Oya and the winds

At a Glance

• Central figures: Oya, Orisha of winds, storms, and the passage between life and death; Shango, Orisha of thunder and lightning, her husband; Ogun, Orisha of iron and war, her first husband.
• Setting: Yoruba tradition (modern southwestern Nigeria, Benin, Togo); the Orisha pantheon under the supreme being Olodumare; preserved in oral tradition, Ifa divination verses, and living religious practice.
• The turn: Oya discovers a secret hidden in Shango’s house - a cloth that, when worn, becomes a mouth of fire - and she takes it for herself, changing the nature of their marriage and of storms forever.
• The outcome: Oya becomes Shango’s equal in battle, commands the winds that precede his thunder, and takes dominion over the boundary between the living and the dead at the gates of the cemetery.
• The legacy: Oya is honored at the gates of cemeteries in Yoruba practice and invoked before storms; her nine copper bracelets and her horsetail whisk, the irukere, remain her symbols in worship.

Oya did not start with the wind. She started with the buffalo.

She could become one. She kept the skin folded in a secret place, and when she wore it she was no longer a woman but a dark-coated buffalo cow with wide horns and hooves that cracked the ground open. This was before Shango. This was when she was still married to Ogun, the one who forges iron, the one who clears the road with his machete. Ogun was powerful but he was not easy to live with. He lived for war and the smell of hot metal. Oya left him. The stories do not say she asked permission.

The Buffalo Skin

Ogun had known what Oya was. He had seen her shed the skin and fold it. He knew the place she hid it. But Ogun was a man who understood tools and weapons, not women, and he never tried to take the skin from her. He respected what she could become, even if he could not hold her.

When Oya left Ogun’s house, she took the buffalo skin with her. She walked into the forest and she stayed there. She was both woman and animal, and neither form was comfortable. She grazed. She raged. She tore bark off trees with her horns when the mood struck her.

Shango found her there. Shango was fire, was drum-beat, was the crack of lightning splitting a baobab in half. He was also beautiful - everyone agreed on this, even his enemies. He saw the buffalo at the edge of the forest clearing. He watched her shed the skin and become a woman. He fell in love with the woman but he also feared the buffalo.

He waited. He came back the next day, and the next. On the third day he spoke to her.

I am Shango. I want you.

Oya looked at him. She had left one powerful husband already. She was not in a hurry to find another. But Shango had something Ogun lacked. He was reckless. He burned. She recognized in him the same restlessness she carried in her own chest.

She went with him. She brought the buffalo skin.

The Cloth of Fire

In Shango’s house there were secrets. Oya was not a woman who left secrets undisturbed.

One day while Shango was away - consulting with the babalawo, or fighting, or drumming in another village, the stories vary - Oya searched the inner room. She found a small cloth wrapped tight and hidden in the rafters. She unfolded it and held it to her mouth.

Fire came out.

Not the fire of a cooking hearth. The fire that splits the sky during a storm, the red fire that has no fuel and answers to no hand. It poured from her lips and scorched the wall black. Oya dropped the cloth. She picked it up again.

When Shango returned, she said nothing. But the next time he went to war, she followed him. She wore the cloth. And when the enemy line held and Shango’s thunder was not enough, Oya opened her mouth.

The fire scattered them. Men ran. Horses ran. Shango turned and saw his wife standing in the smoke with the cloth pressed to her face and the flames still licking out.

He was furious. He was also - the stories are honest about this - impressed.

After that they fought together. Shango brought the thunder. Oya brought the wind that came before it - the wind that tears roofs off houses, that bends palm trees sideways, that tells you the storm is close. She became the warning and the first blow. He became the strike that followed.

Nine and the River

Oya bore Shango nine children. Nine is her number. She wears nine copper bracelets on her arms, and when she moves they ring against each other like a small percussion. Her other tool is the irukere - a horsetail whisk, the kind an elder carries - and when she swings it the wind changes direction.

She is also the Niger River - the Yoruba call the river Odo Oya, Oya’s river. The Niger bends and turns and floods and does not go where you expect. It carries commerce and it carries bodies. Oya is both of those things.

When Shango’s reign at the city of Oyo ended badly - when his own people turned against him and he walked into exile, when he hanged himself from a tree (or ascended to the sky, depending on who is telling it) - Oya did not follow him into death. She did not weep at the foot of the tree. She took a different road.

The Gate of the Dead

Oya went to the cemetery. She stood at the gate and she did not leave.

She is the one who stands between the living and the dead. Not the dead themselves - that belongs to other powers, to the egungun, to the ancestors in their white cloth. Oya is the threshold. She is the moment of passing, the last breath, the wind that moves through the room when someone dies and the window is closed.

People fear her for this. They also need her. Without Oya, the dead cannot pass. Without the wind, the storm has no warning. Without the breath leaving the body, death is a wall instead of a door.

She carries the buffalo skin still. She can still become the cow with the wide horns when the occasion demands it. But she does not use it often. The wind is enough. The wind, the fire, the nine copper bracelets, the whisk.

In the market, women who sell do not say her name lightly. They call her Iya Mesan - Mother of Nine. They pour water at the gate when they pass the cemetery. They do not turn around when the wind picks up suddenly.

Oya does not require praise songs. She requires acknowledgment. The wind is coming. The wind has always been coming. She is already here.