilocal and often polygynous, and the chant's anxieties are accurate reporting on it rather than poetic convention. Second, the same texts are also a genuine display of a young woman's authority over a difficult verbal art at the one moment in her life when she has the floor. Both are true at once, and the recent scholarship reading the genre through womanist theory is an attempt to hold them together rather than choosing one .
The secular chanting genre of praise, who the rárà singer is and how the performance is shaped by the audience paying for it, and the accuracy that makes rárà more than flattery.
What oríkì are, the different kinds, who performs them and why, and how they carry history that written records do not.
How Yoruba oral artists are trained, which genres are open to whom, how gender divides the field, how performers are paid, and the named artists the scholarship documents.
Yoruba song across work, ritual, nursing, children's play and social comment, with texts, and the problem of translating a song so that it can still be sung.
How Yoruba verbal art is classified into named genres by vocal manner rather than subject, who performs each and on what occasion, and why the European category "oral literature" fits the material imperfectly.
The hunters' chant associated with Ògún, its vocal manner, the ìjálá artist and how he is judged, the contest setting, and what the chant does as self-portrait and as praise of animals.