DNA. Comparatively, this discussion could be situated in Platonian and ancient Greece debate. This supports the fact that similar intellectual ideas have been well, explored, and cultivated in different societies both in Africa and beyond.
In furtherance, when the healer Damfo was asked a question about his work in Ayi Kwei Armah’s fifth novel The Healers, he responds: I am saying this is seed time, far from harvest time.
It is an indication that his work is not done. In the future, there will be a generation who will continue his work and whose works will know the progenitor’s. This is agreeable with Ewe mythology of creation where the creator Mawu-Lisa recycles the same clay in creating relatives. So when Orimolade goes into the dark space and creates a
multiverse, she delves into a generational pool of thoughts, of those that she is both aware and unaware of. This leads us back to Yoruba philosophy and the roles of Ifa, Ootọ́, Ìgbàgbọ́ and others in opening ourselves to what is there. What to see. What to find. What to be. And how we know what we know.
Another theme that Orimolade points to in the discussion of her works is the idea of differential knowledge. She points to passages in Amos Tutuola’s 1952 novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard, one of the early African novels. One of the
passages reads: As a matter of fact my heart told me to choose the silverish-ghost who stood at the extreme right and if to say I would choose by mouth I would choose only the copperish-ghost ...
In psychology, we read of somatization the idea that psychological concerns could turn into physical, clinical signs of illness like headaches. If through the body-mind connection different body parts could cooperate and act on a stimulus, we can at least imagine that there could be times that the body would disagree.
When we step into Orimolade’s interlocutory world of drawings, our attention is drawn to the fact that we should not discount a mode of knowing because it is beyond our own limitations. For example, Tutuola the novelist once wrote to his publisher that he could photograph ghosts. Around the time that he started his writing, he took to photography.