Poetry
Fá
Not translated into English
Anonymous · 1700
Synopsis
Fá is both a deity of destiny and a method for reading it. The diviner, the bokɔnɔ, passes sixteen sacred palm nuts from one hand to the other, or casts a chain of eight half-shells, and obtains a double figure: sixteen basic signs, combined two by two, yield two hundred and fifty-six. Each sign has allegorical tales, proverbs, songs and prescriptions attached to it; the diviner says what the sign tells of what has been, then indicates the sacrifices, conduct and prohibitions that make it possible to bend fate.
Context
Tradition has the Fa come from Ifè, in Yoruba country, where the same system bears the name Ifa; the colonial administrator Bernard Maupoil, who devoted a study of nearly seven hundred pages to it in 1943, reported that the Fa “was not born in Dahomey”. The traditions he collected, like those of Le Hérissé, place its installation at the court of Abomey in the eighteenth century, under the kings Agaja and above all Tegbesu; the sovereigns then surrounded themselves with official diviners. The same set of signs is found among the Ewe under the name Afa. The Yoruba Ifa was proclaimed an Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2005, and Mahougnon Kakpo proposed a poetic reading of the Fon corpus in 2006.
Who it is for
For those who want to discover an oral literature in which every tale and every proverb answers to a figure drawn by lot.
Prizes and reception
Studied by ethnologists since the colonial period, it is today read by Beninese researchers as poetry as much as an oracle.