The following is the text of my contribution to "Metaphors of Time" conference held April 11-12, 2018, at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. I was going to develop it into a chapter for the conference book. But I fell behind.
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| Photo: Òréré Abàyà Te by Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ |
1: Good morning. I want to begin by saluting the organizers for inviting me to join this very timely forum that is coming up at a time when, on one hand, interest in the teaching and learning of foreign languages in American universities is under tremendous pressure but, on the other hand, the attractions of earning tuition income at global teaching centers in foreign lands continue to drive university planning. Pondering that contradiction is for another time.
2: When I agreed last year to participate in the conference, I thought I had a good grasp of what time and timing entail. After all, how hard could it be to speak for 15 minutes on “a single, accessible metaphor for time used in” my specific research and teaching domain, Afro-Atlantic literary and cultural studies. I am now standing in front of you torn in many directions not knowing what to say about thoroughfares of time.
3: However, the more I reflected on the conference theme and on my readings for this presentation, the more I became convinced that I should speak about proverbs of time and not metaphors of time. Why? Nothing in my decades of work in literary and cultural studies confirm the axiom expressed thus in the opening paragraph of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and repeated endlessly, in their very important book Metaphors We Live By: “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (3). I admit that Lakoff and Johnson spoke specifically about English language. But one cannot but be struck that little about this grand statement, from the syntax to the cosmic exaggeration, is metaphorical, and everything about it is indisputably proverbial. They admitted that much when they speak of an English language proverb of temporal kinesis as a metaphor: “The proverb ‘Time flies’ is an instance of the TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT metaphor” (42).
You have to pardon my literary criticism frame of mind for not wondering how the thoroughly unironic formulation has been allowed to stand for so long. By the way, the same conceptual violence is perpetrated against other tropes, particularly synecdoche and metonymy. My starting point, therefore, is that every trope is not a metaphor. Discussing “point of view” in relation to time as metaphor does not sound quite right. After all, time is not visible to the eyes.
4: Hence, I will speak of proverbs of time. In the Yorùbá language from which I am drawing my central terms, there is actually a proverb about the primacy of comparison in cognition. Every speaker of Yorùbá language knows that òwe lẹṣin ọ̀rọ̀, bí ọ̀rọ̀ bá sọnù òwe la fi í wá a. (the proverb is the horse of the word, if the word is lost, the proverb is what we use to search for it ). Of course, the expression “every Yorùbá” is an exaggeration. To my Yorùbá ears, asserting, as Lakoff and Johnson do in a foundational premise, that “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” is not metaphorical but proverbial; ohun tó bá jọra la fi í wé’ra wọn (likes are used for wrapping likes).
5: It might be of interest to us that there is no WorldCat entry on proverbs of time. (I checked last on April 10, 2018.) Imagine how that emptiness must feel for someone who works with a language which, prior to its coming into contact with English, had no word on record for metaphor or simile and felt no need to borrow a term from contiguous languages. It will be my contention this morning that the proverb is the form in which metaphors of time enter discourse. Speaking self-consciously as someone who does not seek to be a native informant, most of this talk is thick description of figurations of time in relation to space and place and periodic social embodiments as articulated in Yorùbá language.
6: “Time is not straight like a thoroughfare” is the wording I have adopted for today. For another occasion, I have used “time never lines up like a street.” Both phrasings are my English versions of proverbial reflections—specifically, ìgbà kò tọ́ lọ bí òréré, ayé kò tọ́ bí ọ̀pá ìbọn—in Yorùbá language of the relationship between time and space, particularly the expression in language of the conception of their use. The key terms in the proverbs are time (ìgbà), direction (tọ́), and place (òréré). Time, ìgbà, denotes two senses that I set out thus:
(A) As an abstraction of durative experience, ìgbà rolls (ìgbà ńyí), it moves, and is not amenable to capture. It is not iterable, it is indifferent to the senses. Unlike goats and other domesticated animals, it cannot be tethered to a pole (ìgbà ò ṣe é so lókùn). It cannot be chained or imprisoned. It cannot be led around like pets. It happens, pours, like rain showers, for, on, and to, the rich and the poor, the king and the servant, the tree and the tree cutter, the town and the country. That is to say that it is indifferent to social status, gross matter, including ecology. When it comes to the question of ìgbà, the case is olówó á gẹlẹtẹ, ìwọ̀fà náà á gẹlẹtẹ (the master reposes, the bonded reposes too). This sense of time cannot be measured because it has no beginning and no end. It just is (wà) inevitably. One remarkable observation about this category suggests that (“a kìí sọ pé ‘ọjà á nígbà, kíní ṣe tí wọ́n tún ńná a?’” (one does not say ‘there is a time for the market; if it were so, why would people continuously patronize it?) Another one insists that ìgbà kan kò lo ilé ayé gbó (no one measure of duration [season] exhausts [ages, wears out] can account for all of existence.)
(B) The second sense of time denotes discrete calibrations of duration as calendrical intervals between movements or appearances of heavenly bodies, in relation to either daily or seasonal activities, or to occurrences considered significant to merit a spot on a chronometric scale. In this second sense ìgbà could be rainy season, harmattan period, calendar year, lunar month, drought, sunrise, the occasion to eat pounded yam, or even demarcations of semesters.
Grammatically, such measures of time are restricted to specific predicators: high noon ripes (ọ̀sán pọ́n); evening time plants seedling (alẹ́ lẹ́), the middle of the dark night sinks deeply (ààjín jìn), whereas at twilight, the earth darkens (ilẹ̀ ṣú). Reduplication is the main morphological process deployed to denote the vastness of these calendar items: késekése, pátápátá, kánrinkánrin, kúkúrú, gígùn, gangan (precision), gidi (node) dandan (persistence), gbére.
As transitives, calendrical time can arrive or depart, be adequate or inadequte. It is evitable and could be prompt or punctual. Since it can be measured, counted, and grouped, as the chronometric scale dictates, calendrical time accumulates.
(C) Generalizations in the form of proverbs are attached to each of the categories mentioned above. A kìí bú Ṣàngó lẹ́ẹ̀rùn, ìgbà ara làá búra (we do not swear to Ṣàngó in the dry season) . Òwúrọ̀ lọjọ́, ẹmu ni wọ́n fi ńmu nÍlé-Ifẹ̀ (for the landholding oligarchs at Ilé-Ifẹ̀, even the dawn is for getting drunk on palm-wine). Bí alẹ́lẹ́ bá lẹ́, a ó fi ọmọ ayò fáyò (when night time arrives, it is proper to give unto play what belongs to it); aṣọ ìgbà ṣe é yọ (the fashionable wear of the season is a pleasure to don”).
7: Let’s consider the main predicator (kò tọ́) of the proverb in focus (ìgbà kò tọ́ lọ bí òréré, ayé kò tọ́ bí ọ̀pá ìbọn). (The kò simply marks the negative form the verb tọ́.) In usage, tọ́ follows two main paths. In references to space, geometry, and geography, tọ́ is a predicator of straightness, span, and direction, as that which leads from one location to another without detour, bends, or curves. In relation to ethics or morality, the word, essentially an ideophone, connotes goodness, rightness, perhaps righteousness. Tọ́ could also be used to denote uninvited provocation or taunting. (Amẹ́ríkà ńtọ́ Kòríyà níjà [America is baiting Korea]) As a qualifier of temporality, tọ́ is also suggestive of the durable (igi tó tọ́, wọn kìí pẹ́ nínú igbó [the straight tree trunk does not get to live long]). Now, we may look at “òréré. “a wide road leading immediately into a town” (Crowther, 1852, p. 222).
8: Other denominators of references to time include utensil (ohun èlò): ìgbà lonígbà ńlò (epochs belong to those who own them); possession (ohun ìní): igbà là á ni; ẹnìkan kò lo’lé ayé gbó (the living owns only eras, no individual can wear down time); regime (ìjọba): ọba mẹ́wàá, ìgbà mẹ́wàá (ten hegemonies, ten eras); narrative discourse (ìtàn/ìmọ̀): gbogbo ohun tí a bá ṣe lónìí, ìtàn ni lọ́la (all that we do today is narrative on the next day); propriety (akokò): ìgbà tí a bá dóko lòwúrọ̀ ẹni (“the time of one’s arrival is one’s dawn)
9: The proverb, ìgbà kò tọ́ bí òréré, juxtaposes time and space but presents them as discontinuous in a syntactic arrangement that suggests an absolute observation. Here, time is not straight. From this proverb, we can deduce that time has no end or telos, no terminus or destination, or intention. Time is not like a thoroughfare because it cannot be constructed. It is not straight. But because the term for geometric shape—straightness, tọ́—is the root morpheme for justness, justice, and all conducts relating to rightfulness here, one could argue that time cannot be tended, nursed, built, or bent, or mapped out in the manner that thoroughfares and byways could be. There are no shortcuts to time. Byways and thoroughfare are made and sought. Time cannot be sought. As noted earlier, time is; it just is. Of course, time can arrive promptly, inevitably, and punctually as in àsìkò tó. But ordinary Yorùbá language use implies that time is just because it follows its own will. Time itself has no history.
Time, in use, is constituted narratively (ìtàn), historically, the form in which the record of time is kept after events have broken out. This is the domain of cognition, of arranging or ordering, of time keeping, of points of view, of symbolism, of inclusion and exclusion, of manipulation, of straightening or bending, or “streeting” and homing, editing and compiling.
10: The final issue I want to address concerns the question what happens to “streeted,” straightened time, as in 6B above? To begin to answer the question, I turn back towards anthropology. In Yorùbá society, where twinning rate has been judged to be superlatively high by those who measure such occurrences, each twins birth comes with the names Táíwò (literally taste/test [explore] the world) given the first to be born and Kẹ́hìndé (literally last to arrive) to the second. Because time is not straight straight like a horizon, it could be argued sensibly that the latter arrival is the older: ọmọ́ kẹ́hìn dé gbẹ̀gbọ́n. Two systems of temporality are invoked in this statement. In the pre-birth time upon which the sense of seniority, priority, fuller experience and wisdom, the wiser person (who is also the older one) sent the younger, less experienced one to go explore the birth world. That precedence is the one acknowledged in the cultural explanation, the streets of life, the domain governed by calibrated time. The first arrival, by street clocks, is the first. In the realm of indifference where the other sense of time is to be located, priority is eternal and not subject to regular timing. The wiser is the older. Time there is not straight like a thoroughfare. Priority and anteriority are constant, free of measured, street time.
11: The proverb in focus for this paper clearly links time and space. But, as I have been arguing, time is not straight like a street because constructed social practice, (the street) connects sequence, priority, and privilege with a lot of logic that time does not possess. The prior, for example is older chronologically. In practice, however, this is not always the case. A senior wife (or brother) or husband need not be the older, although each must have arrived at that status earlier than whoever is designated junior. And even as we noticed in the naming of twins, the time of ordinal, sequence that is not subject to will can be ordered idiosyncratically. In short, priority does not proceed from physics but from the social order of things, the order of ìtàn.
12: The proverbial terms I am parsing here combine temporality and spatiality. Definitely, ìgbà kò tọ́ bí òréré; ayé kò tọ́ bí ọ̀pá ìbọn.
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