The Language Blood Remembers
Why praying in your native, cultural, or tribal tongue matters, and why I pray in Yoruba
Here’s how my mornings go. Before I touch my phone, before coffee, before anybody needs anything from me, I pour some cool water, light a candle, and start talking to my ancestors. In Yoruba.
Now, I didn’t grow up speaking it. Not even close. My tongue still trips over the tones, and some mornings the words come out slow and clunky. But honestly? I think blood knows these words even when the mouth doesn’t. A feeling settles in when I speak them, like something inside me goes, “Oh. There you are. Home.”
I believe everybody has a language that does that for them, whether they’ve found it yet or not. And I want to talk about why it matters so much to pray in it.
Why I pray in my ancestors’ language
For me, it comes down to this: I want my prayers to reach the ones who came before me in a way they can truly receive.
When I pray in Yoruba, I’m speaking to Olodumare, the Supreme Creator. To the Orishas, the divine forces who guide our lives. And to my egún, my ancestors, in the language they actually knew. I’m talking to my line. My blood. The grandmothers and grandfathers whose names I may never learn, but whose spirit I carry every single day.
Think about it like this. If someone you loved passed away and you got one more chance to talk to them, wouldn’t you want to speak in a way they’d really understand? Not just understand, but feel? Our ancestors deserve to hear from us in the language that held them together. When I pray in Yoruba, I believe they don’t just hear me. They feel honored. Remembered. Recognized.
This language went through it
To understand why Yoruba means so much to me, you have to understand what it survived.
It survived slave ships, where people were chained next to strangers and stripped of their names. It survived plantations, where speaking your own language could get you whipped. It survived masters trying to beat it out of children, priests calling it devil talk, and colonial governments trying to wipe it out of schools, courts, and memory.
And it’s still here.
In Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico, our people held on. They sang it in secret. They hid it behind saints’ names and Catholic feast days. They passed it down in whispers, in songs, in prayers said just quietly enough that the wrong people couldn’t hear. They had almost nothing left that was theirs, and out of everything, they chose to keep this.
That wasn’t luck. That was resistance. Every Yoruba word that made it to me crossed an ocean and survived centuries of cruelty because somebody refused to let it go.
That’s why, in the Caribbean and across the African diaspora, Yoruba isn’t just a language. It means strength. It means survival. It’s the sound of people who were told they were nothing and answered back in a language their oppressors could never own.
It’s not just Yoruba
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Here’s the thing: Yoruba’s story isn’t the only one like it.
All over the world, people were told their languages didn’t matter. Indigenous children in North America were punished in boarding schools for speaking their own tongues. Irish was pushed aside under British rule. Countless African, Caribbean, Pacific, and Native languages were mocked, banned, or slowly buried under someone else’s.
And all over the world, people fought to keep them alive anyway. In prayers. In lullabies. In songs sung at funerals and weddings. In the few words grandma still says when she’s blessing you on your way out the door.
So when anyone prays in their native, cultural, or tribal language, whether that’s Yoruba, Igbo, Twi, Quechua, Lakota, Hebrew, Irish, Tagalog, Patois, or something else, they’re doing more than praying. They’re saying, “You didn’t erase us. We’re still here. And we still remember you.”
How I’m learning (and how you can too)
I’m not learning Yoruba from a textbook alone. I’m learning it the way it was always meant to be learned: by living inside the tradition.
I listen to the cantos, the sacred songs for the Orishas, over and over until the rhythm settles into my chest. I chew on the proverbs, the òwe, which somehow fit a lifetime of wisdom into a single line. I study the verses of Ifá, where our people’s stories and teachings were carefully kept for generations. I learn the ìwúre, the prayers and blessings we speak over people and their paths. And I read lots of Ìtàn Ifá, the sacred stories of the Orishas and our deities, which honestly teach me more about life than most self-help books ever have.
Each one teaches me a little more of the language, and a lot more about who my people were. You can’t really separate a language from the faith and the people who carried it. Learn one, and you start learning all of it.
Your path might look different. Maybe it’s old hymns in your grandparents’ language. Maybe it’s folk songs, proverbs your family repeats without thinking, or prayers your elders still remember. Start wherever the door is open.
Brains over muscle
One proverb has become my motto: Ọgbọ́n jù agbára lọ. Wisdom is greater than strength.
Our ancestors weren’t always stronger than the people who tried to erase them. But they were wiser. They knew what to hide and what to hold onto. They knew how to outlast. They understood that people who remember who they are can never be fully conquered.
That’s the wisdom I ask for every time I pray.
Sacrifice looks different now
Our ancestors gave up things we can barely imagine. Comfort, safety, and sometimes their lives, just to keep their traditions breathing.
Our sacrifices look different today, but they’re still sacrifices. It’s getting up early to pray when you’d rather hit snooze. It’s practicing words that don’t come easily, again and again. It’s the hard work of studying and staying disciplined when life pulls you in a hundred directions. And it takes real mental flexibility to live in a modern world while honoring an ancient one, holding onto both without dropping either.
That’s our offering. Not the easy way, but the effort.
Your roots are calling too…
