Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry, By Bolaji Campbell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry by Bolaji Campbell Cheryl Sterling Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry BY BOLAJI CAMPBELL Africa World Press, 2019. vii + 211 pp. ISBN 9781569026274 paper. In Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry, Bolaji Campbell gives a comprehensive analysis of Egungun traditions in relation to Yoruba beliefs about death and ancestry. He grounds his analysis in Yoruba cosmology and history, situates such knowledge within the performance contexts of Egungun festivals, its transit and rearticulation in the African diaspora, and its modern-day influence and adaptation by contemporary artists. Such a multitiered approach to the subject succeeds in both elaborating on and decoding our understanding of Egungun in all of its manifestations. The term Egungun, itself, has many different meanings; it may be the ancestors, bones, a mask, a masquerader, or the masquerade. In general, however, it refers to concealed powers. Campbell, from the beginning of the text, reveals that the Egungun are ara orun, spiritual dwellers who are emissaries to our material realm and who have multiple potentialities and powers to aid humanity. Using a combination of oral sources, such as oriki (praise poetry, Ifa divination poetry, Egungun chants, legends and stories), as well as eyewitness accounts by African and European scholars in chapter one of the book, Campbell further excavates their mythical origins, but also locates the beginning of the tradition in the expansionist warfare of the Oyo Empire (late 1700s). In particular, he focuses on Oyo's war with Ibadan to set the stage for his detailed interrogation of Egungun festivals in that city. While Egunguns usually belong to a family line, they are not always the ancestors within a family, and Campbell's research in Ibadan shows how they function as markers and a balance to state power. He further intertwines their functioning as an association, with their performances within popular cultural festivals, reinforcing their roles as protectors of the community. Campbell is an art historian with over twenty years of experience researching Egungun masquerades, and a standout in the text is his focus on the ubiquity in which women participate in the tradition. Even though other scholars have written about female participation in Egungun celebrations, John Willis, in Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town (2018), is the only one to centralize women's roles (Beier; Drewal and Drewal; Babayemi). Campbell takes this work one step further, by detailing and describing the roles of female participants in all aspects of Egungun celebrations. His work reframes the discourse through the lens of gender and opens our understanding of the tradition. Most concretely, he focuses on the roles of women in chapter two of the book and, while such roles are not at all limited to the materiality of Egungun representation, they are also intertwined with the fabrics that the Egungun wears, which by the way is their primary medium of engagement. Egungun costumes are complex, [End Page 257] tiered assemblages, composed of multiple layers of cloth lappets, made from the most expensive and prestigious textiles, which cover and hide the masker's identity, but also cover the plethora of medicines, protective substances, and objects that invoke the spirit of the ancestor manifesting through the masquerader. The roles women play are apparent even in the diaspora, and when Campbell focuses on his research in Oyotunji village in chapter four, he tells stories primarily of the women who commission Egunguns to invoke and celebrate their ancestors. This work is called Fabric of Immortality because, as Campbell states, he is borrowing the words of one of his mentors, Rowland Abiodun, in emphasizing "the deathlessness and timelessness of cloth" (4); that "fabrics, in essence, represent the cultural notions of immortality, of interconnectedness, and of the ultimate ideas of cohesion and filial devotion" (5). Cloth across the board in African societies reveal complex articulations about the political, social, cultural, and gendered map of the society. The colors, composition, patterns within, tell stories. They are symbolic texts that insiders understand and depending on cultural context, special fabrics are used by family members to mark liminal events from births to...