In one of my recent projects, as means of remembrance and recollection, I have underscored original poetry with hand-drumming traditions that reach back over millennia to that time on earth when drummers, healers, poets and gods were women.
Surviving oral traditions and ancient writings link us to these other times. As example here are a few excerpts from poems or songs that span the last 4,300 years. All of them relate in some way a powerful and divine, often female, figure that in most instances is also equated with some force in nature, or as the earth itself.
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Following is a song in the Yoruba traditions of Nigeria and Benin, traditions coming through slavery to Brazil and the Caribbean, safeguarded, for example, by Cuban Santería in the batá drum ceremonies that still take place today, and are related to honoring the Orisas.
Song #13 to Yemoja, the Mother of the Children of Fishes, translates:
It is indeed the work of knowledge
We come indeed for the purpose of knowledge
It is indeed the work of the Owner of Heaven
Owner of Waters Owner of Odú, Owner of the Sea
you quickly do good
We come indeed for the purpose of knowledge1
From a poem titled "A Clay Pot (One of the Banpo Ruins)," by contemporary Chinese Poet Li Xiaoyu. The ruins in Banpo Village, Shaanxi Province, are from China's ancient Neolithic Yangshao Culture:
Ah my mother with her long disheveled hair
Enwrapped in animal skin
She pointed to
The purest earth, water and flame
The world was thus born
Born into
A pregnant curve
An unborn babe moving inside its mother
A fruit at the instant of ripening
A sun
A perfect union of heaven and earth
A clay pot2
This is pre-Columbian, Anonymous from the Apache. It's a traditional "Puberty Rite Dance Song":
I come
to the White Painted Woman
I come
through her long life…
I come through all her fruits…
Through her holy truth
she goes about3
Here is a traditional woman's song of Papua, New Guinea, from the Elema Tribe:
Oh moon, oh moon!
Who is your mother?
White crescent!
If she frowns at you
bad harvest befalls you.
If she does not—
your mouth will be full….4
From a poem titled "Goddess of Matriarchy," by Anna Swir, Poland, 1909-1984:
You will arrive on your legs thick as power,
you, powerful
as a million years of fire
enclosed in a million years of ice.
And you will open your mouth
walled shut for a million years.
And you will bring to the world
stone tablets
of a new Decalogue
not stained with blood.5
From the Oaxaca tribes of Mexico, "Luna, del ombligo enterrado" / "Moon, from the buried umbilical cord," as sung by Lila Downs:
Moon, which the clay swings in the foam
Of all the nights of my solitude
I follow the steps you lead me to
The place you came from
…the place where I will end…
And I believe in the mouth of my earth
That from the root feeds my belly button
The mouth of the dead that is found in my center
My center, my temple of life
My center, my temple of life6
Lastly is En-hedu-Ana, high priestess of Sumer and of the temple of the moon god Nanna, in the city-state of Ur, about 2285 BCE, in what is now southern Iraq. She is recognized as the first writer, the first poet in history whose name and writing are together preserved. This is part of her invocation to the goddess Inanna:
62. full of wisdom, foresight, queen over all lands,
63. …I now strike up your fate-determining song!
81. … I will now say a prayer to you.
91. My driven divine wild cow!
136. I have heaped the coals,
prepared the purification rites,
139. What was said to you at midnight,
140. the cult singer shall repeat it to you at midday7
In this excerpt we see Inanna in her form as cow goddess. We see as well indications of ritualistic and ceremonious behavior using music and singing, just as in the poem to Montezuma. Whatever prayer the cult singers were using (singing/chanting) is repeated at midnight and midday.
Notes:
1 John Mason, Orin Orisa: Songs for Selected Heads (Brooklyn, NY: Yorùbá Theological Archministry), 330-331.
2 Li Xiaoyu, "A Clay Pot," trans. Julia C. Lin, in Women of the Red Plain: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women’s Poetry, (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1992), 60-61.
3 Anonymous, "Puberty Rite Dance Song (Traditional)," trans. Willis Barnstone, in A book of Women Poets: from Antiquity to Now, ed. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 423-424.
4 Anonymous, Untitled, trans. Mari Marase, A Book of Women Poets, 428.
5 Anna Swir, "Goddess of Matriarchy," trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, in Talking to My Body (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1996), 107.
6 Luis J. Rogríguez, "Grace, Power and Beauty: A Profile of Lila Downs," The Progressive, May, 2005, 40.
7 Tatijana Dorsch, "Enheduana's Lawsuit in the poem Nin-me-sarra," translation of Der Rechtsfall der En-hedu-Ana im Lied Nin-me-sarra, by Annette Zgoll, (Ugarit-Verlag, Muenster, 1997), The En-hedu-Ana Research Library, February 15, 2001, http://www.angelfire.com/mi/enheduanna/Ninmesara.html (accessed September 9, 2003).
