It Starts With A Beat

I started thinking about drums when I was planning my wedding, a couple of years ago now. I couldn't imagine getting married without them. Every significant event of my childhood had drums (and sometimes King Sunny Ade). So I knew I needed them there too.

Which sent me down a path of learning more about drumming in Yorùbá culture.

In Yorùbá cosmology, drums weren't just for entertainment. They were communication. The àyàn, the talking drum, could mimic Yorùbá speech so precisely it became its own language. Your name. Your lineage. Your mother's prayer. All of it could be spoken through rhythm.

When our people were taken across oceans, they took the drums with them. Or rather, they remade them from memory. In Cuba, Yorùbá Bàtá drums evolved into a family structure: Ìyá (the mother), Ìtòtele (the father), Okónkolo (the child). The mother leads. The father responds. The child keeps steady time.

It's not exactly how it was structured in West Africa, but it's how it was remembered. And that remembering is sacred.

Other sacred ways drums were used was through grounding the body. Fàràbalẹ̀. Drumming creates a rhythm that holds grief, settles trauma and helps people find their breath again. Long before we had words like nervous system regulation, our ancestors knew rhythm could move pain through the body instead of letting it get stuck there.

Rhythm was medicine. Still is.

 It's in your chest when a memory stirs. In your body answering a song before your mind knows the words. When you light incense and the room fills with the hazy scent of you lifting the veil between those on earth and those who have passed.

Drumming was also an everyday tool of communication. It spoke to call people home and announce something important. It was how we said: something sacred is beginning.

And something sacred is beginning here.

Ẹlẹ́wà...

Strike a match. Light the incense. Let whatever rhythm is calling you now find you.