Between Orphicism and Mbari
The title of this first entry is also the subtitle[1] of this Cara Musis Weblog. "Cara Musis" means "matters dear to the muses," and the Weblog is dedicated to the synthesis of classicist arts and African sensibilities. As a student at The University of Nigeria, I found very popular among my learned colleagues a tract called "African Origins of Greek Philosophy." The title took me aback, and reading it was a transformative moment in my artistic awareness, not because it resonated with me, but rather the contrary. The book, and much of the other raiment of high Négritude left me wondering: "why it gotta be like that?"
The problem was amplified when I moved to the U.S. and ran headlong into cadres of Eurocentrists even more strident than their Afrocentrist peers. I've wondered why there must be a "versus" between Classical culture and any of the myriad African traditions. I've always been an avid, amateur classical scholar, teaching myself Latin to read Vergil and Ovid, teaching myself Greek (or at least making a very serious attempt) in order to struggle through The Odyssey. As a poet and critic, my taste runs firmly to renaissance, and New Classicism, and the more Classicist elements of Modernism, but Christopher Okigbo is the genius to whom I look, and my sensibilities lie deeply in my Nigerian heritage. I've always argued that these are not separate magisteria of spiritus mundi, but rather a continuum that especially suits today's cultural spirit. Reactionaries see destruction in the melding of European, African, Asian, and other cultures that inevitably characterizes the global information age. That foolish attitude leads to Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, and other destructive bigotries. Cara Musis celebrates one genus of dipole in the rich, salty ocean of the young 21st century.I know there are many of you with similar interests, who find them very poorly represented in media and academy. Please do join me in my journey between Scylla and Charybdis, and then into the Bush of Ghosts. Orphicism is the ancient Greek mystery, a lost tradition, of ritual devotion to the First among Poets. Mbari is a community-wide event, a nearly-lost tradition among Igbo people, focusing on symbolic arts such as painting, body- and house-decoration, story-telling, singing and dancing. Both celebrations respect the relationship of art to good living, of beauty to harvest. Both are symbolic mysteries we can draw from to enrich our lives, and lives of others.
(Mbari House picture from online text of Olu Oguibe's "God's Transistor Radio")
[1] I had at first thought to call it "Between Orphism and Mbari," but I thought that might cause confusion with Apollinaire's idea of "Orphism" as abstract Cubism.
