What is an Oríkì?

The short answer

An oríkì is a Yoruba praise poem: a gathering of the names, lineage, character and deeds of a person, said aloud to them or about them. The word joins orí (head — a person's essence and destiny) with kì (to greet, to praise, to hail). To perform someone's oríkì is to greet their head: to name what they are, in front of others.

It is not a biography and not a eulogy. An oríkì exalts. It selects what is worth lifting and lifts it, in a register closer to invocation than description.

It belongs to the living

The most common misunderstanding in English is that oríkì is funeral poetry. It is performed at funerals, but it belongs to the living: at naming ceremonies, weddings, chieftaincy titles, homecomings, milestone birthdays, and across ordinary days when a mother greets her child by their oríkì to settle or encourage them.

Someone can be praised with their oríkì on a Tuesday morning for no reason but that they are who they are. That is the tradition's centre of gravity, not the graveside.

The kinds you will hear

Oríkì orílẹ̀ belongs to a lineage or a town. Everyone descended from that line shares it, and it reaches back through ancestors, migrations, wars, farms and rivers. It says where a person comes from before it says anything about them.

Oríkì ìnagijẹ belongs to the individual — built from their character, their work, their reputation, the things they have survived and the things they are known for.

In performance the two are woven. A praise singer moves from the lineage into the person, so that a woman being praised at her 60th hears her great-grandfather's town and her own stubborn kindness in the same breath.

How it is built

An oríkì is made of accumulated lines rather than a fixed text. Names and epithets stack. Repetition is structure, not padding — a name returned to three times lands harder each time.

Metaphor is drawn from the concrete: markets, rivers, iron, honey, roads, doors. A generous woman is not called generous; she is the one whose door has no lock, whose pot is never empty on a Sunday.

Tone carries meaning. Yoruba is a tonal language, so the marks are not decoration — Ọlá and Òla are different words. An oríkì said with the wrong tones is not a lightly accented oríkì, it is the wrong words.

It is composed to be heard. Oríkì lives in breath and rhythm, in the voice of someone who knows how to land a line. On paper it is a score, not the music.

Composing one for someone living

Start with the names. The full name, the names family use, the name their mother calls them when she is proud of them. Spell every one correctly, with its tone marks.

Add lineage if you know it — the town, the compound, the trade a family is known for. If you do not know it, leave it out. An invented lineage is a lie told beautifully.

Then take three or four true things they have done, and raise them. Not 'she worked hard' but the stall she opened at dawn for thirty years, the four children she put through school on it.

Close with a blessing that faces forward. Oríkì praises what is, and then reaches for what should come.

Say it aloud as you write. If a line cannot be performed without stumbling, it is not finished.

Common questions