*This was originally
written on August 14th, but due to the laziness of the author and
his general ineptitude, it is just being posted now. Get on top of your shit,
Machado.
In my life, I have very few hard and fast rules, but I do
have some. Most borne out of experience and yet others from premonition. People
who know me well may know one such rule: if, in your wandering, you ever come
across an individual smoking more than one cigarette at a time, run--there is
some wild shit afoot. Whenever the invigorating power of a single smoke just
won’t cut it, whenever both time and circumstance dictate such a supreme
nicotine fix, perhaps you have arrived at a moment that is somewhat
unmanageable. Evacuation is likely the best card to play.
And yet, despite my convictions, I instead found myself far less
flight-given even as a writhing Ewe man, doused in seawater and his own sweat,
stood just in front of me with two 40-centimeter blades drawn across his own
abdomen and neck while he drug vigorously on two spliffs the size of cigars.
But before we get here, maybe I should offer some context:
Pops, the bartender, had been serving me plenty of beer over
the past few days.
“You look skinny, Mario. You need to eat more. You need to
drink more.”
Pops is the kind of doctor I need--a funny, wry, no-dread
Rasta serving up drinks and a philosophy that places good ganja and good
friends at the center of this quite, tropical universe. But he is right: between
the diet I have maintained during fieldwork in some rural communities, the
bout(s) of giardia, and the malaria that I would later learned had been
swimming in my system for a few weeks (at least), I had indeed lost weight,
quite a bit actually.
“I need my medicine, Pops.”
Pops giveth. A liter-bottle of Club beer manifests in front
of me. I feel better already. Amen.
“You should go see Mamishie Rasta, she is very powerful.”
Pops encourages me, very matter-of-factly.
I am intrigued. “Who is Mamishie Rasta?”
And this is where the tale begins: Mamishie Rasta, before
she was Mamishie Rasta, was just a normal village girl who one day wandered too
far into the surf and disappeared into the sea. After a fruitless search, her
family held a funeral and laid her memory to rest, if not her body, which was
lost to the waves. For many years, it was so, and in the silence that should be
expected from the dead, there was no further word of the girl from the village.
Then one day, out of the waters of the Gulf of Guinea appears a women dressed
in a pure-white gown with dreadlocks that reach longingly, like roots from a
banyan tree, down past her knees towards the ground.
Mamishie had been reborn. This is the second-coming, my
friends.
Her family questioned, her neighbors pried, and after a
careful examination, it was discovered that this mythical creature was in fact
the reincarnation of their beloved. But Mamishie had returned with a purpose,
with something to share. During her years of absence, she had lived in the
ocean among the mer-people--a community of half-seahorse, half-humans that
bestowed upon her the sacred knowledge of their gods and divine medicine.
Mamishie had returned to spread this knowledge among her people.
The story is amazing and as Pops fills me in on the details
(which, even as a good Christian, I can tell he completely believes), I find
myself in need of no more encouragement. As a rather godless person myself, I
find such a story just as plausible as any other religious narrative. Plus, I
am skinny as shit and at this point, after the weeks of disease and drink,
anything Mamishie might offer would really be incidental. So after a 1 cedi
($0.25) taxi ride, we find ourselves seated in a hot, windowless room in front
of a woman who is even more magnificent in person (not necessarily elegant, certainly not refined, but with a distinct aura of the sea) than the stories we’ve heard.
Our consultation begins, somewhat fittingly, with strong
drink: alomo bitters and palm wine, a shot a piece. The bitters don’t go down quite like the
palm wine, but we can’t be rude. In my book at least, wasting good drink is a capital offense, quite socially inexcusable. So with this refined sense of maturity and respect, I graciously agree to help my friends and polish off a few more helpings. God
help us all
After a brief discussion, we are led into another room with
a low-hanging corrugated-tin roof. With few words exchanged, we are gestured
into some plastic chairs where we are left to watch the spectacle soon to unfold
before us. The room itself--more of an extended porch occupying a courtyard
tucked within a labyrinth of closely-built mud and brick houses--was flanked by
a series of smaller rooms acting as shrines to a pantheon of gods and
goddesses. Around the small doorway leading into each structure, mythical
portraits and scenes were depicted with the respective names of the gods scrawled
in bold, black letters. The two I remember most vividly are Papa Tongo, a
drum-playing merman riding a horse and clothed in leopard skins, and Mamiwater,
the penultimate goddess who bore a surprising semblance to Mamishie Rasta
herself.
But the material scene slowly and easily fades into
the back of my mind. The room was populated by somewhere between 30 and 50
people (such details, as well as a specific chronology of events, remain quite
elusive for reasons that will soon become clear). There was a group of
shirtless, sweaty men playing a massive array of drums in the far corner while
a cluster of women and young children sang rhythmically, occasionally venturing
into a dance as the music took them.
This went on for quite some time, perhaps an hour or two or
more. In reality, I have no idea how long we sat there watching, the scene was
hypnotizing, intoxicating, and as much for the music as for the various fires
being lit, joints being passed around, and piles of gunpowder being lit by a
small contingency of priestly subjects. The room soon became as thick and heavy
as the ocean with a cacophony of sound and smoke and we were all swimming in
it--awkward white visitors and community members alike--as the evening began to
thrust itself in a different (and unforeseen) direction. At this point, with
bellies full of booze and lungs and heads full of earth and smoke, we were all along
for the ride.
The drums, the drums, the drums, incessant like a fever and
soon reaching to a pitch of madness, began pounding any sense of reason from
the atmosphere. Their tempo was conducting the collective departure attained by
those possessed souls around me.
I say possessed and I mean possessed.
A few men had arrived on the scene, maybe 3 in total, but it
is hard to remember exactly--maybe more, maybe less. These men were quite
literally possessed by spirits: spirits that lent great power, spirits that
make men strong, spirits that breathe unrepentant life into a world otherwise occupied
by well-dressed Sunday-morning churchgoers. Their possession threw them into an
intense, almost violent sort of bodily ritual as they stormed around the entire
scene from one end of the room to the other. Sometimes they crawled animal-like on all
fours. Sometimes they seized rabidly on the floor. Other times, they leaped and
stomped the earth in rapture, grabbing any number of various knives and
machetes to press against their bodies. Some used blocks of wood to hammer the
blades against their abdomens, others simply ran them (with the dull-side against
their skin) like saws across their throats.
The spirits make you invincible. The spirits make you
strong.
Throughout this process, these men were supplied by the various priests with a chain-supply of hefty spliffs (great hand-rolled cigarettes containing a sweet mixture of tobacco and marijuana) with which to sup their insanity. It was somewhere around this time that I found myself face-to-face with the gentlemen described at the beginning: a twenty-something fisherman whose sinewy body was playing temporary host to one of these various spirits. Swinging, sawing blades in hand and two-spliffs dangling menacingly from his mouth, he only seemed to stop smoking for the brief moments that he howled and yelled and screamed at the heavens. And if I had any lingering doubt as to the authenticity of his possession they were definitely assuaged by the supernatural capacity of the hits he drew from his herbs. They were full and deep and holy and they raced past his throat and lungs and went straight down into his abdomen which lurched forward and sunk backward in fits of hysteria and trembling.
At one point, he placed his large machete on the ground,
grabbed my arms and pulled me from my chair. It was unexpected, but I felt wholly unworried, having been cruising at the same altitude as this entire room for
some hours now. My only conscious thought in that moment, I remember, was that
maybe I could catch a few drags from his spliff, but he had other plans. I was
led--not forcefully, but certainly not with any choice to the contrary-- across
the room and in front of Mamishie Rasta herself. She was seated unassumingly in
the background, having spent the hours monitoring the entire scene and smoking
slowly.
My new-friend, in all his possession and intention, pushed
me down onto my knees in front of Mamishie. I was then somewhat shoved into a
position of reverent prostration at her feet, with occasional respites in which
I was expected (and obliged) to place my forehead against Mamishie’s knees. All
the while, my friend was likewise placing his forehead against my shoulders and
my chest and shaking violently and screaming and just carrying on as if such
contact was killing him.
Mamishie looked on. She looked over me. She looked through
me. I was in a moment of complete abandon, so incredibly far away from any
familiarity that I could draw upon, any memory that might provide me with even
a rough blueprint of how to navigate such a place and such moments. It was
release on a whole new level and I was burning with something like passion or
madness or the reckless singularity that exists at the edge of the cliffs of
experience, understanding and knowledge itself.
During a lull in the commotion, or maybe I was just coming
in and out of the present, I had a distinct thought--in my head, I heard the
soothing voice of a pilot (is this what god sounds like?), and the quiet ding
of the fasten-seatbelt light turning off. “We’re gonna be experiencing some
turbulence….uhhhhhh, just hang tight…this might be the end. We hope you have
enjoyed your flight with us and we hope to see you again soon in the
afterlife.”
My last clear memory of the evening is watching my possessed
friend, barefoot and glistening with sweat, standing in a bed of hot coals,
smoking two spliffs like a fiend and howling into the night air. Through this
all, from the beginning of the drums until the soul-rattling climax, the
village children wandered in and out, sometimes dancing, sometimes singing, but
otherwise treating such a setting as completely normal, even playful.
The drums gradually wound-down and the smoke cleared along
with my mind. Sober thoughts rushed to my rescue and my senses became
hyper-acute as soon as we stepped into the night and could smell the salt in
the air yet again. We walked home slowly, talking little. It was a normally
sleepy evening in the villages we passed along the coast with a silence
punctuated only by the occasional passing motorcycle or nightjar flying overhead. The whole experience had lasted good 6 hours or so, although in all honesty, in the moment, time seemed quite a foolish notion altogether.
The next day I woke, bright and gleaming as the morning. I
was still skinny and I still had malaria (thankfully outpaced by the daily
doses of Malerone running through my blood), but I felt like a fucking king. I
spent the day on the beach watching the waves without a word.
Whenever I see some manifestation of indigenous beliefs,
whether nakedly displayed in its own right or covertly smuggled into the rigid
framework of Christian dogma, my thought is almost always: eat shit and die
colonialism, eat shit and die religious predation.
Maybe it’s because I am afflicted by a body of intensely
rebellious bones, or maybe it’s because I am naïve or immature, but the forces
that allow such traditions to survive despite the depraved delusions of a
hegemonic modernity never cease to inspire me. As much as the exploitative
powers of this world--economic, political and religious--have sought to flatten
the map and assimilate diversity into their monochrome vision of a deranged
world order, the capacity and endurance of the human spirit remains
inextinguishable. Despite the wholescale dissolution that colonialism, the
slave trade, and missionary conquest have wrought in many corners of the world,
such persistence of traditional beliefs is a fact of life that no amount of
violence and oppression can change.
I reflect back on the sterile church services that I endured
in my youth and I can’t help but think about the demotion that such a bleached-white
interpretations of spirituality offer to god. As if he/she/it were something
easily consumed, like a multivitamin or a gentle laxative, during the safe,
controlled suburban rituals of Sunday mornings. I place such thoughts against
the incalculable insanity and zeal that I experienced during my momentary
tutelage under Mamishie Rasta. There is no comparison.
In a small fishing village along the eastern Ghanaian coast
close to the border with Togo, Mamishie Rasta has created something
incredible--a raucous, animal-sacrificing belief system that celebrates equal
parts life and death through the rousing effects of drums and plenty of drink.
There is no holy book, there is no tithing, just an abundance of fervor and the
liberation induced by uninhibited spiritual transcendence.
But I will stop myself before I pontificate too much upon
such things (this is a long fucking blog post as is). Hopefully, this story itself
will provide more by ways of explanation and understanding than any of my
foolish attempts at faux-academic mumbling.
Suffice to say, I prefer my god with a little flavor. And a little bit of herb doesn't hurt either.
From Ghana,
-Mario