Sheila Chukwulozie ’17E
—
In the beginning—according to Yoruba mythology—the creator of the world Olodumare, sent 17 gods to establish the earth. 16 of those gods were male and one was female: Her name was Osun.
Without consulting her, the 16 male Orisas came into earth and made decisions about the ways the world would unfold. They picked out the textures and the colours of this new world without considering or caring that Osun might have had opinions about just how brown the sand would look or how brittle it would feel. They fashioned the order of the world she would live in without asking her how she wanted to live, or even what she needed to stay alive within it. In other words, they couldn’t have made the phrase “it’s a man’s world” any clearer.
All of a sudden, rain stopped falling on the earth: The male Orisas watched the earth crack in the dry heat. Yet, that wasn’t the worst of it: The heat turned all the plants into ash and soon, they had no food to harvest. There was no drop of water to quench their thirst. The famine caused too much hunger and the drought too much thirst. So the male gods spoke amongst themselves and agreed they should return to Olodumare and ask their creator for a solution.
“How many of you did I send down there?” Olodumare asked when confronted by the 16 male Orisas.
“17” one of the Orisas replied.
In the hope that they would figure out where they failed, Olodumare prodded further; “and how many of you are here now?”
They looked around and counted each other.
“16”, the same Orisa who had spoken before announced.
“One of you is missing” Olodumare confirmed the obvious yet important fact.
“The one you seem to have forgotten is Osun, who controls the river. And it is the river who controls all the water in the earth. Through her magic, she sends the water from the ground into the earth and it falls back as rain. Without her, there will be no rain. And without the rain, the soil will be dry. And if the soil is dry, there will be no food. And if there is no food, there will be no life,” said Olodumare.
All the male Orisas begged Olodumare for a solution. He refused. He left them with a warning instead: “If you ignore life, life will ignore you”
As Chinua Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart, “there is no story that is not true.” No one is sure that Olodumare actually said that last line—or any of it. No one is even sure the creator is a spirit man named Olodumare. In fact, you might laugh at the whole story, but this creation story is not more far-fetched than any creation story: Just like the Christian story of Adam and Eve revealed the patriarchal culture of the countries that endorsed it, the Yoruba creation story reveals some of their old cultural values. Regardless of whether there was a tape recorder in Olodumare’s kingdom or not, the point of this story is clear: The Yoruba people who created this myth believed that Olodumare only needed to send one female Orisa, and they also believed, strongly, that She was the only Orisa with the power to nurture life or to end it.
Panic stricken, the other 16 orisas ran down to earth to beg Osun to forgive them. They wanted to live and they knew they would die without her forgiveness. Pained and pregnant, Osun made a promise: If she gave birth to a son he would act as mediator between her and them. But, if she had a daughter, there would be an impasse. In her book African Wo/man Palava, Chikwenye Ogunyemi simultaneously describes the collective panic of the male orisas and the strength of the single female orisa:
“The male orisa, marvelling at the magic of the womb, stunned by the silence of the womb which they could not hear, the darkness of the womb which they could not read, the mystery of the womb which they could not decipher, prayed fervently for a son.”
At this point in the story, there’s an interesting dynamic to note in the (re)telling: Though Osun is confirmed to be the orisa of all the sources of life on earth, it is never assumed that she controls the creative design of human life specifically. This is important to observe because it speaks to the constant placement of women at the center of nurturing, with the responsibility to deliver and preserve life but usually, without the honor of creating that life. Even though Osun is seen to be the source of life on earth, the Yoruba have still made Olodumare a man, in control of the design that happens beyond the earth—He is still in control of She.
As well, let us consider the moment in this Yoruba myth where the woman is only consulted when the crisis is becoming unbearable for everyone. Not just unbearable for her, but unbearable for everyone—man and woman alike. It seems like a crisis unbearable for women is just a mere fact of life as a woman but a crisis unbearable for everyone warrants all 16 Orisas travelling to Olodumare’s palace to declare a national emergency. But in fact, we are not sure how long Osun had to suffer alone and in isolation from the world she was sent to live and lead.
How did they forget her, how long did it take for her to realize they might never remember her if she didn’t remind them?
This idea of forgetting female pain mirrors the frequent nationalisation of male suffering. The stakes for male and female pain are quite different: One of them is made to seem at odds with the very idea of their identity while the other one is made synonymous and inseparable from their identity. While the physical pain women go through is categorized as “female pain,” the pain men go through is nationalized and made to stand alone in its glass box as just pain. Male pain is displayed to be the biggest tragedy while female pain is normalized to be psychological inconvenience which women choose to complain about. Male pain is a threat to masculine strength and endurance while female pain is femininity.
Leslie Jamison articulated this perfectly in her book The Empathy Exams:
“The moment we start talking about wounded women, we risk transforming their suffering from an aspect of the female experience into an element of the female constitution—perhaps its finest, frailest consummation. The ancient Greek Menander once said: “Woman is a pain that never goes away.” He probably just meant women were trouble, but his words hold a more sinister suggestion: the possibility that being a woman requires being in pain, that pain is the unending glue and prerequisite of female consciousness.”
To use “Woman” as a metonymy for “Pain” is to give Woman little or no opportunity to be anything other than pain. To say women feel pain is closer to a truth. To say some women get pained is even closer to a more specific, and more accusatory truth. But to say “Woman is a Pain” is to marry woman and pain in a predestined union that cannot be argued or treated away.
Leslie Jamison continues:
“A 2001 study called “The Girl Who Cried Pain” tries to make sense of the fact that men are more likely than women to be given medication when they report pain to their doctors. Women are more likely to be given sedatives. The study makes visible a disturbing set of assumptions: It’s not just that women are prone to hurting—a pain that never goes away—but also that they’re prone to making it up. The report finds that despite evidence that “women are biologically more sensitive to pain than men … [their] pain reports are taken less seriously.” Less seriously meaning, more specifically, “they are more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore, ‘not real.’ ”
There’s a systemic erasure of female pain and at the same time, a prioritization of male suffering. For example, historically, during wars of national independence, women were often asked to keep their problems on hold while men fix bigger problems, as if female life and public life are mutually exclusive concepts. Even today, when movements for racial justice are largely fortified and created by women, fights for Black women’s rights, such as equal pay, are still prefixed as “women’s issues” and are therefore considered only women’s business to deal with.
Instead of acknowledging that issues that greatly affected the quality of women’s lives were being sidetracked, women were asked to “stay in line.” Staying in line was seen as prioritizing national freedom over personal freedom. Furthermore, by using narratives of freedom to promise safety and happiness to women, the men were able to disguise their need to express and validate their usefulness as sacrifice and goodwill for the women. In Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, Harvard Professor Afsaneh Najmabadai uses the crises in Iran as the looking glass through which she confirms that.
“Manliness performed by women was a marker of shame by men…National sovereignty and masculine honor became the prizes of a changed regime…Women’s presence on the streets was often viewed as a sign of things gone wrong,” she writes.
By this, she claims—rightfully so—that the male egotistic desire to prove himself as saviour was probably stronger than the selfless motivation to save female life.
In Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, the King’s Horseman—Elesin—is called to kill himself in order to be a companion to the King who has just died. When one of the women asks if he is scared to die, he lets her understand that it is in not dying that he loses everything: “Life is honour. It ends when honour ends,” he says. As his job is to be with the King all through his life and his death, he does not believe there can be anything worth living for if he does not fulfill the job he believes he was called to do. To understand a character like this to also understand the mentality of many male citizens who believe it is the core of masculine identity to protect women. Therefore, though it disguises itself as a selfless sacrifice, Elesin shows us that there is a loss that men fear more than the loss of physical life: the loss of their masculine pride. Loss of male life in struggle wins decorations and honor but loss of female life in the struggle to endure female pain is not honorable because it is normalized. It is not romanticized because it doesn’t seem to happen for any cause.
Most importantly, surviving with female pain is largely invisible and we are convinced we have to see things to believe they are real and true.
We don’t know change when we don’t see it. Think about it: When we think about revolutions, we think of visible signs of frustration: people marching; people talking (loudly, on megaphones); people fighting; or, people dead—all visible signs of active disruption. Change is usually marked by sacrifice; doing something you would normally, not do. Heroes are people who transcend their ordinary selves to save lives. So in that case, how can we acknowledge that childbirth revolutionized the world if childbirth is not disruptive but expected. And furthermore, since it’s expected, it ceases to become impressive. It’s just like pain when gendered: the pain doesn’t need to be treated as a disruption of your body’s normal functions because it is the normal function of the female body to experience (and therefore withstand) all kinds of pain. For too long, pain has been marketed to us as the joy of motherhood.
The daily pain and sacrifices suffered by women are normalized, whitewashed, or outright ignored. Yet, when men undergo the same experiences, they are idolized, exalted, made into heroes. This is so even when the men’s sacrifices harm women—that harm is dismissed or made invisible. But when a woman dares to sacrifice in such a way that men are harmed, it is seen as anathema to her role as nurturer and protector—a role that goes unrewarded when she does faithfully fulfill it.
It’s easy to read the story of Osun and think that she wasn’t a hero, but rather was just a woman. Apparently, women can’t be heroes because they have to be mothers, and what type of mother wouldn’t save life?
Amherst Disorientation 