177603.fb2 Tropic of Night - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 14

Tropic of Night - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 14

FOURTEEN

9/22 Lagos

The generator arrived today. NEPA, the Nigeria Electric Power Authority, or like they say here Not Enough Power Anywhere, sucks big-time amp; is under no real pressure to improve: big boys all have generators like us, everyone else steals it from power lines, so there is no money for capital investment. A typically African solution?simple, effective, self-destructive. W. working at last, at least typewriting noises from his room. I pray he is getting some good work done; at least something will be salvaged from this wreckage. He has his own room now.

Des away a good deal, making arrangements with his contacts, people high in clan and tribal hierarchies, finding out when ceremonies will be held, arranging for the grad students to be placed in various sites. And arranging things with the government, too. We are in bad with the government, according to him; there is often a car outside the hotel, fat guys with sunglasses and nice suits, watching. Colonel Musa would love to catch us making a pornographic film.

Talked with Des just now. David Berne is coming for sure, and he advised me to wait until I had a chance to talk with him before setting off for Ketu. I’ve been reading his stuff on Gelede magic and dance, and I agreed that was best. The guy is, in any case, one of the heavies in the field, and also one of the few who doesn’t think M. is a total charlatan. I wonder why that’s important to me at this late date; I’ve often called him that myself. In any case, looking forward.

9/24 Lagos

All day at the courts and jail, trying to get Tunji’s brother, Ifasen, out of trouble. Ifasen is a cabdriver and apparently he ran over a goat and the cops pinched him. In Africa, if someone works for you, it is the done thing that you are thereby the patron of his or her entire extended family. I am also paying the school fees of Ajayi’s two nieces. The sums are pathetically small, but it takes up so much time. W. observes this and gives me contemptuous looks. Miss Ann being kind to the darkies. I want to shake him!

9/27 Lagos

With Greer at the University here to look at the library, and introduced me to Mr. Odibo, the librarian. A ramshackle place, lizards running through the books, termites eating everything. It’s no wonder literacy was so long delayed in Yorubaland, and the rest of Africa. There is nothing to write on that will last more than a decade. Interesting discussion about this with Odibo, and the consequent survival of enormous feats of memory by traditional Africans, the preservation of, e.g., thousands of verses of Ifa prophecy by diviners, and of history and events by griots.

Oral culture, easy to sneer, but not when you actually observe a relatively recent shelf of books turned to powder. Odibo showed me some rarities he keeps behind steel, journals of missionaries and early British merchants and administrators. Some French material there, too, which piqued my interest. Always possible to get a paper out of crap like that, especially stuff that hasn’t been translated into English.

After that, Greer took me to a man he’s been working with for years, a healer named Sule Ibekwe, lives in concrete-block, tin-roofed house with a dirt yard surrounded by walls of mud-brick amp; rusted corrugated steel. We sat on stools in front of his house (they sat on them; I sat on the ground) and were given palm wine by a striking young woman. Greer translated. This case was interesting?a thirteen-year-old girl, Rosa, cerebral malaria, doctors had given her up. I saw her, agreed with docs, emaciated amp; withdrawn, goner. Ibekwe called some men in and they carried the patient out to the compound. More people filtered in from the house and the surrounding shacks, until there was a considerable crowd. Some men set up drums and began to play. It was a typical African affair?no one giving any orders, a coalescing of intent. Ibekwe explained to us etiology of Rosa’s disease?it was necessary that patient be restored to harmony with her spiritual and social environment, had been upset by a curse. This was a very powerful curse, and in order to cure, Rosa would have to be placed under the tutelage of a powerful orisha. Ogun, the smith, the master of iron and war, was picked to be the one, or rather he had picked himself during a prior ceremony.

Two women, one of them the remarkable woman who had served us, pulled the girl to her feet, and the drums grew louder and more instant and a dozen or so devotees gathered into a rough dance line. The healer stood before Rosa, chanting, and anointing her with white powder and several liquids, one of them from an old Prell squeeze-bottle. He lit a clay bowl of some vegetable material, which gave off a sweet smoke. I asked Des what it was and he shushed me. Ibekwe blew smoke at the girl, and chanted some more; the dancers leaped and twirled, the drums pounded. This went on. My attention was fixed on the splendid woman. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, the energy she radiated, her authority was so very intense and attractive.

Then Rosa let out a high yell and stiffened. Her eyes rolled back into her head, showing only whites, and her neck twisted stiffly to the right. The drums fell silent, the dancers froze. Ibekwe was hunched over her, chanting, his face inches from hers. She was drooling thick saliva, like a dog; one of the women holding her wiped her chin with a cloth. Then came a softer drumming. Ibekwe stopped chanting and backed away. Rosa’s feet were beating rapidly on the packed earth; her head snapped back, her body bowed; she was in seizure now and the two women were having difficulty holding on to her. Other women jumped forward to help and we lost sight of her for some time. When we could observe her again, she was back on her litter, limp. The drummers and dancers wandered around, chatting, like players after a softball game in the park.

I asked Greer if the operation had been a success, he told me it was just the first stage, she’ll be here for weeks, getting deeper into trance states, amp; letting the orisha inhabit her more deeply each time. Eventually she’ll be consecrated to Ogun, like Maro. Here he pointed to the beautiful woman who’d helped hold the patient. He said she’d been brought in with encephalitis, also a Christian, also a hospital reject. She was essentially dead, and look at her now. I did and as I did she looked at me and smiled and I felt a jolt of some?I don’t know, some sexual energy. Very disturbing. Greer wanted to know what was wrong, said I looked like I was about to faint. All the excitement, I said, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was blazing hot. He took me back into the house, where Ibekwe was sitting on a rope bed being cared for by some of his devotees, an old woman was bathing his face with a damp rag. Greer talked with him awhile and I stood around, feeling a little awkward as you do when attending a conversation between two people with a long history between them. The healer opened his eyes amp; looked at me amp; had conversation w/ Greer, clear they were talking about me. Des said, He says he’s got a busy schedule but as a favor to me he’ll try to fit you in. For what? He says you’re carrying a curse, Greer said. He says you’re cursed in your marriage bed.

Later in the car I tried to be all clinical about it, stupidly, really. What was really happening in the curing ceremony, talking about hysterical conversion and oh so interesting recent speculations about the connection between mental states and the immune system and Greer said, Yeah, I know all that, and the fact is, most traditional healers are charlatans, but Ibekwe isn’t, he really does it, and it’s outside the science zone, and so when I write about him, I’m going to have to fudge and do all that hand waving about the fucking immune system. Fact is, we know fuck-all about the immune system and its connection to the psyche. Ibekwe thinks he’s dealing on the psychic level, and we have no tools to study the psychic level because we don’t think it exists. We say weak effects, uncertain effects, no causality, small N, ergo not a fact. But it is a fact. Ibekwe turns a lot of people away, people he says he can’t help, and they mostly die, and the ones he helps get better.

Reflect later?a familiar experience, with that woman. I recall that jolt from somewhere?hair standing up on arms and neck, a tingling in the sexual parts, I thought my nipples were going to pop through my shirt. A dejr vu? I asked Greer who she was consecrated to and he said Oshun. The Yoruba Venus. Am a little frightened, also excited. Thinking of M. now, and Siberia, wishing I had more memory of what happened there, not just the events, but memory of the body.