Osaro is a DJ and performer who creates Black-focused community events like the award winning punk gig Black Jam with Dublin Fringe Festival and Nu Roots with Live Collision Festival. Osaro also performed in THISISPOPBABY’s 2018 theatre show Mouth of a Shark.
She shares two audio stories with us. The Drowned God looks into the varying roles of motherhood, both absent and present, and Werewolves is about a fictional village called Yaeg which is ruled by the Rat King. Mayhem prevails…
[restrict]LISTEN HERE TO THE DROWED GOD
LISTEN HERE TO WEREWOLVES
THE DROWNED GOD
I am descended by women abandoned by their mothers
My mother’s mother walked away, she bore three children
Time to walk away, little one. Time to grow
Time to mother your siblings
Mother your Father
And eventually mother me
To cook, clean, wash the dishes (hide from spirits)
All by the age of ten. No time to finish school
Before she’s blessed with a new day again
My mother peeters to bed in agony over her lost mammy
Village spirits would swim through walls
With their faces Old, Black and Weary
Would peer over my mother’s sleeping body
Until she cried out. Unable to move
New stepsiblings, old troubles remain
So who will be champion to a motherless child?
Ye Ye Omo Eja
Mother whose children are fish
Protect the lonely and the barren
Will you hear our wish?
Ye Ye Omo Eja
One thousand years of river stones and cowrie shells
Wrapped around your Black breasts
like a newborn clings
Yemoja. Yemaya. Ishka
The drowned God of mermaids whose cervix contorts open
And out pours the seas, trawling behind the first humans into this New World
Our La Sirene. Our Mere De L’eau
Black Madonna will you be champion?
At night, I’m visited by sharp claws digging into my neck
And talons scratching at my thighs
And through her cooos and her clicks *click* *click*
I hear her. I hear her shriek;
I demand new blood and old memories
Give me your truth. Who are you? Where are you from?
I tell the phantom Queen
I am descended from women abandoned by their mothers
And their mothers’ mothers weave cowrie shells that wrap the hands of Papa Legba Himself
Koyo
WEREWOLVES
This is my village, for better, for worse. I’ll stay here blessed I’ll stay here cursed
The smell of burning lavender and murder is in the air
Our favoured Rat King has devoured freedom, Barricading our village shut
Until the enemy is caught. Werewolves. Who slithers in daylight
Haunting parks at night? All beware
Our favoured twins Suspicion and Superstition is in the air.
People masks to don off evil. Eviiiillllllllllll
The first to choke back on purple fumes will be up for execution
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Nothing could stop the Midsummer festivities so soon
Especially now as we are being punished by wanton gods for abandoning them
One hundred years ago.
We will seek divine safety in our most ancient Temple 1666
Where Mummers delight in warning
This day will be remembered. This day will come.
Fionn Mac Cumhaill will
Want your mother. She will bear him a son
We will seek Divine Aid from Yemaya if her She-maids pull you into their watery haven
So stay wary! Stay alert. Their many tongues will caress you until it hurts
Until you cream gratitude, a riverbed of foam
Look no evil in the eye if accused of being a spy
By the one you can talk to, the children of Lír
We call our Bean Feasa
Are you a villager? Are you a werewolf?
Pray the Rat King grants you asylum from loved ones
If bloodlust turns them into vigilantes by dawn
For children have been ripped to shreds.
Children have been abducted. Devil babes run with wolves
And even the Dead rattle their rotten jaws at the Living
Somebody must pay for our wretched village
Who is a werewolf? Bean Feasa tell us
Tell us already! Hmm? Is it you?
He, She, or They? An army of Night Lovers won’t stand in the way
You kill one you kill them all. Love isn’t dead after all
Exquisite corpses of villagers are strewn around a public well
Just over a purple hill.
Which is more than enough proof that war wages between
Werewolves, Villagers and even the Dead who only
Desire a stake in claim of Land
This is my village for better for worse
I’ll stay here blessed I will stay here cursed
This is somehow my home and here I’ll keep
Until werewolves harp on my bones
The Rat King is dead!
Thrown into the coldest waves of earthly blue
A bloated sight. Killed by none other than his seven children who commit taboo for power
For better for worse this is a most opportune time to speak riddles and rhymes into law
There is shrilled talk amongst the living that
One of his offspring is apparently a werewolf in disguise. A renegade bitten by an Original
The Rat King is dead now and he laughs in silence at the organic mayhem left behind
He rattles and prattles any pots and pans at his seven children
A royal poltergeist, yes, yes he can!
I believe that if these circumstances were different
The people would vote to elect his ghost for he was a good King
Our Ratty Boy, he was sometimes romantically known as
Our people grow mad with handsome fear to shooting, hexing, shirking and stabbing
Anyone in sight with the slightest whiff of wolfish behaviour. How am I still alive?
I ask myself this question every year and not only because it is mandated by
Village doctrine that we must always ask ourselves this every year to ensure that the village is under constant humility.
But this year, more than ever, this moment, more than ever
As neighbours jump from me, fear from me, more than ever.
How am I still alive? How am I walking? Running? Sweating? Aching? Howling?
This is my village for better for worse
I’ll stay here blessed I’ll stay here cursed
Bean Feasa tell us
Who is a werewolf?
Because this is somehow my home and here I will stay and keep.
[/restrict]
