Of Water and the Spirit
Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
by Malidoma Patrice Some
(311 pages, pb, $12.95)
Penguin, 1995
ISBN 0-140-19496-7
A fascinating account of the tribal African consciousness. Malidoma is incredibly
articulate. I heard him speak in February 1996 in San Francisco. If you
have a chance to hear him talk, go for it. (He appeared through the local
Learning Annex.)
His detailing of his initiatory ordeals are particularly incredible...literally.
You won't believe the things he experienced, and yet you know he speaks
truly.
Chapter Titles
Introduction
Chapter 1 Slowly Becoming
Chapter 2 A Grandfather's Farewell
Chapter 3 Grandfather's Funeral
Chapter 4 A Sudden Farewell
Chapter 5 In the White Man's World
Chapter 6 Life Begins at Nansi
Chapter 7 The Rebellion Begins
Chapter 8 New Awakenings
Chapter 9 The Long Joumey Begins
Chapter 10 The Voyage Home
Chapter 11 Hard Beginnings
Chapter 12 Trying to Fit Back into Village Life
Chapter 13 The Meeting at the Earth Shrine
Chapter 14 My First Night at the Initiation Camp
Chapter 15 Trying to See
Chapter 16 The World of the Fire, the Song of the Stars
Chapter 17 In the Arms of the Green Lady
Chapter 18 Returning to the Source
Chapter 19 Opening the Portal
Chapter 20 Through the Light Hole
Chapter 21 The World at the Bottom of the Pool
Chapter 22 Burials, Lessons, and Joumeys
Chapter 23 Journey into the Underworld
Chapter 24 A Mission in the Underworld
Chapter 25 Returning from the Underworld
Chapter 26 Homecoming and Celebration
Epilogue: The Fearful Return
Selected Quotes from the Introduction
My name is Malidoma. It means roughly "Be friends with the stranger/enemy."
Because the Dagara believe that every individual comes into this life with
a special destiny, some names are programmatic. They describe the task of
their bearers and constitute a continual reminder to the child of the responsibilities
that are waiting up ahead. A person's life project is therefore inscribed
in the name she/he carries. As my name implies, I am here in the West to
tell the world about my people in any way I can, and to take back to my
people the knowledge I gain about this world. My elders are convinced that
the West is as endangered as the indigenous cultures it has decimated in
the name of colonialism. There is no doubt that, at this time in history,
Western civilization is suffering from a great sickness of the soul. The
West's progressive turning away from functioning spiritual values; its total
disregard for the environment and the protection of natural resources; the
violence of inner cities with their problems of poverty, drugs, and crime;
spiraling unemployment and economic disarray; and growing intolerance toward
people of color and the values of other cultures - all of these trends,
if unchecked, will eventually bring about a terrible self-destruction. In
the face of all this global chaos, the only possible hope is self-transformation.
Unless we as individuals find new ways of understanding between people,
ways that can touch and transform the heart and soul deeply, both indigenous
cultures and those in the West will continue to fade away, dismayed that
all the wonders of technology, all the many philosophical "isms,"
and all the planning of the global corporations will be helpless to reverse
this trend.
It has taken me ten years of battling with insecurity, uncertainty, hesitation,
and God knows what other types of subtle complexes to write this book. The
greatest obstacle I encountered was finding a suitable way to tell my story.
I could not speak English when I arrived in the United States ten years
ago, even though I had taken some English classes at the Jesuit seminary
in my teens. Although I have made great strides in orally communicating
in that language, it was still very difficult to write this book. One of
my greatest problems was that the things I talk about here did not happen
in English; they happened in a language that has a very different mindset
about reality. There is usually a significant violence done to anything
being translated from one culture to another. Modern American English, which
seems to me better suited for quick fixes and the thrill of a consumer culture,
seems to falter when asked to communicate another person's world view. From
the time I began to jot down my first thoughts until the last word, I found
myself on the bumpy road of mediumship, trying to ferry meanings from one
language to another, and from one reality to another - a process that denaturalizes
and confuses them.
I have had to struggle a great deal in order to be able to communicate this
story to you. It is basically the story of my initiation into two different
and highly contradictory cultures. I was born in the early fifties in Burkina
Faso in West Africa, then called Upper Volta by the colonial French government
who invaded my country in the early 1900s. Although my parents did not record
my birth, and to this day are still in conflict as to the exact date, my
papers say that I was born in 1956.
When I was four years old, my childhood and my parents were taken from me
when I was literally kidnapped from my home by a French Jesuit missionary
who had befriended my father. At that time Jesuits were trying to create
a "native" missionary force to convert a people who had wearied
of their message along with their colonial oppression. For the next fifteenl
years I was in a boarding school, far away front my family, and forced to
learn about the white man's reality, which included lessons in history,
geography, anatomy, mathematics, and literature. All of these topics were
presented with a good dose of Christianity and its temperamental god who
forced everyone to live in constant fear of his wrath.
At the age of twenty I escaped and went back to my people, but found that
I no longer fit into the tribal community. I risked my life to undergo the
Dagara initiation and thereby return to my people. During that month-long
ritual, I was integrated back into my own reality as well as I could be.
But I never lost my Western education. So I am a man of two worlds, trying
to be at home in both of them - a difficult task at best.
When I was twenty-two, my elders came to me and asked me to return to the
white man's world, to share with him what I had learned about my own spiritual
tradition through my initiation. For me, initiation had eliminated my confusion,
helplessness, and pain and opened the door to a powerful understanding of
the link between my own life purpose and the will of my ancestors. I had
come to understand the sacred relationship between children and old people,
between fathers and their adolescent sons, between mothers and daughters.
I knew especially why my people have such a deep respect for old age, and
why a strong, functioning community is essential for the maintenance of
an individual's sense of identity, meaning, and purpose. I used this knowledge
as my starting point.
My own elders had experienced French colonialism and the culture of the
West as a force that used violence as a means to eradicate traditional lifeways.
They had seen their own youth stolen from them as they vainly struggled
against the incursions of these intruders. During these years, in which
my people were trying to make sense of a people whose every action seemed
to go against the natural order of things, creating chaos, death, and destruction,
the sense of unified community that sustained their tribal life was profoundly
destabilized. These foreigners seemed to have no respect for life, tradition,
or the land itself At first my elders refused to believe that a race of
people who could cause such suffering and death could possibly have any
respect for itself. It did not take long before they realized that the white
man wanted nothing short of the complete destruction of their culture and
even their lives.
For some of my people, befriending the white man was the best way they could
find to fight back. By doing this, they hoped to get to know how the white
man's mind worked and what they thought they were accomplishing by invading
another people's ancestral lands. Not all of my people were willing to have
this much contact with the whites. Some village people, who chose to see
things only from their own tribal perspective, believed that to have become
so spiritually sick, the white man must have done something terrible to
his own ancestors. Others who knew a little about military culture, imperialism,
and colonialism thought that the white man must have destroyed his own land
to have to come here and take the land of others. In spite of the best efforts
of all my people, the whites kept on coming; kept on doing whatever they
pleased; and kept on taking more and more of our land, our beliefs, and
our lives.
Many years later, my generation finds itself gripped by a powerful irony.
Suddenly it has become popular to defend tribal people, their world view,
and their lifeways. But while the West is engaged in a great debate about
what it means to preserve culture, the indigenous world is aware that it
has already lost the battle. It seems obvious to me that as soon as one
culture begins to talk about preservation, it means that it has already
turned the other culture into an endangered species. Then you have the purists
on either side who want indigenous cultures to remain "exactly the
same as they have always been." In many cultures, the Dagara included,
it is no longer a question of preservation but of survival in some form
or another. The culture's own reality has already been superseded by the
"fashionable" modernity. I see my position as a two-way passage
of information, as both a bridge and a conduit. By agreeing to move between
both worlds, I seek to bring about some kind of balance.
I deeply respect the story I have told in this book. I respect it because
it embodies everything that is truly me, my ancestors, my tribe, my life.
It is a very complicated story whose telling caused me great pain; but I
had to tell it. Only in this way could I ultimately fulfill my purpose to
"befriend the stranger/enemy." This is not the first task set
me by my elders, nor will it be my last.
My first "assignment" after my initiation into the tribe was to
seek entrance into the university. I did so equipped with the special knowledge
that initiation had provided me with. I had one thing in my pocket - a little
talisman. This talisman was an oval-shaped pouch stuffed with a stone from
the underworld and some other secret objects collected in the wild. Though
it is common to carry talismans in my village, for they are a great source
of power and protection, people fear them. Every Dagara knows that powerful
objects are dangerous. Depending on the actions of its bearer, such objects
have the power to help, but also to hurt. Therefore, talismans are treated
with great respect and care. My pouch was sewn tightly shut and then decorated
in a way that enhanced its ugliness and scariness. These objects are always
made to look ugly and fearsome, perhaps to stress their supernatural quality.
Besides, my experience of the other world has led me to understand that
anything that crosses from that place into this one is seldom beautiful,
as if anything spiritually potent must look ugly and smell bad in order
to work. My talisman certainly did. At one end of the oval pouch was a tuft
of strange animal hair.
[...]
The year that I applied was no different from any other. I had filled in
my application for a scholarship knowing that I had no chance of getting
beyond the filing. But I also knew that my tribal elders had given me instructions
on how to apply, even though they had no basis upon which to work. How,
I wondered, could these people, accustomed to village life, know how to
get one's needs met in the city? Yet I felt it was still worth a try. What
did I have to lose? To my great surprise, I was scheduled for an interview
and was not only informed of my acceptance to the school, but given a full
scholarship on the spot. I cannot tell you the details of how my talisman
worked, for I prefer not to blunt its effectiveness, but it is still helping
me today to speak in big assembly halls. Though invitations come in unorthodox
ways, I always seem to be able to get where I need to go and say what I
need to say.
I spent four years in that center for higher education, which later became
the national university. I walked away from it with a bachelor's degree
in sociology, literature, and linguistics, and a master's thesis in world
literature. I still did not know why I had been there. The system did not
care whether you really learned anything or not. It was based upon the regurgitation
of memorized material fed to one by professors who read from their notes
in bored, sleepy, and sometimes even drunken voices. Most of what they said
was incomprehensible. Our only reason for being there was our need to transcend
the alarming social and economic situation in which most of us were caught.
We did not need to be told that a proper Western education was the key to
good Western jobs and a decent life.
For most people, top performance in that school meant hard work. As an initiated
man, I did not have to work hard to get my degrees. I skipped a great deal
of the classes, made sure that I was present at the exams, and walked away
with my diplomas. The answers to the exam questions were mostly visible
in the auras of the teachers who constantly patrolled the aisles of the
testing rooms. I just had to write these answers down quickly before any
one of them noticed how strangely I was looking at him/her.
During my second year in college, the teachers began to notice me. It was
harder and harder for me to cut classes. When I was picked by the professor
to reply to a question, I continued to instinctively seek the answer in
his aura, as I did during exams. To me it was like being asked to read out
of an open book. This method worked so well that one day one of my teachers
looked at me suspiciously and asked, "Have you been reading my mind?"
Of course, I said no. We were in the modern world, where such things are
impossible.
My talisman continued to work for me. I was awarded a scholarship to the
Sorbonne, where I received a "D.E.A." (Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies)
in political science. Later I continued my education at Brandeis University,
earning a Ph.D. in literature. I am not writing about all these accomplishments
to impress you, but to show you that what I have learned as an initiated
man really works (at least for me) in Western reality.
Links to More Malidoma Material
A
Conversation With Malidoma Some
Interview
by D. Patrick Miller
Remembering Our Purpose
The Wisdom of
Africa
