In The Yorùbá God of Drumming: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wood that Talks, Àyàn/Añá speaks through a transnational and multigenerational community of scholars, artists, and orisha practitioners. This volume, edited by Amanda Villepastour, is the first to focus exclusively on Àyàn/Añá, a Yoruba/Cuban god whose sound and energy has been resonating in the Black Atlantic for centuries.

The lacuna of academic work on Àyàn/Añá reflects a scholarly tradition grown from early Christian observers who failed to recognize Àyàn while developing an “official” Yorùbá pantheon (10). Àyàn’s invisibility among the sanctioned gods obscured the deity’s connections to Añá in Cuba, a link that has only been recognized by researchers since the 1990s (12). The lack of scholarship also reflects epistemological challenges specific to this god. Àyàn/Añá is an orisha, the first drummer, as well as the lineages of drummers and drum makers. Àyàn/Añá is also ephemeral, being located in drum sounds, and lacks the visual imagery and associated iconography of other orishas. In certain contexts, Àyàn/Añá is materially understood as residing in, or at times being synonymous with, consecrated (fundamento) drums. Moreover, the god is sometimes imagined as male, sometimes female.

While a diverse and geographically diffuse complex of peoples, beliefs, practices, and material culture comprise Àyàn/Añá, the deity coalesces in drums and drumming. “The Wood that Talks,” is a translation of asoro igi, a Yorùbá phrase (drawn from a praise poem or oríkì) describing Àyàn. In other translations, like “speaker through the wood” (3), the wood/drum becomes a medium for speech. Using this oríkì phrase in the subtitle, Villepastour captures a key feature locating Àyàn/Añá at the heart of Yorùbá orisha practices: Àyàn/Añá communicates. The deity—as drum, drumming, and drummer—calls all the orishas, speaks in their voices, conveys their energy to devotees, and sonically binds the global community of Orisha Devotion.

Because communication is central to Àyàn/Añá’s functioning, Villepastour focuses on language. As she notes in the preface, her “love of the Yorùbá language compels [her] to present it with optimum linguistic precision” (ix). This care is visible in Villepastour’s use of diacritics, the attention paid to English translations, and in the helpful glossary of musical and religious terms in the six relevant languages. Spellings, terminology, and language choice in the different sections keep the reader grounded in the geographic spaces and perspectives the book traverses. Villepastour organizes the chapters under five themes: cosmologies (1 and 2), histories (3 and 4), gender (5 and 6), identities (7 and 8), and secondary diasporas (9, 10, and 11).

While concerned with new approaches, The Yorùbá God of Drumming does not ignore earlier writings. In his preface, J. D. Y. Peel sets the stage with an affectionate reading of Yorùbá-born Revd. James White’s letters and journal entries, which highlight the vibrancy of drumming and the centrality of performance, and details the lives of orisa drummers in nineteenth-century Yorùbá culture. Villepastour’s introductory chapter then addresses Àyàn’s disappearance from the Yorùbá pantheon in accounts by early Christian writers, and explores the ways later generations of scholars, and practitioners informed by their work, reinforced Àyàn’s absence (10).

In subsequent chapters, the normative models of the canonical texts are further scrutinized. Kevin M. Delgado (chapter 4), for example, challenges the orthodoxy that Cuban batá are the only fundamento drums. Through detailed ethnography and historical research, Delgado presents a compelling case for including non-batá drumming traditions as fundamento and in possession of Añá. Addressing gender, Katherine J. Hagedorn (chapter 6) notes how the emphasis on maleness seen in mid-twentieth scholarship—especially in the foundational writings of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz—helped shape the hyper-masculinity and exclusivity (in which homosexuals and women are designated as outsiders) prevalent in Cuban batá drumming. She also recounts recent efforts by women batá drummers that threaten the hierarchy. In Kenneth Shweitzer’s contribution, chapter 7, these prohibitions, in combination with consecration rituals for batá, educational practices for young drummers, and gatherings for drum maintenance, are analyzed as key strategies that diasporic drummers use to maintain cohesion apart from the hereditary lineages of Yorùbán Àyàn drummers.

Focusing on Àyàn drummers in Nigeria, Debra L. Klein explores in chapter 8 how three generations navigate their roles in a modernizing nation. Their evolving strategies of identity incorporate diasporic ideals of Àyàn-ness while adhering to local expectations and political and economic realities. Unlike in Cuba, Nigerian women are not prohibited from handling or playing consecrated drums and are integral to hereditary Àyàn drumming lineages. In the book’s other chapter on gender (chapter 5), Villepastour explores divergences between Nigerian and Cuban drumming traditions and communities. Here again, her attention to language—e.g., the gendering requirements in Spanish and (by extension) Lucumí versus the more fluid Yorùbá—reinforces the centrality of communication in the Àyàn/Añá narrative.

Chapters highlighting Àyàn’s spiritual dimensions, mythologies, and narratives feature utterances from orisa priest Kawoleyin Àyánbekún (with Villepastour, in chapter 2) and Yorùbá Àyàn drummer Chief John Àyánsoolá Abióodún Ògúnleye (with K. Noel Amherd, in chapter 3). In the latter, details on drumming and drum-making, along with the inclusion of extensive oríkì describing Àyàn, vividly convey how the tradition manifests in, and is expressed by, a deeply informed insider. Likewise, Àyánbekún’s articulation of the intricate metaphysical mappings between Àyàn and the Yorùbá drums powerfully demonstrates the value of oral history conveyed in the words of its speaker.

The final three chapters comprise first-person accounts in secondary diasporas at the far end of Àyàn’s travels. Musicians John Amira and Alberto Quintero (chapters 9 and 10) offer personal perspectives on the development of batá drumming in New York and Caracas, respectively. In their roughly contemporaneous accounts, they relate the arrival of key performers and important performances as well as the local challenges each community faced in establishing their traditions. In the final chapter, Fernando Leobons brings us to Añá’s periphery. The results of his ongoing efforts to bring batá into Brazilian orixa culture are, at this point, far from certain. All three narratives trace drumming communities’ efforts to attain legitimacy by bringing Àyàn/Añá into being—in consecrated drums, through initiated drummers, and in the sounds of drumming and worship.

While each chapter offers a unique perspective, the authors’ combined voices reveal an intricate and dynamic Yorùbá deity. Undergraduate courses in religious studies, history, gender studies, folklore, ethnomusicology, linguistics, and anthropology will find valuable methodologies and content. The book will also appeal to musicians and orisha devotees interested in understanding Àyàn and Añá through the experiences of both practitioners and scholars. Villepastour frames this volume as a subject primer on Àyàn, Añá, and Yorùbá drumming lineages in the Black Atlantic (27). More than an edifying introduction to these realms, The Yorùbá God of Drumming reads as a joyful invocation, with Àyàn’s drumming resonating throughout. And as an Àyàn oríkì emphatically states, “no one hears the sound of Àyàn without dancing” (85).

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[Review length: 1128 words • Review posted on February 18, 2021]