Of Water And Spirit
Water Spirit, Photograph, © Evan Kaufman
Malidoma Somé, who died in 2021, was known widely in the West as an African Shaman from the Dagara tribe of modern day Burkina Faso. His life’s work was to bring the teachings of his tribe to the West, acting as a bridge between radically different cultures. As Somé recounts, his work was a spiritual purpose given to him by the elders of his tribe and, befitting the name Malidoma, which means “be friends with the stranger/enemy.”
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the life of an African Shaman, first published in 1994, is Somé account of his life, his early childhood in his native Dagara village and the magical connection he forged with his grandfather, his capture by white missionaries at the age of four and subsequent initiation into Christian discourse and the ways of the West, and his escape from his captors and return to the tribe, where he experienced a shamanic initiation into Dagara manhood.
As Somé explains in the introduction of the book, the Dagara have no word for fiction, and no clear split between the material and the spiritual. “The world of the Dagara does not distinguish between reality and imagination. To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality. To imagine something, to closely focus one’s thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring that something into being” (8). For the Western reader, this is a helpful primer that invites us from the very beginning of the story to let go or suspend our conditioned ways of thinking and experiencing. Somé’s book itself, if the reader allows, is an initiation of sorts into a rich and wonderful realm of being where we are invited to learn, grow and receive the wisdom of his tribe’s teachings.
A material accounting of the book’s content would be an injustice to its message. The book is a story, yes, but it’s more of an experience and Somé’s most masterful feat here might be his ability to bring forward the altered states of consciousness and varied realms of experience he encounters in his initiation to the reader. I read in the deep of winter, mostly at night by a hot, glowing fire. This physical contact with fire, the heat, the spark and cackle, the trance of flame, helped to make a journey of a book, one suffused with magic and mystery inside my very ordinary living room.
When Somé returns to his village as a young man, he has been irrevocably changed by his exposure to Western culture. The elders of the village understand Somé’s exposure as a kind of soul loss and Somé as an outsider. His father explains to him, “When a person has been changed the way you have, one of two things always happen: either you die into the old part of yourself—and that is painful—or you make everything else die into you. The first one is human. The second is not. In the first case, wisdom is at work. In the second case, fear is at work. The elders want to give you the chance to adjust to your village before you make it adjust to you” (177). So it is that having been initiated into the ways of the white man, Somé is now asked to take the path of wisdom and be initiated into the traditional Dagara custom, one most boys in the community undergo at the start of adolescence.
Perhaps in the West, if we think of initiation at all, we are prone to amplify the personal journey of the initiate. Rites of passage, like going off to college, getting married, even taking vows in a religious community, are read mainly as threads in the narrative arc of an individual. For the Dagara the emphasis is on community. While Somé was indeed irrevocably altered by his years away from the village in another culture and in need of transformation, his continuing in the village without initiation was a threat to the health of the village. While Somé’s journey into Dagara initiation is necessary for him to kill the “ghost” within him, it is a necessary step in protecting and promoting the harmony of the village and each person’s place within it.
One of the richest offerings of Of Water and the Spirit is its invitation to taste and consider initiation and its role in our collective health. While the choose your own adventure storyline of modern Western culture has blazed new paths of creativity and self-expression, it seems imperative that we also consider what has been lost. Alienation, isolation, and addiction are endemic. Is there no causal relationship we are willing to consider between the supremacy of the individual and the profound suffering, the dislocation, that permeates our culture collectively?
It turns out that Somé’s ultimate place within the village was out of it, at least in the physical sense. After his initiation and a period of reintegration, it is “decided” by the elders that he will go to the West to share the Dagara traditions. As his father shares, “But your grandfather told you when you were very young that you would have to go and live in the white world, and I think your fate is pursuing you” (307). Bereft and lost, Somé recounts, “I was tired—tired in my soul, tired with the kind of exhaustion that cannot be named. But I knew what my father meant. I knew what the council meant. I will never have a home” (307).
Somé never recounts this move away from the village as a choice. It’s fate. It’s responsibility to the village, it’s “under orders as an initiated man” (309). There is a self-leaving in following the orders, a sublimation of his own desires, hopes and ideas for something beyond himself. Through the lens of modern Western culture, the “orders” are tiny needles that we often fail to see or have interest in looking for, much less have the wisdom, support and trust to try and thread. But this does not have to be so. Light a fire, settle in and open the book.