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EPA MASQUERADE HEADDRESS: ELEFON
19th century Yoruba peoples, town of Efon-Alaye, Ekiti region, Nigeria Wood, pigment, Reckitt's blue, ground stone, powdered egg, snail shell, kaolin latex. H. 44 1/2 in. (113 cm) Museum purchase: Carrie Heidrich Fund. 87.33 The Yoruba towns in northern and southern Ekiti are famous for annual festivals known as Odun Epa. During the festival one or more family groups or quarters in a town will sponsor the appearance of a dancer, who balances on his head a large wooden headdress, sometimes weighing as much as fifty pounds and standing close to five feet in height. When several dancers appear, they do so in sequence, usually on a single evening but sometimes over a few days. A festival may also focus on a single major masquerade, however, accompanied by children wearing smaller masks. An Epa mask consists primarily of this carved wooden headdress, which may depict a leopard leaping upon an antelope; a warrior with spear, seated or astride his horse; a priest of herbal medicines or divination; a woman with twin children surrounded by an entourage of drummers and other women holding offering bowls; a single woman wearing and holding the emblems of her authority; or a ruler on horseback, his large umbrella-like hat encompassing the cluster of figures around him. Collectively these images are expressions of social and cultural achievement: the primary acts of farming and hunting; acts establishing and securing communal life, through bloodshed in war or through sacrifices to unseen powers; the celebration of the inner power —the ase—of women, the basis of social existence; and the heralding of the political power, also ase, of rulers.
In the Ekiti town of Otun, an Epa headdress depicting a standing female figure was called Eyelase, "Mother-Who-Possesses-Power." The New Orleans Epa headdress shows a similar figure, whose ase—power or status—is visible in more than the necklaces and chieftaincy beads above her breasts, or the signs of office she grasps in her hands. Her ase is expressed by her swollen abdomen, the fullness of her breasts, the child on her back, and the crownlike coiffeur rising above her head. According to the person responsible for the care of Eyelase, an Epa headdress "remembers the great ones, the ones who have died," but does not necessarily refer to a particular person, although its creation may have been inspired by a particular individual who embodied what is being celebrated. The praise songs chanted by the mask's followers as she appears from the forest of the Epa often sound as though a specific person is being heralded, but the songs are essentially about the ase, the essential authority, of women, who are the "ground bass" of society. The abstract face of the helmet mask on which she stands may suggest the ones who have died," but the superstructure is a celebration of the inner power of woman that sustains life. The carving is in the style of the Adeshina family of carvers of Efon-Alaye. The individual maker himself cannot be identified, but he is clearly a carver with an eye for design and composition, or oju-ona. More important, he possessed what the Yoruba call oju-inu, "inner eye"—that is, an insight with which he has rendered his subject. JOHN PEMBERTON III
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