In marriages, husbands who admire their partners also try to dim their shine

I was listening to Mother Márcia de Obaluaiyê, my beloved mother of saint, tell her stories this past weekend when she began to talk about Iansã, an orixá also known as Oyá. Mother Márcia is devoted to this powerful orixá who rules over storms and goes to war.

In one of the itãs, as the mythical stories are known, Oyá kept a power and a secret: she could transform herself into a buffalo. However, one day, during her hunts, Ogum saw a beautiful buffalo shed its skin and reveal itself as Oyá.

He is impressed and, while the warrior goes to work at the market, he steals the buffalo skin and hides it. Ogum, who already has other women, then asks Iansã to marry him. She is convinced and goes to live with him.

Being a woman as fiery as palm oil, her overwhelming arrival in Ogum’s community aroused jealousy among the general’s women. One night, they get Ogum drunk, and he reveals Oyá’s secret and where he had hidden the buffalo skin.

Ogum’s women began to provoke Oyá with malicious comments about her and the animal. They did not expect, however, that this would greatly anger the orixá, who found her buffalo skin, put it on, and gored and trampled the wives and the entire community.

Faced with the massacre and before fleeing from Ogum, Iansã left a pair of horns with her children so that, in case of need, they could call her by striking one horn against the other, to which she would come to their aid at lightning speed. This summarized version of one of Iansã’s most well-known stories leads me to reflect on the obstacles that strong women face in letting their strength flow.

From Ogum’s theft of the buffalo skin, we can consider how men may feel threatened and, as a result, weaken women who enchant them with their strength, precisely the characteristic they seek to subdue to control them.

It is a double-think in the lives of those who relate to strong-willed women. They both admire and want to dominate and extinguish the fire that awakens them. In the case of the deity, this subtraction of her strength was accompanied by a marriage proposal.

When I think of the other wives bothered by Oyá’s arrival, I remember my sister Grada Kilomba’s words about the nymph Echo, depicted in Greek mythology, condemned to repeat the last words of each sentence spoken by Narcissus.

What I mean is that if a woman’s power bothers men—who hold patriarchal power—it also bothers women who feed whenever a glowing fire is extinguished. On the night of the drunkenness, I observe the betrayal of Oyá’s trust, by revealing her secret, as an alliance between those bothered by her sovereign power.

But this orixá, who rules justice alongside Xangô, reconnects with her strength when confronting injustice and humiliation. She becomes a buffalo again, destroying everything around and heading out into the world.

But first, she ensured that her children had tools to communicate, showing that even the hot-headedness, which many point out as a problem of this orixá’s inconsequence, coexists with her zeal for children.

Like the wind, this orixá traveled the world and had many adventures. There is an itã that tells us she slept with the orixás and learned a secret from each one. With Exu, she learned magic; with Oxóssi, she learned to hunt; and with Xangô, she learned to spit fire. The only one she didn’t sleep with was Obaluayiê, her dear friend, whom she once helped by blowing wind through his straws and thus revealing him to be as beautiful as the sun.

From her lovers, she received many gifts, but it is alongside Xangô that Iansã led armies, joining powerful kingdoms that the powerful ancestral king of Oyo had never been able to approach. To greet her, we say “eparrei!” and we ask that her courage and justice protect strong women to keep going despite so many obstacles.

*Originally published in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper column on July 11.