{"id":171,"date":"2017-09-22T11:44:58","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T15:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/?p=171"},"modified":"2017-09-22T11:44:58","modified_gmt":"2017-09-22T15:44:58","slug":"o%e1%b9%a3un-o%e1%b9%a3ogbo-and-the-creation-of-a-diasporic-legacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/2017\/09\/22\/o%e1%b9%a3un-o%e1%b9%a3ogbo-and-the-creation-of-a-diasporic-legacy\/","title":{"rendered":"O\u1e63un-O\u1e63ogbo and the Creation of a Diasporic Legacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The African Diaspora has been defined by many, and in many different ways. The definition I find that connects with the O\u1e63un-O\u1e63ogbo Festival best would be the how Professor Christopher Johnson, a professor of Religion, the African Diaspora, Atlantic studies and more from the University of Michigan, defines it in Chapter 30, <\/span>\u201cReligions of the African Diaspora\u201d<\/span><\/i> from the book <\/span>\u201cA Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism\u201d<\/span><\/i>. \u201cDiasporic religions are composed on the hand out of memories about space- places of origin, about the distances traversed from them since a time of exile, and the physical or ritual returns imagined, […] diasporic religious agents recollect the past through territorial and temporal ways of seeing, and from particular sites.\u201d This idea of the rituals returns is clear in the film, <\/span>Sacred Journeys: With Bruce Feiler “<\/span><\/i>O\u1e63un-O\u1e63ogb<\/span><\/i>o”<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> as the O\u1e63un-O\u1e63ogbo Festival occurs every year in August and hundreds of thousands of people make the trip to return to Africa and to O\u1e63ogbo for the festivities. <\/span>Alathia Stewart and Oni Yipiay-Henton are two young women that we met<\/span> in the film who came to Africa to be initiated as priestesses of the Yoruba religion. They said that coming back felt like they were taking back all that had been taken from them when their ancestors had been stolen from their homeland, and from their religion. During their time in slavery they weren\u2019t allowed to practice their religion freely, they were forced to hide it and keep it veiled behind Catholicism and Christian ideas. This can be seen in Cuban Santer\u00eda, which can be traced back to Yoruba religion, as many of the gods and goddesses of religion are also associated with Catholic Saints. The goddess Oshun is associated with <\/span>Our Lady of la Caridad del Cobre (Our lady of Charity) and each god or goddess has their own Catholic counterpart.<\/span> In the film they also talked about how many of the traditions in the religions\u2019 homeland haven\u2019t changed in hundreds of years, and that most of them survived through the toll that the African Slave trade took on the people and country of Nigeria. They kept the memories of Africa and these religions alive, which is a key part of being a diasporic religion, because they are composed of these memories. It\u2019s the memories that keep the religion alive in the population. This is such an important part of diasporic religions; the whole festival of O\u1e63un is based off of a memory. That being the memory of how the goddess O\u1e63un became the patron ori\u1e63a, deity, of O\u1e63ogbo, the reason being, because the first king of O\u1e63ogbo chopped down a tree in O\u1e63un’s Sacred grove, breaking her personal dye pots, in an attempt to fix what he had done and to repair this relationship between his kingdom and the goddess, he promised her sacrifices and a festival every August. I think this film gave me a better understanding into diasporic and Yoruba religions, because being able to see part of the festival gave me a better understanding of how large of a religion it actually is. I wasn\u2019t aware that it was in the top 10 largest religions, so to see how many people traveled to come participate in this festival, and knowing from Robert Farris Thompson’s book<\/span> \u201cFace of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and African Americas\u201d<\/span><\/i> chapter on the festival celebrating Yemoja, another deity of the water in Yoruba religion, in Brazil really helps to demonstrate how large of a religion it really is. As well as showing how popular of a religion it is, the film also showed us more into the intimate parts of the religion. When we saw Bruce Feiler, the host of the film, go in and speak with the priest and watch a bit of a ritual, or when we got a look into the process of how the young girl was chosen to carry the sacrifices for O\u1e63un down to the river, we got to actually see a very important part of the religion that we normally do not get to see in the articles that we read. Through this film we are able to see into the religion and make the connection between Yoruba religion and between the African Diaspora. At the same time though, we didn\u2019t get to truly understand what the rituals truly are, and the meaning behind them, because we are only outsiders peering into something that we cannot even begin to understand because the film shows us an American’s view into this African Diasporic religion. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The African Diaspora has been defined by many, and in many different ways. The definition I find that connects with the O\u1e63un-O\u1e63ogbo Festival best would be the how Professor Christopher Johnson, a professor of Religion, the African Diaspora, Atlantic studies and more from the University of Michigan, defines it in Chapter 30, \u201cReligions of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4544,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":172,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}