Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X

COMPARING YORUBA AND WESTERN AESTHETICS:
A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART, CULTURE AND AESTHETICS

Eric Morton

PROLEGOMENA

aesthetic (es thet' ik), adj. 1.pertaining to a sense of the beautiful or to the science of aesthetics. 2.having a sense of the beautiful: characterized by a love of beauty. 3.pertaining to, involving, or concerned with pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality. — n. 4. aesthetics. 5. a philosophical theory or idea of what is aesthetically valid at a given time and place: . clean line, bare surfaces, and sense of space that bespeak the machine-age aesthetic. 6. Archaic. the study of the nature of sensation.1

I have selected the above definition of aesthetics—with special attention to the fifth more narrow use of the noun, aesthetics—for the purposes of beginning this inquiry. I prefer the use of "aesthetics" as a noun because the word presumes a philosophical theory or idea of aesthetic validity at any given time or place. The noun, aesthetics, places the term in the context of cultural processes. Cultural influences shape the artist in the practice of his or her craft in Africa as well as in the West. "Culture" is the inescapable shaper that affects everything from the artists' sense of identity (national and artistic) to the political and spiritual postures from which that identity springs. The noun "aesthetics" provides the only meaning that can be useful in all societies: a definition which encompasses all of the factors—art, religion, and politics—which govern an audience's perception of and appreciation for an art object. Aesthetics, then, is the sum of factors, with inter- related essences, which are noted, consciously or unconsciously, by the audience and prized by them or disparaged by them. Aesthetics as a noun is a usage that refers to the cultural canons of a people.

Although the noun usage can be generally applied to Yoruba and western aesthetics, a problem arises when we attempt to make aesthetic evaluations of specific art objects. We are forced to deal with several questions. We must ask ourselves: What is (or are) Yoruba aesthetics? What is (or are) African American aesthetics? What is (or are) western and American aesthetics? Is there a difference between African (black) and western (white) aesthetics? If so, what is (or are) the difference(s). The answers to these questions force us to recognize the differences between Yoruba concepts of aesthetics and western concepts of aesthetics. Too often western critics see African and Yoruba art as reflected images of a European scientific and socio-political discourse, an enormous error which confuses reflections for reality, impressions for meanings. Thus we read about western "discoveries" of primitive African and Yoruba art produced by cultures that were in existence when Europe was still a medieval backwater.

The questions I raise do lead to philosophical problems. Broadly speaking, there are two different ways of addressing the problems. One is to claim that all works of art have something in common, some defining characteristic that makes art especially valuable; but a universal definition of "beauty" also would have to share in this claim. However, historically, various aesthetic theories have proposed different accounts of what it is that all works of art share what it is that gives them aesthetic value and beauty. These theories fall into three general types: 1) art as imitation, 2) art as form, or 3) art as function.

The second approach to answering these questions is to look not at the objects we admire or abhor but to ask ourselves what is the interest we take in our admiration or abhorrence of art objects. The second approach inevitably leads to a theory of aesthetic appreciation which takes into account how we form responses of pleasure, detachment, or distaste. When we judge something to be beautiful or not we make a complex judgment based on the psychological, sociological, political, and cultural influences that mold our ideas of taste.

Briefly, I will examine the historical dimensions of aesthetics in Yoruba and western cultures. Then I will offer my philosophical view of an African American aesthetics, via an analysis of the influences that have shaped African American aesthetics, especially those influences that I deem to be derived from Yoruba. The last task will require giving an historical perspective to the introduction and acculturation of the African to the New World of Euro-American culture.

Yoruba Aesthetics: A History of Continuity and Change

The Yoruba people constitute one of the major ethnic groups in Africa— twenty-five million people—whose cultural history extends across a large area of West Africa. Today, it is not easy to define the area of Yoruba cultural influence. However, using broad criteria of common language, traditions, origins of the traditional ruling class, political institutions and organizational patterns, religion, morals and the geographical contiguity of the lands occupied by the different Yoruba groups, a measure of agreement may be presumed about the definition and boundaries of the core. In Nigeria, Yoruba culture covers all the states of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo and Ondo as well as the Ilorin and Kabba regions of the Kwara State. In the People's Republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey), the core of Yoruba culture covers the area between the Weme River and the Nigerian border. The Ana and Fe (Ife) sub-groups of Yoruba culture occupy the Atakpame region of the neighboring Togo Republic. Pockets of Yoruba are found in other parts of Nigeria, in some West African countries and even in the West Indies and South America. In fact, the trans-Atlantic slave trade resulted in the forced exportation of a large number of Yoruba into the Americas where, as in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil and most Caribbean Islands, they have remained as the largest single group of African people in the Diaspora.2

The historical origins of the Yoruba people and their culture cannot be traced precisely. One Yoruba oral tradition claims that the Yoruba have inhabited their homeland since the creation of the world. According to this tradition, in the beginning the world was a mass of water. The Yoruba High God, Olodumare, sent Oduduwa from heaven to create the earth and the human race. Oduduwa descended with his lieutenants and landed at Ile-Ife in northwest Africa where he accomplished his mission. By this tradition, Ile-Ife is the cradle of all humankind. Later another tradition claims that as a result of a political crisis in Arabia after the rise of Islam the Yoruba migrated to their present homeland from Mecca under the leadership of Oduduwa. Some scholars have concluded that, while it was possible that Yoruba had contact with Mecca or other parts of Arabia before they migrated, their real place of origin was either Egypt or Nubia. In any case, all Yoruba traditions acknowledge Oduduwa as the spiritual leader and founding father. The first creation story refers to events that happened thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The second migration story had to happen after the rise of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Therefore, two versions make it difficult to be precise about the origins of the Yoruba people and their culture.3

It is certain that Oduduwa is the founder/leader of the Yoruba people and that Ile-Ife is the cradle of the Yoruba religion. The essence of the Yoruba religion is a belief in and worship of the Supreme Being Olodumare. Also Yoruba recognizes a number of lesser deities who serve as intermediaries between Olodumare and human beings. Both Olodumare and the deities initiated contact with humans at Ile-Ife. Some Yoruba accounts say that these deities, such as Obatala, Ogun, Esu-Elegba, Yemoja, and others were believed to be in the original party, led by Oduduwa, and sent by Olodumar e to create life on earth at Ile-Ife. The Yoruba people regard Ile-Ife as the origin of their religion as well as the origin of the world. Ile-Ife is to the Yoruba what Mecca, Bethlehem and Jerusalem are to the Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

The many myths and episodes regarding Oduduwa and the founding of the Yoruba people at Ile-Ife reveal themes of heroic struggle: Oduduwa, as the spiritual leader of the Yoruba people, had to overcome many obstacles, including the aggression of powerful outsiders who were bent on destroying the kingdom of Ife. Yoruba history chronicles their many achievements in the realm of government, religion, and art. Some of these events occurred during Oduduwa's reign, and some occurred after, as a result of what Oduduwa started.4

The traditional Yoruba worldview has remained fairly constant in spite of the introduction of Christianity and Islam.5 Before the colonial period, the Ifa system had come to terms with Islam by incorporating Islam into the Yoruba tradition of creation. Likewise, the Yoruba have succeeded in adapting the traditions of other world religions to meet their needs, while at the same time maintaining Yoruba cultural identity. Some change has occurred, but the religious institutions and beliefs among the Yoruba still show much continuity with the past.6 For instance, Ifa remains a body of lore which Yoruba Christians and Muslims consult.

The Yoruba world has two dimensions that represent the whole: Orun, the metaphysical and invisible world; and the Aye, the visible world inhabited by all life forms. The Yoruba cosmos contains Olodumare, the supreme deity; the Orisa, or lesser divinities; ancestral spirits, and a number of other categories of spiritual beings. Humans are composed of corporeal and spiritual elements of both worlds; the spiritual elements have a variety of functions related to Yoruba beliefs about destiny and reincarnation. Humans fulfill their individual destinies through piety, divination, and sacrifice and by recognizing and paying homage to the power of the Orisas, thus soliciting their help and the help of ancestors.7

The relationship of human souls to fate and destiny is the reason for divination rites. Divination rites are a means of linking the spirit world with this world through the poetry of the Ifa. Ifa or Orunmila is the God of Divination who informs mortals of the wishes of Olodumar e. Eshu is the Divine Trickster and the Messenger of Olodumare. Eshu delivers sacrifices to Olodumare and sees to it that those who sacrifice attain their ends while those who do not are punished.8 Ifa connects the visible world to the Orisa who give the gift of divination rites to humans. Yoruba myth says the Orisa Orunmila witnessed creation and therefore knows the personal destiny of every human. At a divination rite, the priest of Ifa, known as babalawo, "father of ancient wisdom," chants at length from the corpus poetry of Ifa. (Those who have witnessed the sermonizing of black Baptist preachers will immediately recognize similarities.) The chanting of the poetry provides a context of thought and values within which supplicants reflect upon the dilemmas and aspirations that have brought them to seek the assistance of Ifa.9 (Later we will see how poetry and its oral-aural rhythms provide a similar service to the African American.)

Five ancient concepts are essential to an understanding of Yoruba aesthetics.10

(1) Ase means "power" or "authority". However, the meaning of Ase is extraordinarily complex. Ase is used in a variety of contexts. One of the most important meanings is the "vital power, the energy, the great strength of all things."11 Ase also refers to a divine energy manifest in the process of creation and procreation. Ase invests all things, exists everywhere, and is a source for all creative activity. Again, Ase often refers to the inner power or "life force." Ase also refers to the "authority" by which one speaks or acts.

(2) Ori is the "inner spiritual head" in humans or "personal destiny," not mind or soul as these terms are used in the West. But Ori can mean the enabling power that represents the potential that life contains.

(3) Iwa can mean "character" or "essential nature." Two classifications of usage of Iwa are generally recognized: the ontological-descriptive and the ethical evaluative. The ontological-descriptive meaning enables one to identify the quantitative existence of a person as revealed by their behaviour, the "lifestyle" or manner in which they exist in the world. The ethical-evaluative meaning represents a qualitative judgment of how good or bad is their iwa.

(4) Ewa is an aesthetic term as well as an expression of iwa, a person's essential nature. Ewa means "beauty", referring in some contexts to physical beauty of a person or object, but mostly to the qualities of beauty of a person or object. The term can be used to describe how a work of art captures the essential quality of the subject.

(5) Ona means "art" or it can refer to an artist's ability to create or design. In Yoruba "art" cannot be defined outside of the context of the processes of creation, the purpose of creation, and the skill of the artist in capturing the first two contextualities in order to produce a physical object that embodies meaning.

The Yoruba's language of aesthetic discourse has evolved within the context of the religion and culture. As a result the Yoruba have a sophisticated terminology and methodology for evaluating creativity and beauty. Their methods and language apply across the board, whether they are evaluating the words spoken by Priests, Priestesses, and the chanters, or the Ifa poetry recited by their poets, or the creative products of carvers, blacksmiths, potters, weavers, or the fluid motions of dancers, and the rhythmic music of musicians. The Yoruba people would say to the uninitiated person or the outsider that they "see through their nose," without understanding. To the artist and the discerning person they would say that they see as one who has "walked with the elders." A thorough understanding of Yoruba—which means one has learned from the elders and history—is the only way one can see and understand the iwa, the essential nature of creativity.

Western Aesthetics: A History of Representation and Change

The etymology of the term "aesthetics" derives from the Greek aisthesis ("sensation"). In the Western tradition the term has come to designate not the whole domain of the sensible, but only that portion to which the term "beauty" may apply. The German philosopher, Alexander Baumgarten, who lived between 1714 and 1762, first used the term, aesthetics, to convey physical "beauty."12 Baumgarten defined aesthetics broadly, although his theory of beauty was the essential element of his definition. Many others contributed to the definition of the term, but it was Kant and Hegel who canonized the more limited reference of the term to apply to an Euromorphic concept of perfection and beauty represented by symbolic art (iconography as substantive form).13

Western theories concerning the qualities of beauty in art and nature can be traced to early philosophers such as Socrates. Discussions of beauty in art have engaged the energies of western philosophers ever since.14 The history of western aesthetics is one of constant critical theorization over representation and change, culminating in what Martin Bernal refers to as the overthrow of the "Ancient Model" and the enthronement of the "Aryan Model."15 As an example of this change, Bernal notes that Friedrich August Wolf, a German historian and philosopher, concluded in 1804 that the "Homeric epics should be seen not as the work of a single author but as the product of the childhood of the Greek-European Volk as a body."16 Other western philosophers advanced theories of aesthetics.

(1) Plato (428-384 B.C.) held to an imitation theory of art, believing art to be an imitation of some aspect of the space-time world which for him was an imitation of an imitation. Beauty referred to function; that is, the symmetry, proportion, and use of form. Plato, Isocrates, and Aristophanes explored the application of rhetoric, and logic and the art of deductive reasoning as a means of perceiving and defining the qualities of beauty and abstract ideas after which the material world is patterned.17

(2) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) modified Plato's imitation theory so that art became an imitation not of an actual, but of a possible thing. He produced a theory in which beauty depends upon an abstract unity, a unity in which every part must equal the whole. Aristotle emphasized an abstraction over function.18 For example, Aristotle said, "For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history."19 Aristotle is regarded as the father and almost the founder of Western aesthetics.

(3) Plotinus (205-270) associated the beautiful with a radiance or splendor, resulting from the quality of unity in the object. Plotinus applied a monotheistic notion to beauty and aesthetics. For Plotinus the One was a divine principle, more or less completely reflected in the world.20

(4) Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) combined principles from his predecessors, while developing a Christianized concept at the same time. He brought Aristotelian philosophy into the framework of the Christian faith. Beauty is that which gives pleasure on sight, and, hence, is related to the cognitive faculties. Beautiful objects (within the framework of faith) must have integrity or perfection, proportion or harmony, and brightness or clarity.21

(5) Empiricist David Hume (1711-1776) held that experience is composed of impressions and ideas. Habit or custom developed through experience leads people to connect two aesthetic events in a causal manner. The foundation of human sensibilities is the sense of necessity gained by experience. According to Hume's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1748, "If it happen, from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of correspondent ideas. . . .A Laplander or Negro has no notion of the relish of wine." In making this statement Hume makes the extraordinary leap of linking race and aesthetic judgment, a notion that would be incomprehensible to Yoruba culture.

(6) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) also directed his attention to the development of aesthetic judgment, finding beauty in whatever produced a sense of harmony in the relations between the faculties of the will and the understanding. When the adaptation of nature to reason is subjective one has the field of aesthetics. When the adaptation is objective or logical, one has a theological view, that is, nature as including organic life. Kant's views of aesthetic appreciation are developed in his Critique of Judgment (1790).22 Earlier, Kant argues in Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) that different nations and races have different aesthetic and moral sensibilities. Kant placed whites at the top of the human hierarchy in the development of aesthetic and moral sensibilities.

(7) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) took the position that beauty is found in representation of truth in sensuous form. Reason is the guide to reality. The rational and the real are identified as one. The rational and the real are representations of the absolute shining through appearance. Hegel's notions of real, beauty, and art are Eurocentric in the extreme. Christianity represents the Absolute truth. He wrote that the global process of human socio-political evolution was divine (Christian) Reason realizing itself in history:23

...We must first take notice of those natural conditions which have to be excluded once for all from the drama of the World' History. In the Frigid and in the Torrid zone the locality of World-historical peoples cannot be found...Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained—for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World—shut up...Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be, their lot in their own land is even worse.24

(8) Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) a poet, scholar, educator, literary and social critic lays a basis for Eurocentric aesthetic judgment in his two-volume Essays in Criticism (1865 and 1888). Simply stated, his standard for evaluating aesthetics is the art of judging the quality and value of "the best that is known and thought in the world."25 Which in Arnold's mind was the creative works of Europeans. Arnold cited these rather ambiguous values as qualities of art: plainness of style; natural magic; high seriousness. In a letter to A. H. Clough, dated February 12, 1853, Arnold wrote, "Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."26

(9) Sigmund Freud (1856-1940) added a psychological dimension to the aesthetic judgment theory. What is aesthetically compelling relates to the inner drama of man, rooted in the great drives of life and death, race, culture, sex and guilt. The artistic consciousness works through repression and sublimation of the material that represents the great drives. Thus the viewer is captivated by the artist's transformed material that culminates in his artistic creativity.27

(10) Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) took a somewhat different approach than Freud by positing a collective unconsciousness. The aesthetic material to which we respond is the archetypal deposit within the collective unconscious of every individual. The artist works with this material, however, unknowingly, and to this we respond.28

(11) Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) identified the arts with the presentation of "unconsummated symbols" to our awareness. These symbols bear intentionality, yet lack dictionary definition:

. . . among all races there appear certain recurrent, simple idioms that are really nothing but the ultimate symbols of their vital consciousness: calls, chimes, cradle-rhythms, work-rhythms; dance forms, often intimately related to certain bodily movements and steps; shouts, hunting calls and military signals, highland themes and tallyhos; also plenty of borrowings from the national liturgy; in short, all sorts of motifs in which an undercurrent of popular imagination reveals itself.29

Before leaving this evaluation of European theories on aesthetic appreciation to discuss African American aesthetics, I emphasize that Langer's theory of "unconsummated symbols" has poignant significance when we consider the element of "racialism" inherent in today's prevailing notions of what constitutes beauty and art.

African American Aesthetics: A History of Necessity for Change

The breakout of the human spirit as a reaction to oppression is a constant theme in African American art, from the slave narratives to the paintings of Jacob Lawrence and William Howard Johnson. By necessity, African American aesthetics have been shaped by the history of acculturation of Africans in the Americas. The remembrance of Africa, the middle passage, slavery and the plantation system, emancipation, Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, northward migration, urbanization, segregation and racism profoundly affected the minds, hearts, and souls of Africans in the Diaspora. These same forces formed the foundation for the development of African American art and aesthetics. All the elements of the Black Diaspora are reflected in each artistic genre, music and dance, poetry and prose, oratory and drama.30 Aesthetic forms of African oral histories and rhythmic styles survived in the Diaspora and emerged on the North American continent as a unique ancestral mix that produced authentic Africanized "American" forms of creativity. Toni Morrison, during a television interview, made the salient observation that black literature is "remembering and describing", an "exorcism" of black history. "The consequences of slavery presents aspects that only artists can deal with."

The slave newly arrived from their African homeland is one thing; the acculturated African American is quite another. What is required, above all else, is an understanding of the exigencies that constitute the African American "epic." What is least understood is the process of the "Americanization" of the Africans. Disassociated from their homelands and dispossessed of their myths, religion, art, culture, and history, Africans were stranded forever by their colour and stuck in an unmanageable present. Plantation slavery denied Africans a human presence in space and time.31 In a conversation with Margaret Mead, James Baldwin described his sense of time deprivation:

The past is the present.I am one of the dispossessed. According to the West I have no history (yet) my life was defined by the time I was five by the history written on my brow...The political position of my father, whether or not he knew it, was dictated by his very honorable necessity not to break faith with the Old/New World. But the black American must find a way to keep faith with, and to excavate, a reality much older than Europe.32

The problem of bridging the gap between the ancient world and the New World is equivalent to the effort of crossing from one black hole to another black hole in an expanding universe.

Music and the spoken word, both ancient means of expression, give creative form to time and space. These two vehicles of expression allowed African slaves to travel back and forth between Africa's past and the New World's present. Work songs, folk songs, love songs, field hollers, gospels, soulful harmonies, blues, bebop, rap, folklore, preaching, black theology, and political commentary; "the dozens," "signifiying", proverbs and hoodoo have been synthesized into new genres of the black culture. What has emerged and is still emerging is an African American aesthetic of continuity and change. LeRoi Jones gives further emphasis to this "art of translation-assimilation" in his work Blues People:

The African cultures, the retention of some parts of these cultures in America, and the weight of the stepculture produced the American Negro. A new race. I want to use music as my persistent reference just because the development and transmutation of African music to American Negro music (a new music) represents to me this whole process in microcosm.33

The use of discordance and dissonance constitutes basic elements of jazz, blues, rap, dance, painting, and sculpture, as well as black literary styles. One can see these cultural nuances in the "way" black people choose to dance, sing, write, and talk. Stock harmonies, melodic repetition, explosive imagery, and rhythmic emotional phrasing represent a syncretization that was essential to the birth of blues and jazz. The modal improvisations in jazz and blues notes were derived from the flatting or bending of the thirds, sevenths and fifths into quarter tones, which greatly expanded the creative limits for mixing the harmonic and melodic elements within musical chords.

Segregation helped promote the intermingling of black musicians, preachers, charlatans, doctors, lawyers, chauffeurs and hustlers in neighbourhood bars, roadhouses and the black church. The inclusion and seclusion of these disparate communal associations, facilitated by racial exclusion, helped lay a fertile foundation for African American culture. These ritual-like situations, simple and elaborate, formed a fertile field for the growth of African American aesthetics. Ralph Ellison touches on this phenomenon in describing the influences of his youth, growing up in a frontier state, which had achieved statehood only seven years before his birth.

Gamblers and scholars, jazz musicians and scientists, Negro cowboys and soldiers from the Spanish-American and First World Wars, movie stars and stunt men, figures from the Italian Renaissance and literature, both classical and popular...were combined with the special virtues of some local boot-legger, the eloquence of some Negro preacher, the strength and grace of some local athlete, the ruthlessness of some businessman-physician, the elegance in dress and manners of some headwaiter or hotel doorman.34

For the five centuries black people have been present in North America their stately presence is not easily discernible in the museums, the literature, the history books, and the principal outlets of American art and aesthetics. Yet, African American artists, writers and philosophers, have consistently attempted to correct this omission by their efforts to define themselves, their art, their history, and their philosophy. But recognition of the contributions of African American art and aesthetics as an authentic creation and a vital part of American history and culture continues to be ignored.

The concept of a black aesthetic finds little acceptance among traditional Euro-American critics and arbiters of taste. Consider that even black abolitionists had to resist the attempt of white abolitionists to change their way of telling their slave narratives. Writers such as David Walker, William Wells, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Jacobs, and Olaudah Equiano were under constant pressure to make their stories more acceptable to white sensibilities. Blacks secretly learned to read and write under impossible conditions. Nonetheless, black abolitionists and leaders of slave rebellions developed an eloquence that universally spoke to other people of the need and desire for freedom, justice and equality; an eloquence that still rests comfortably and aesthetically with the universal declarations of human rights. Ralph Ellison gives recognition to this fact:

[The] Negro American writer is. . .heir of the human experience which is literature, and...taken as a whole, its spirituals along with its blues, jazz and folk tales, has . . .much to tell us. . .of the blues-like absurdity known to those who brought it into being. For those who are able to translate its meaning into wider, more precise vocabularies it has much to offer indeed.35

At the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, black artists liberated themselves from the restrictions imposed by hegemonic white culture. The period known as the Harlem Renaissance flourished as it opened a path to the emergence of a new black consciousness. This explosion of distinctive African American music, dance, art and literature greatly influenced white America's most creative artistic and literary period—the Jazz Age. For the first time in America, the influence of black culture surfaced as the popular culture.36 Black artists, such as Jacob Lawrence and Katherine Dunham exhibited a freer spirit that favored the vital instead of the exquisite; challenge was more significant than charm. Black artists discarded supplicant tones and mimicry of white manners and styles. An eminent black writer of this period was Claude McKay, self-proclaimed purebred African from Jamaica. His sonnet, If We Must Die, is a deliberate exhortation of unity and defiance.37

If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
and for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Dissatisfied with whites' Eurocentric insistence that their view of history, their canon, art and beauty were the most desirable, the Black Arts movement, spearheaded by African American jazz musicians, artists and writers, continued into the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. This new era of black consciousness included entrepreneurialism, Black Nationalism and separatism. Black artists—painters, dancers, orators, bebop musicians, writers, and purveyors of popular culture, such as music mogul, Barry Gordy—defined their own concepts of beauty. Their creations countered the reductive and assimilative views of America. Black artists focused their creativity on exploring their origins. Many black artists and intellectuals in the 1960s turned to Islam, Black Power and Black Nationalism, disavowing western culture altogether. Some artists used Black Art as a weapon to fight white standards of beauty, to "show up the enemy," to lift the people, to support revolution, to dismantle white canon. Words and images became weapons.

LeRoi Jones's style is a strikingly discordant example of literary creativity as warfare. His arresting vocabulary communicates shocking ideas like missiles hurled at his enemies. His writing celebrates blackness and espouses black separatism. Written after he had changed his name to Imamu Imiri Baraka, and after he had divorced his Jewish wife, Black Art enunciates a clarion call for a new black aesthetic and a more in-your-face form of black consciousness.

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or tree or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, wd they shoot
come at you, love what you are
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing.


...We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking
Whores! We want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff
poems for dope selling wops.


...Setting fire and death to
whities ass...


We want a black poem. And a
Black World.38

It is this writer's opinion that this "Movement's" overreliance on expressions of pseudo-African heritage, violence and vulgarity poses profound aesthetic problems. The narrow restrictions of angst and anger can be an aesthetic burden. The interpretation and recitation of the black experience should encompass more than invective language

The importance of Yoruba aesthetics to American social and literary history offers a basis for a broader understanding of American and world culture. One of the earliest published recognition's given to this understanding came in an essay on the clarinetist Sidney Bechet, written in 1919 by the eminent Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet. Ansermet concluded with the comment that perhaps Bechet's way

...is the highway along which the whole world will move tomorrow...
Jazz is a major contribution of Afro-Americans to contemporary culture. It was they who created it and they who provided its greatest influences and innovations. It has been the bridge, the connection from the oral past to the New World.39

If the aim of African American aesthetics is to transcend the Du Boisian dilemma of the double consciousness of the African American, then it is essential for the African American artist to seek and isolate those elements that give special character and universality to black arts and letters.

© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center

Citation Format

Morton, Eric. (2000). COMPARING YORUBA AND WESTERN AESTHETICS: A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ART, CULTURE AND AESTHETICS. Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 1 , 1.

Table of Contents

** Table of Contents

0. 1. Prolegomena
0.1. Yoruba Aesthetics: a History of…
0.2. Western Aesthetics: a History of…
0.3. African American Aesthetics: a History…