Igbo
etile on egbin (A forest near town collects
rubbish)'
Adapo
owo on iya (A partnership breeds suffering)
Yara
ajumogbe itale ni ninu (A shared room
breeds worms)
Da Fun Babamarose (Cast for Babamarose/Babamaroya)
* * *
(William Bascom, Sixteen Coweries: Yoruba Divination From Africa to the New World (1980) Eji Ogbe No. 22, pp. 112-113)
By now virtually everyone on Earth plugged into social media has heard or seen that marvelous performative moment at the White House, where like a group of early 19th century fishmongers at the wharf on market day, the heads of State of the United States and Ukraine engaged in a performance fit for a daytime television reality show (are these now discursively oracular?; one wonders). No doubt, that is coming, along with the hand wringing, oracular readings of the script, body language and fallout, and other prestidigitation that must surely follow. That is as it should be. Such drama--one in which they each played their role superbly, apparently all ad lib to bring out the true performative power of the cast--each the victim of personal affronts which were then transformed, through the extraordinary ability of ego to invoke semiotic magic to turn personal antipathy into state politics. There are other analogies, some positive, some negative, some relational, but held together by the power to incarnate huge vats of virtual signification tied to the social collective constructs of state into the far smaller bodies of the players.
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| Video of event link HERE |
Aaaahhh so old fashioned--like traveling back in time with a host of actors too poor to afford the appropriate time sensitive costuming. Yet they are not states, this is not the 16th century, nor are they television actors the scripted (or off script) antics of which provide anything but comedic-melodramitic entertainment for the masses. And perhaps that was the point--actors trapped in a scripting of their own making now locked together in a room--much like that envisioned as Hell in Sartre's play Huis Clos (1944) (No Exit ((New York: Vintage Books, 1989)) the connections with which I leave to the reader to embrace or reject). And, indeed, from the perspective of performative discourse, the moment proved to be of great significance to all the players, both revealing what had been concealed under layers of bureaucrats and formal discursive tropes, and at the same time making it impossible not to push forward along now quite visible pathways. It is in this sense that the performance was perhaps the finest exposure of the essence of the great transformations that are occurring in this third decade of the 21st century--or more broadly it brilliantly captures the spirit of the times. As such, criticism or praise is lost n the moment--it exists far beyond both.
In a sense one ought to be grateful--if only for the exposure, at last, to the realities of politics, and the fusion of the personal and the representational, driven by the personal--that may well be the signature marker of this first phase in the movement from a unitary converging global order, to the fractured convergences of the post-global --first explosions, then the terror and its proscription lists, then conflict, and then finally the emergence of those actors, hidden in the flanks, that will both inherit and transform from out f the pieces of the past that suit them. It is in this sense that condemnation or judgment--rather than observation anchored in the objects and actions around which social relations are currently constituted, that is rather than a stricter analysis of the semiosis of these events and their connection to larger cognitive frameworks--is both premature ad beside the point.
Yet the unavoidable--there is no exit--remains largely unappreciated.
Still the shock of its realization from time to time in dramatic form
like this, sometimes causes anxiety among those whose cognitive cages
have been carefully constructed to avoid the realities of the condition within which social collectives and the naturalization of their relations, encases humans. The best one can hope for, perhaps, is to play the role of the Valet No Exit--who serves and watches unable to blink or avoid the gaze as he goes from one room to the next, ensuring that the emerging post-global order, enclosed within a series of rooms populated by people who deserve each other, is well tended.
GARCIN: Ah, yes, I've got it. It's your daytime. And outside?
VALET: Outside?
GARCIN: Damn it, you know what I mean. Beyond that wall.
VALET: There's a passage.
GARCIN: And at the end of the passage?
VALET: There's more rooms, more passages, and stairs.
GARCIN: And what lies beyond them?
VALET: That's all. (No Exit)
The only real questions, then, are whether some of the characters may occupy more than one room; whether the rooms can be redecorated to taste; and whether there are conditions or constraints on the ability to travel between one or another room of one's making. We will have to ask the Valet. But one senses that there are lots of rooms, each closed off from the others,but that while its inhabitants might be able to move from one to another none can be the Valet. Certainly that may well be the condition of the United States as it constructs its own No Exit setting. This works to a point but does no more than set a way of perceiving the performance. Nonetheless, within that perspective and its own cages one might come to think of the US position as fortunate indeed; other characters populating this closed space of rooms will likely have no such power and will, like the characters in the Sartre original, have to make the best of the room in which they find themselves. Or perhaps the Oddu of Ifa's Eji Ogbe have it better and one finds oneself on Babamaroya's farm (Bascom, supra, Eji Ognbe A 22)--"Babamaroya ki o ma fi wàràwàrà da ire nu; Ibiti Osa pe ki eleni ki o ma ko iya nu se o; Nibi ise ti ba nse " [Babamaroya do not think of suffering and lose a blessing through haste; This is where the Orisha says that a person should endure suffering in the work he is doing"]. And who is Babamaroya/Babamarose?--the father of those who do not think of discomfort and do not think of suffering.
It is with that in mind that one can perhaps better appreciate the continuing conversation that has emerged from the aftermath of that visual performance between the U.S. and Ukrainian Heads of State--as persons and as the incarnations of their political collectives. For the President of the United States that migt be best encapsulated in the document posted to the White House Website: President Trump, VP Vance Are Standing Up for Americansand dated 28 February 2025. It follows below. Also provided for consideration is a companion document: Support Pours in for President Trump, VP Vance’s America First Strength of the same date. See also the sometimes quite interesting quotes in the March 1, 2025 More Support for Trump Administration’s Pursuit of Peace in Ukraine. Among the most descriptive of the object of the performance might have been the quote from the Speaker of the US House of Representatives: "“Thanks to President Trump – the days of America being taken advantage
of and disrespected are OVER. The death and destruction of the
Russian-provoked war needs to stop immediately, and only our American
President can put these two countries on a path to lasting peace.
President Zelenskyy needed to acknowledge that, and accept the
extraordinary mineral rights partnership proposal that President Trump
put on the table. What we witnessed in the Oval Office today was an
American President putting America first.” It nicely captures both the performative psychology of Huis Clos as the fundamental manifestation of post-global ordering, but also the nature of the role of Babamaroya in the new fragmented world ordering.
Again, let me be clear, nothing here should be understood either as criticism or praise. I have no role in play in these dramas, nor hardly half enough information to make judgments worthy of the time taken to read them. Nonetheless, from my own small corner of the universe I might observe what is offered for my consumption and perhaps attempt to decipher their signification. In that respect I would not offer any conventional analysis (though I do enjoy soothsaying as an entertainment), just the observation that in its own way this post performance production from the Presidents of the United States and Ukraine may help one to better understand the way the room in which they appear to be enjoying each other's company may be furnished and from which there will be no exit.
But there is a moral, and this from Ifa's Eji Ogbe and the lesson of Babamaroya who was counseled against losing a blessing through haste (ki o ma fi wàràwàrà da ire nu):
* * *
bi o ba da oko (If [Babamaroya] made a farm)
Nwon jo
je ni (Others would eat with him)
Bi won ba
si de ile (When they went home)
On ni yio
gba ile (he was the one who swept the house)
On ni
yio ka eni (he was the one who rolled up the
mats)
Be titi
won nse be, won nse be (And on
and on they were doing so)
Awon
mejo ni si nsun ni ibikanna (There
were eight who were sleeping in the same room)
Won si nse owo po. (And they were trading as partners)
On ni
yio lo ra, on ni yio lo ta; (He
was the one who would go and buy; he was the one who
would go and sell)
Awon ni yio wa pin owo. (and they would share
the profits)
Ti won yio
ko tire le lowo, (When
they gave him his share,)
Iwon ti
o ba wun won ni won yio fun; (They gave him any amount they wished)
Ko ja a
titititi (But he never fought)
* * *
[After a
while all seven partners left, only Babamaroya remained; Babamaroya gathered up
what the seven left behind]
On nikan
lo wa ko, o sa wa la (He
gathered all, and became wealthy)
Ni o wa
njo, ni nyo (He
was dancing, he was rejoicing)
Ni nyin
awon awo, ni awon awo wa nyin Osa (He
was praising the divers, and the diviners were praising Orisha
Pe be ni
awaon awo ti on nse enu rere wi (That his diviners were speaking the
truth)
(Bascom, supra, pp. 114-115 Eji Ogbe A 22).
But who is Babamaroya?
