oba and oya have it out

I've never talked about Oba, not in public anyway.  More, I whisper about her.  Whisper to her.  Whisper around her. Anything might offend. I try not to think about her too much.  Living with her can be pure hell.  But only sometimes.  Here's the problem:  her self-defeatism, if that is a word.

We had a conversation yesterday, 'conversation' being the polite word for it. She fucking cried, pouted, complained, and blamed (everybody else). Again.

"I'm all alone," she wailed, like I'm not right there next to her, as usual.

She then went on—you know the drill—nobody's helping her. Nobody's supporting her. Where's hers? I've heard this all before. Nobody's giving her a break, how 'bout a grant maybe, a really good job where you don't have to work.  How 'bout free rent? Or no rent at all. How 'bout sex? Where's mine?

She cut off her ear, they say, to feed it to Chango.

You know, I just don't have much sympathy.

Oba could use a really good therapist, as far as I'm concerned.

She counters saying I don't understand her. Don't understand her pain. Her sense of humor. Her struggles. Her ambitions.  How-hard-it-all-is for her in this world.  She's absolutely right. She struggles like mad, and everything's a struggle. 'The world' just isn't taking care of her, and she's furious about that.

She's got to do it herself, and that just pisses her off. And she's sick of people telling her to pull herself up by the bootstraps and do it the fuck herself.

She raises her voice. She yells when she's not being just plain morose. She cut off her ear and fed it to Chango. (I mean, it didn't work too well for van Gogh either as a coping mechanism, but hell, at least he didn't stop painting).

Do you think that kind of behavior makes her more attractive?  Do you think Chango was moved?

I'm not much of a supporter of woe-is-me strategies. I grew up hearing them, and I must say all it did was harden my soul.  Make me want to never ever ask anyone for anything. Not long for anyone. And certainly not pine for them. I have no sense of 'deserving' or 'undeserving'. No sense of entitlement at all.

Expect nothing.
Be ready for anything.
Be prepared.
Maybe I'm a Boy Scout at heart.

It's not like Oba needs to pick up a sword to make her point. Granted, that's not her way.  Just pick herself up. Dust herself off. Hold her head high. And get goddamn to work.

See what she's done?  She's got me the fuck swearing.

Maybe I've got way too much of Weber's Protestant Ethic in me and not enough of Mauss's prestations.  Or maybe I'm too selective in my sense of reciprocal obligations. Maybe I'm just a bitch with a sword. Maybe I'm supposed to fix her tight little universe for her. Find her a Chango and hand it to her on an ebony platter. Cut off my own ears and feed them to her so she can see I'm listening?

A good therapist is what she needs.
Maybe I should give her mine.

oshun and oya, in private

Sometimes I wonder if Oshun really gives a damn about Chango.

I mean, there's Oshun. Keeper of the hearth and home. Happy to keep the home fires burning. Happy to hold it all together when Chango is off fighting the good fight, being dramatic, charismatic, and good.

Oshun, I think, is in love with love. Maybe even the idea of love. And she is not at all ambivalent about children and kitties and dogs. She pours out love and caring. And she's very attached to that house.

But Chango?

I mean, I think it's probably a relief for Oshun when Chango goes off awandering. She gets a little time to herself to contemplate the principles of love, without having to deal with the pain in the ass who's very nearly never there.

The women of Medjerda were thrilled when their husbands were away.

They got the courtyard all to themselves then. They could relax. They were not beholden. Multiple wives —polygyny, in other words — was prized, even by the younger women, even though by the time I got there polygyny had been illegal for about 15 years. Bummer, that. I mean it. Multiple wives. How cool is that — for the women, I mean.

Be stuck with Chango all by yourself? Well, no. Having a co-wife or two would make living with a man who thought himself a god (not to mention, taking care of his mother as well) more bearable. Polygyny would ease the terrible burden. The young women I talked with (rural, marriageable fellahi girls) were uniformly not looking forward to being stuck with some preordained husband of their own. Partly it was the geezer factor. It was only the older men who could afford marriage at all.

And love wasn't what it was cracked up to be, either.

The problem with love for these Medjerdiya girls was that the young men they might fancy were almost certain to be unemployed and likely unemployable. There wasn't any land left to distribute. And only one son might inherit his father's lot, and still not own it. They had no education to speak of. And getting a passport to work abroad usually just wasn't in the cards. But many of them did get out. Basbor de la lune — passport of the night. Sneaking over the border to Libya. Well, that's not going to happen again any time soon.

Of course, the women of Medjerda are not devotees of Oshun at all. They put their trust in Allah, and they do their part resisting. I think they'd find Oshun a tad unrealistic.

Romantic love can only get a person into deep shit.

But the love of the household, the children — well that's a pretty safe place to be. And when Chango's off with his Oya, you can relax into knowing the place is all yours. And the kids are too. And you build an obligation in them, so that when they're grown and there's no place else to go — they'll take you in. But if you yourself try to leave before they're grown, you can't take them with you, and so when you and they are young there's no place you can go.

There's a law in Tunisia, still on the books I believe. About foreign women who marry a Tunisian man. Should they divorce, the children are his and his family's. She cannot take them out of the country, not even for a visit without his leave. Family law wholeheartedly supports patrilineal privilege.

The Imazighen of Morocco, have it just the other way around. When a man leaves, the children stay with their mother. Matrilineal, still, to the core, the Berbers are. But it's not at all the law.

Heartbreaking either way. Staying. Overstaying. Leaving. Falling in love. Dangerous stuff, these.

Oshun. She believes in love. Embodies it, as if it will keep her safe. She's needed there at home. Who else will do her job? You can't fire her, right? Disaster would ensue.

But the Changos of the world do fire her. Or they leave her there to figure it all out on her own. For the Changos of the world, the adventure is with Oya. The larger issues. The global affairs. High drama, intensity, and the cause of justice in the air.

Most likely I've misrepresented Oshun here.

And that's me — who can Oshun as fiercely as the next person. Tiger-mummy extraordinaire. I can do that. I do do that. But my Oshun still comes out looking a whole lot like Oya. Just like my chicken soup can't help ending up a minestrone, heavy on the lemon.

But I can't stand an Oshun who is beholden. Who sits at home and waits for Chango's return. Who doesn't stand a chance in the realm of grand adventure. Who has nowhere else to go.

And yet, look at all those altars! Oshun, that's what people want. Find me a mate, Oshun. Bring me children, Oshun. Give me your life, Oshun.

It's not like anyone's asking for Oya's favors, unless they are very, very desperate for a dramatic change.

Oshun wins inside the public imagination. She's got a hold, a grasp Chango's not willing to let go of. Somebody's got to do it. And she does it so bloody well.

Oya walks away, or rather, she turns and runs. You're not going to tame her the way you tame Oshun.

Strange thing about Oya is that she too has to live someplace. Strange thing is that Oya can do Oshun all by herself and do her really, really well indeed. I think there's not a soul on earth who thinks that but me. Okay, you say, but that's not love. Okay, I say, but maybe it is.

I mean, Oya's got to come from somewhere and she's got to go home again too sometimes. And Oshun might be afraid of adventure. But Oya finds it all divine.

Sometimes I think I'm more like Oya. Sometimes there's no question I do Oshun. Maybe it's Chango who's overrated. Time to think more about Ogun.

on being oya to your chango

Yah, I wanna be Oya to your Chango. No domestic tranquility for me. I was cursed, to tell the truth, so that's how it would be. I think it's worked out pretty well, to tell the truth. And yah, he actually used that word 'curse' — a little dramatic, don't you think? What kind of moron curses in this day and age?

So. I'll be your Oya. We'll have our adventure. We'll ride off and conquer death together. Conquer grief together. You'll raise your battle horn and give a blast. Shofar, the way shofar was meant to be! But at the end of the day, you'll go home. Oshun, with her irresistible smile, awaits you. She'll ground you. She'll hold down the fort for you.

I figured the whole thing out recently. Was trying to explain my worldview, somehow. Not the worldview that I'd like to have. No. The cosmology in which I seem to operate.

I think it was that comment, "Too bad you don't like opera..." that helped me figure it out. See how useful our mothers are? No. I don't want to live inside the opera. It's absolutely true. Opera belongs on the stage, right?

So what kind of hypocrite am I?

A. F. C. Wallace wrote this wonderful article about time. It's published in a fairly recent issue of AOC — Anthropology of Consciousness. Last five years, maybe ten. I don't know, I can't hold on to time. Time-slipping. That's another piece of the puzzle. Wallace talks about three kinds of time.

Linear time: in which events are placed sequentially, and then we call it history. We count in days and months and years. Decades, centuries, millenia. The point is that we count. We keep track. This happened. And then that happened. This is the least interesting of the three, although it does point out that there are consequences to our actions. That's not a bad thing at all. But it makes it sound like this thing led to that thing — if we string the things out just so — and that might not be what's really going on at all. We might have left out a string or two or three in our analysis.

Cyclical time: in which it's never over. In which we have another chance to try it out again. If this cycle doesn't work out so well, hell, we'll just reincarnate, and it'll be better next time. And then we don't have to worry about death so much. Next time, next time — as if there is a next time. As if there are do-overs. As if we get a second chance or third. As if only the truly 'evolved' (spiritually speaking) will get a chance to be released. Then, and only then, are we okay with death.

And then there's:

Mythical time: in which the gods are ever-present. And so is id, ego, and superego. These things do not recycle, and they're not linear, evolving from child to adult; from magical to rational. That's long ago been demonstrated to be absolute nonsense. Mythic time is ever-present. The capricious pantheon of gods — whether Sumerian or Egyptian or Greek or Ugaritic, or the mythic time of the Songhay empire — are archetypic patterns that we play out. We look to the gods and see ourselves. In all our folly, and in our glory too.

Bachofen says that the struggle between the gods takes on a dialectical form. Can we call it dialectical mythology? First, he says, in the earliest myths, the female deities held sway. Goddesses reigned supreme. And in their hubris, they abused their power. The males rose up and conquered them. Gods! And eventually, one god supreme. And when that god becomes so tyrannical that they can no longer stand it, women will rise up, and the goddesses will return. Right.

Bachofen says mythology hands us the pattern. He doesn't say it's historically accurate. He says we carry it all ourselves. Each of us — until we discover our collectivity and rise up — and become gods.

Okay. That's not what he says, that last part. But I like it.

I've inhabited mythic time and space my whole life. I feel more comfortable there.

Teish came over one time. Voodoo queen extraordinaire. Priestess. Dancer. Storyteller... We were working on a project together. She walked into the house. Intake of breath. She walked into my bedroom. Seeing with her expert eye.

"Oya," she said.

It's not the first time I've heard that. Bibbo says it too. Candomblé practitioner from Brazil. He's told me this for years.

Oya, they agree, is the orisha of my head.

There's no Oshun for me.

That. That right there. That was the curse.

Well, fine. I can live with it.

Apparently, my entire house is 'done up' as an altar to Oya. Tribute to her. Her colors. Most of all, her feeling. A place she is at home in.

This does not at all match my mother's description of my home. Early Istanbul whorehouse, is what she calls it. Bordello. Brothel. But my mom, she likes opera. Whereas Teish — well, Teish is just stating the facts. Right?

I don't think I'm as brave as Oya. I don't think I take charge. I don't do battle, that I know for sure. I'm not a goddess of radical transformation. So what the hell are they talking about? But when they say these things, I can feel Oya's heartbeat inside my own. Maybe I don't understand bravery and battle. She's not a man, after all. Maybe Oya's bravery is something else entirely. Maybe I've got it. Maybe I don't.

Maybe Oya takes chances. Maybe Oya says yes, where others would say no. Maybe Oya leaps where others tiptoe.

And maybe Oya is only Oya when she meets her own Chango.