12/?? Danolo
Have not written in some days, no longer know date with precision. Moon tonight in new crescent. Will have to keep track of passage by her from now on, as in old days. How anthro of me! Almost needless to say my cheap watch stopped, and the local drugstore does not stock watch batteries. Writing slow anyway, something.
I must have drifted off. It seems hard to form letters, have to really focus. Was not the case in Chenka, that I noticed. Here is maybe deeper into the no-write zone? List of facts:
— the place I’m in is called a ganbabandole. It is a kind of sorcery institution. You come here to get unwitched or to get oracles or like that, just like you go to a post office to get stamps. The man who runs it is my pal Ulune. He is the babandole, the chief sorcerer in charge.
— the people here speak Olo, a language that seems to use both Yoruba and Bambara roots, but the tone structure and grammar are not like either, and it is more agglutinated than the typical Kongo group language. It’s not like anything I have heard of, but I am not expert in African languages. A creole of some kind. Bespeaks migration, fairly recent as these things go.
— Ulune says he knew I was coming. I am an important person for some reason that he can’t explain just yet.
— My husband is an important person, too, ditto on the explanation. I have not seen him in however many days it has been. Four? A week?
— I am to be taught ndol, sorcery of a type not taught to women. This is because I am not officially a woman. (Note: analogous to Gelede, where women don’t dance but men dressed as women do?) As name implies. Gd = female; ezil = gold(en); dik = outsider, not Olo; ama = head; ai in the terminal position indicates a partial negation of the primary indicator of sex, size, or position. I think. Thus Gdezdikamai means “goldenheaded not quite a female foreigner.” Ulune himself will be my owabandolets, my “father-in-sorcery.” It is quite an honor, or maybe it is a doom. Everyone in the compound treats me with wary respect.
— The Olo, says Ulune, came to Danolo a long time ago. Before that they lived in Ile-Ife, down in Yorubaland. They taught the Yoruba about the gods, the spirits, about Orun, the otherworld, which here they call m’arun. They also taught them Ifa divination, and just a little bit about m’doli, the unseen world = bridge between m’arun and m’fa, the world of the here and now. Don’t know if I believe this. Explains some things, obscures others. Confirms Tour de Montaille. Want to call Greer and ask him.
— Ulune showed me a photograph. As far as I can tell it is the only photograph in the compound. It’s old, cracked, and faded. It shows a man who looks vaguely like Ulune in the uniform the French colonial infantry wore in the years before the Great War. This is impossible, unless he is over a century old, so why does he want me to believe it? Age = status? Ask trick question. Jane: Why did he let himself be photographed? Wasn’t he afraid his soul would be trapped? I was a different man then, he says. That man is dead.
Someday, Danolo
U. doesn’t approve of writing things down. Writing kills the spirit of the thought, he says. He wants me to train my memory. Too late, I’m literate, the rot is too deep. Therefore, I try to keep the stuff in my mind, and then write it down at night, like now. I have pages full of stuff. Ifa verses, spells. Moon in waxing quarter.
Anthropology. Family and clan structure? Who knows? A good deal of ritual life goes on in compounds, each with a central babandole, all very secret one from the other. U. used to teach sorcery in a kind of university they have here, but not any longer. Now his only student is me.
Ulune’s compound is inhabited by Awa and the girl, Kani; by Sekli, who is supposedly something of a sorceress in her own right (although I have not seen evidence of this) and a formidable battle-ax. She is the majordomo of the compound. Then Loltsi, a jolly, portly woman, and Mwapune, who is quiet and has a little girl of about five named Tola. My favorite is Tourma, a lovely creature of about eighteen, who is pregnant with her first child. At first I thought all these women were U.’s wives, but when I voiced this theory, he seemed shocked. Olo sorcerers are celibate, more or less permanently. Sex makes too much noise in the spirit realm (m’doli); the orishas and spirits get jealous, and rival sorcerers can use the distraction to get at you. This is also the answer I get when I ask about W. I can’t see him lest we be irresistibly drawn into sexual congress. Little do they know. Prob. why sorcery never caught on at American colleges and universities.
The women in the compound are in fact staff, and honored for it. They have husbands they visit on their day off, all except Sekli, which may account for her temper. The other thing is that Kani and Tola are not the birth children of Awa and Mwapune. They are imasefune, soul-children. The Olo believe that when weaning concludes, at about age three, the original connection between birth mother and child has quite faded and that the child then becomes the responsibility of anyone who forms a relationship with it in sefune, the affective soul. Most often this is a close relative, an aunt or uncle, but it can be a stranger from the other end of the village. Unusually, it can even be the child’s own mother or father. But in vono ba-sefune, as it is called, the merging of souls, both parties immediately understand what has happened, everyone accepts it, and the child immediately moves into the household of his or her new owasefune or gdsefune, the soul-father or soul-mother, becoming their imasefune, soul-child, until puberty.
When I asked U. whether a child ever failed to find a soul-parent, he looked bleak, and told me sometimes not, such children are damaged in the soul. No one talks to it, or feeds it, and it dies. On very rare occasions, it does not die, though; it scavenges food, and lurks on the edge of the village. If it survives to its twelfth birthday, it is considered dontzeh, a person under the protection of the spirit world, not quite human, but considerable. It enters the household of a superior babandole of the town, and is taught various aspects of magic. All dontzeh become witches, and if you ask the Olo why they help them to the knowledge that will enable them to work evil, they say, who are we to reject what the god has touched? Find myself thinking about four-year-old kids no one will talk to, starving to death in plain sight. Poison in paradise.
As for W., he is well, I am told when I ask, he is fulfilling his destiny. U. won’t divulge what it is. Pay attention to your own, he says. Fulfilling destiny a phrase much used around here, by the way. Many people, says U., wrongly suppose life is like a fishing net on a nail. Shift those nails and the meshes fall into completely different patterns. In fact, it is not a net, but a hook and line. Ifa hooks us in our mother’s womb and although we thrash this way and that we are drawn along our line of fate until we are brought flopping to the seat of Olodumare. The same Olo word, ila, means fate and also a fishing line or a line scratched in the sand. I asked him, can no one escape their fate? Oh, yes, he replied casually, this is what we sorcerers are for, and laughed. This is so Olo, a profundity tied to a silly joke.
Later I press him on this. He has two expressions when I ask him for something he doesn’t want to tell me. One is kindly, like a dad saying It’s too complicated, darling, you’ll understand when you’re older. The other is almost embarrassed, like it’s something shameful. I get the latter when I ask him about changing fate, or manipulating time, or about where the Olo come from. All seems to be related.
Just another day, Danolo
I probably missed Christmas already, and New Year’s. Moon gibbous, a little over half full.
I’m sick a lot nowadays from the stuff he makes me eat and drink. He says my body has to be changed, so that part of me lives in m’doli all the time. This is something I’ve learned, how the chemical magic M. was always talking about really works. Didn’t believe him at the time. Beyond that?there are as yet only intimations. Did my first sorcerous feat today, after three days of prep, nauseous, pissing black, night sweats, horrible dreams. These are all good signs, U. says. First thing in morning, we discuss my dreams. Never recalled dreams much before, but now they’re as vivid and recollectable as Casablanca. U. doesn’t think dreams are meaningless random discharges in the sleeping brain.