Incantation and the Yoruba Art of Speaking Reality into Being Opening Ọ̀rọ̀ tí a bá sọ, a kì í fà á padà (the word once spoken cannot be pulled back). A Yoruba elder does not say this the way an English speaker says “you can’t unring a bell.” The English version is a warning about consequence: be careful, your words […]
At 2am on Monday, someone got into the refrigeration controls of an ICA store in Stockholm. Staff noticed hours later. “There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees,” the sales manager told Reuters. The same night, around 40 Delhaize stores in Belgium and Luxembourg had their evaporators switched into defrost mode. One branch in Hoeilaart put […]
Yoruba praise poetry, lineage memory, and the art of being called by name CHAPTER ONE The Sound of Your Own Name Ilé la ń wò, ká tó sọ ọmọ lórúkọ. We look at the home before we give the child a name. Somewhere tonight a grandmother is holding a restless child and chanting over it. She is not singing a […]