The Starry Cave

The Yoruba term àjé , carry associations to movement and trade – we might understand it as a marketplace of night unfolding in silver rays. This nocturnal marketplace is conceived of as a gathering of long beaked and predatory birds. The concept of àjé has in the New World and the Modern West been equaled with ‘witch’ – and this is true, in so far as we understand what a witch is – on African premises. Àjé is considered a power some people have by inheritance, initiation or by birth. It is considered to be an excess of àse (natural power) – and therefore it must be kept under control and in balance to avoid damage to the wielder of àjé and the community itself.  Àjé is the primordial emotional depths of womanhood. It is not a generative force – on the contrary. Honeysweet Òsún is the generative powers and fertility. Àjé and their mother Ìyàmí Ò s òr ò ngà is the barrenness and otherness, the femaleness prior to the first blood and the lament upon the last blood. This means...

Constantly debates concerning the natural and the perverse are surfacing. Homosexuality and ‘unusual’ sexual practices of any variety is often brought to the attention because here in the world of sex all men and women meet their most pure inclinations and their most raw darkness. The scale in these debates are between the personal sensual inclinations as they are mediated upon a universalist moral insisting that we all have the same sensual inclinations – and those who escape the lawful are perverts – or worse. These moral discourses are almost always dictated upon religious motives propagating a most curious scale between freedom from sin and shame of one’s inclinations. In this climate on ‘one moral fits all’ resistance naturally surges to the surface.  The debates we see today can be anchored in the 11 th Century and the ecclesiastical debates concerning the Natural Law – here we find St. Thomas Aquinas who actually told us to look at nature...