This year the millet fields had been generous and the harvest good. The hard work of collecting and transporting grain from the farm to the house roofs, where it waited to be put into the granaries, was over. Now, in the fallow dry season, the villagers turned their attention to spiritual matters — to initiation.
One afternoon I was sitting outside with my sister when a town crier came running to my father’s house. In a Dagara village, the town crier is considered an envoy of the spirit. He does not greet people or otherwise behave normally, for he is possessed by the message he has been commissioned to convey. He appears very agitated because he is responding to what the spirits have told him to do.
Out of breath, he stopped in front of us, mumbled something, and drew a cross on the mud wall of the women’s quarter. He said nothing, but instead sang a bizarre song. As he was about to go away, I stopped him.
“Wait a minute. What’s all this about?”
“What? You don’t know? Well, a child who lives in this house will become a man — if he lives that long.”
This answer transfixed me. I sat down. I had imagined that Baor was scheduled for the middle of the dry season.
Seeing my perplexity, my sister said, “You cannot be told about it until the day before. If you know ahead of time, something is wrong.”
“So my initiation begins tomorrow — and I am not the least prepared for it.”
“Your not knowing is being prepared.”
That night I could not sleep. Each time I closed my eyes, I saw ghosts all over the place.
No one bothered me until the middle of the afternoon, when Father called. The house seemed deserted. I walked out of my room into the inner yard, where Father was waiting for me. He held ash in one hand and a bowl of water in the other. He handed me the water and I followed him into the medicine room.
We knelt down and he began. “Walai!” he said, saluting the spirits. “To the rising of the sun, to the powers of life, to you who established the directives and the meaning of crossing the bridge from nonperson to person through the hard road of knowledge. Here is another one who leaves his warm home and comes to you seeking the path of memory. The road is dangerous, the process uncertain, but with your protection, upon which we rely, he will return to us a man. Let him come back alive.”
Father asked me to hand him the water, which he sprinkled on the statues of the male and female ancestors. He had already done the same with the ash in his hands. Then he continued, “Take this ash and give him the power of his ancestors. Take this water to seal the contract between us that he will return from his journey with a heart turned toward his tribe and a soul toward his ancestors.”
He then turned to me and said, “The time has come. I will not have much to say to you again until . . . I may never say anything to you again unless you come back. I have done what a father should do. The rest is in your hands. Please come back to us.”
The whole family was outside watching. When I followed Father out into the compound, everybody looked at me with sympathy. I had no idea how long I was going to be absent. We all walked away from the house toward the outskirts of the village. As we neared the bush, more and more people joined us. There was a large group of young adolescents, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, packed together at the edge of the bush. They looked so young that I felt out of place. They were all naked.
Nakedness is very common in the tribe. It is not a shameful thing; it is an expression of one’s relationship with the spirit of nature. To be naked is to be open-hearted. Normally, kids stay naked until puberty and even beyond. It was only with the introduction of cheap cloth from the West, through Goodwill and other Christian organizations, that nakedness began to be associated with shame.
The naked kids were singing. As I came closer, I could hear their words.
My little family I leave today. My great Family I meet tomorrow. Father, don’t worry, I shall come back. Mother, don’t cry, I am a man. As the sun rises and the sun sets My body into them shall melt, And one with you and them Forever and ever I shall be . . .
Their families embraced them. Some family members grabbed their hands and sobbed with them; they knew they might be saying goodbye for the last time. There were so many young men that I could not count them all. Many of them were strangers to me. My father told me to take my clothes off. I obeyed him but felt ashamed. No one paid any attention to my nakedness, however. My sister was weeping when she grabbed my hand. A little annoyed by this display of emotion, I pulled myself loose and joined the group of candidates who were singing —
To become a man I must go, Into Nature’s womb I must return, But when I come back, The joy of rebirth for you I will sing.
Each one of us possessed a center that he had grown away from after birth. To be born was to lose contact with our center, and to grow from childhood to adulthood was to walk away from it.
We sang as we walked into the belly of the bush and were swallowed by the trees. We were not walking in any order. I felt propelled by the crowd of kids and my feet moved automatically. How many of us are going into the bush to be initiated? How many villages are represented here? I wanted to ask someone, but I felt a palpable pressure against asking questions. The air around me was charged with the sense that something serious was happening, something so big that to start trying to put it into words would desecrate it or go counter to the whole purpose of the gathering. So I kept quiet and did as everyone else was doing.
The initiation camp was a rudimentary clearing in the bush, hidden in the midst of a grassy savanna by the protective walls of surrounding mountains and foothills. I had envisioned a place decorated with talismanic medicine tools — hyenas’ tails sewn to elephant skin, dried lions’ hearts, hunting relics, and the like — but the clearing turned out to be just a circle like the one in the middle of a farm that farmers reserve for the harvested crop before they carry it home. In this case, we were the crop.
The area was divided into two circular sections. The smaller circle was reserved for the five elders in charge of the rites of Baor. Each of the five elders had a brand-new straw mat for a bed, and at the center of the elders’ circle were a fireplace and a little hut. I assumed the hut contained the teaching tools for the initiation ceremony.
Our circle, on the other hand, was virtually empty when we got there. We began collecting leaves from trees to make beds for the coming night, and dry wood for the fire. As soon as we arrived, the elders disappeared and we were given directions by a coach — a graduate of a previous initiation — who was in charge of practical matters. We knew that the elders were there somewhere, but we didn’t see them until later.
When darkness began to fall that night, our coach roared at us to prepare for the circle of fire. He communicated with his hunter’s wélé, whistling the words rather than singing them. The wélé is a five-inch flute with two holes on the right side and one on the left. The Dagara language is a tone language spoken like a chant, and it is customary on important ritual occasions to blow words through this flute. Each sound has a code meaning, and people take a message delivered this way more seriously.
The coach’s summons came while we were still collecting dry wood or fresh leaves. I had little knowledge of musical language, so most of the message seemed like perfect gibberish to me. Sensing my difficulty, my friend Nyangoli translated for me: “He says that the sun is going to lie down for the night. As the blanket of darkness spreads over the land of the gods, the ancestors have requested the elders to ask him to summon us to gather for the instructional ceremony. That’s what he said, word for word.”
“What’s this supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” replied Nyangoli, uninterested. “Very soon the elders will show up to tell us what we’re going to be doing out here. That’s all there is to it.”
I was becoming conscious of entering an unknown space. The message of the flute was the first mystery. How many more were to come?
When we gathered at the initiation circle, the sun had set and the twilight was at its height. In the middle of the circle, a little hole had been dug. Around it pieces of dry wood were being planted. Smaller pieces of wood went on top, and more wood was added until a fireplace was built. It was pitch dark by the time the fire was ready to be lit. Soon its flames drove back the night’s blackness. Our shadows moved rhythmically with the flames, and we intoned the song of light:
O light of burning fire, Clean the mud of the night That sticks to the lids of my sight. O instrument of my sight, Do not close the lids of my eyes Even when you eat the wood to ash. Can I see without your light? Can I live without your heat? Can I survive your plight? O light of burning fire . . .
I did not remember having heard the song before, but the music was inviting, calming to the mind, and soothing to the heart. I mumbled along, wishing I knew how to sing it like everybody else. But I had been away too long. The song got inside you, burning your heart like fire, and I was quickly caught up with its rhythms, words, and melody. We held each other’s hands and swayed in cadence.
The elders chose this time to make their dramatic entrance. They looked like living skeletons, half naked and covered with white lines painted on their faces, necks, bellies, and backs. Each wore ritual cotton shorts that were voluminous and looked from afar like bags. The elders’ thin, black bodies were not visible in the dark — just the white, almost phosphorescent lines painted on them. Each elder carried his medicine bag made of feline skin. They walked in a line, slowly, quietly, imperturbably.
Their presence intensified the song, as if the force of the elders, a gift that flowed from the power of being old, were suddenly available to us. Our teachers walked around the fireplace in the center of the circle — three times clockwise and three times counterclockwise. They did not sing with us. When they stopped their procession, the song stopped as if by enchantment. Nobody asked us to stop singing — we simply lost the song. The silence that followed was as thick as the darkness behind us in the bush.
One of the elders pulled something out of his bag, which was a pouch with an end like a tail. He brought the pouch to his mouth and said something silently, only his lips moving. Then he directed the tail end of the pouch toward the fire and uttered something in primal language. Instantly the fire changed color to violet and increased its roar. We still held each other’s hands. The elder moved close to the fire, continuing his invocation. With each of his movements the fire grew taller and taller, until the violet flame stood almost six meters high. From then on, I heard nothing and thought nothing.
The violet fire looked like a ghost with flaming arms, one of which held a flaming stick. The legs seemed covered by a robe of flame. All was roaring horribly. The elders had disappeared from the center of the circle. Only this ghost remained, roaring with a deep voice. Suddenly I knew what we were going to be doing in the days to come, although nobody seemed to have told me this. Rather, the knowledge seemed to have been poured directly into my consciousness. I could not tell if it had been there before, or if it had come after the fire was turned into a ghost. Can a thirsty throat feel quenched without the cool sensation of drinking? Can a starving belly feel full without the pleasure of eating? Somehow the schedule of Baor had been poured into us.
I doubt the whole thing took more than thirty minutes, but when I came back to myself, the ghost was becoming a regular fire again. It receded slowly, reluctantly, as if fearing a trap. The elder responsible for this magical event was standing in front of the fire. He was thin, tall, and rigid. His body and mind were entirely fixed upon his creation, his eyes wide open and dilated. The other elders were still standing where they had been before — they had been there all the time.
Now the coach ordered us to sit. Four elders posted themselves around us in four different corners — the four directions — facing inward. The fifth elder (the one responsible for the ghost in the fire) still stood in the middle of the circle next to the fireplace. Walking slowly around the circle, he spoke incessantly and breathlessly as if in a hurry to get the job done. Somehow what he said did not sound strange to me. It was as if he were putting into words something we all knew, something we had never questioned and could never verbalize.
What he said was this: The place where he was standing was the center. Each one of us possessed a center that he had grown away from after birth. To be born was to lose contact with our center, and to grow from childhood to adulthood was to walk away from it.
“The center is both within and without. It is everywhere. But we must realize that it exists, find it, and be with it, for without the center we cannot tell who we are, where we come from, and where we are going.
“No one’s center is like anyone else’s. Find your own center, not the center of your neighbor; not the center of your father, or mother, or family, or ancestor, but that center which is yours and yours alone.”
He explained that the purpose of Baor was to find our center, to repair the wear and tear incurred in the course of thirteen rainy seasons of life. I was twenty. Had I remained at home, I would have gone through this process seven years earlier. I wondered if I was catching up too late.
After a while the elder stopped walking, but his eyes never quit the fire in front of him. He stared at it with such intensity that he seemed to be seeing another ghost within it. From the four corners of the circle, the other elders watched him. I could see the dancing fire in their eyes.
My attention moved from the elders to the neophytes sitting around the fire. Each had a different posture, as if they had become stones, or human dolls stuffed with straw. For a time I felt I was the only conscious person there. The others had shifted into a closer relationship with what the elder in the center of the circle was teaching us. But how did they perform the shift? Why was I an outsider, incapable of entering into the same state of intensity I could see in every face?
As my gaze wandered around the circle, it confirmed my aloneness. Nobody noticed me looking; they were all preoccupied with what they were doing. Why was it so hard for me to participate fully like everyone else?
I tried to concentrate, but the more I tried to focus my attention, the more I realized how alone I was in this circle of inert men. I could not even sense those next to me. I felt as if the elder were still speaking, but I was the only person in the circle unable to hear him.
I was twenty. Had I remained at home, I would have gone through this process seven years earlier. I wondered if I was catching up too late.
Suddenly my perceptions changed, turning inside out in an instant. No, the elder had been speaking all the time! He had never stopped talking and gazing into the fire. Now I felt as if I were jumping from one contradiction to another, one strange realization to another, registering reality in an abnormal way. I was busy trying to make sense out of something that was probably meant to challenge my habitual perceptions.
Then something inside began screaming for me to break out of this spell of isolation. I asked myself, Where am I if I am the only one alive in this circle? Where are these people — the elders, the neophytes sitting next to me as stiff as dead pieces of wood? The fire was still roaring, but it too had stopped moving. Everybody and everything around me was like a museum piece, and I had become a visitor to the museum.
Then the bush narrowed around us. I was quite certain that the trees had moved closer, but how much closer I could not tell. I felt as if everything around me — other than the strangely immobile fire and my companions — had come to life.
All around and underneath me I could feel life pulsating, down to the smallest piece of dirt on the ground. This life expressed itself in otherworldly sounds and colors, incandescent visions and apparitions. Everything seemed alive with meaning.
The elder in the center of the circle was the most intriguing to watch — an amalgamation of colors, sounds, and innumerable forms. All his smallest constituent parts — down to the tiniest atomic particles of his being — had come alive. He was not moving, but the colors, sounds, and life forms were. Without being able to put it into words, I understood then what was happening: things had become their meaning. I knew that was the lesson for the evening.
This memoir is excerpted from Malidoma Somé’s autobiography, Of Water and the Spirit, used by special permission of Tarcher/Putnam. Copyright © 1994 by Malidoma Patrice Somé.
— Ed.
