Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment rhetorical tropes from traditional Yoruba ritual chants, beliefs, practices
and sayings. Even the deceptively simple “Koko Oloro” is illustrative of
this point:
Dolorous Knot
Plead for me
Farm or hill
Plead for me
Stream and wind
Take my voice
Home or road
Plead for me
On this shoot,
I bind your leaves
Stalk and bud
Berries three
On the threshold
Cast my voice
Knot of bitters
Plead for me (IOP,)No great exegetical enigmas are posed by this adaptation of a tradi-
tional children’s propitiation chant, but still there is an engrossing in-
terest in the title “Koko Oloro,” rendered in the first line of the poem
as “dolorous knot” and in the fifteenth line as “knot of bitters.” Lines
nine and ten give an intratextual gloss on the word “knot”: “On this
shoot, I/Bind your leaves.” Connectively, lines eleven and twelve speak
of “Stalk and bud/Berries three,” which must be the “bitters” or “do-
lorous” predicating the “knot” created by the “bound leaves” of lines
nine and ten. The child who performs this simple ritual act, accompa-
nying it with the words of the chant, is being schooled in a lesson in life’s
paradoxes: knotty, embittering privations may hold the key to negotiat-
ing the confounding perplexities and defeats of existence and lead to a
tractable progress through life’s tragicomic journey. The spare, compact
and sinewy lines of the poem, combined with the metaphoric suggestive-
ness of a child ritually binding the leaves of an organic, growing shoot
to create the “knot of bitters,” together with the incantatory effect of the
repetition of the refrain “plead for me” four times (with its variants of
“take my voice” and “cast my voice”), create a haunting lyric poem on
faith and hope pregnant with a burden of the knowledge of pain and
“dolor.”