Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (39 page)

I said, “Oh, okay,” and drumming began—the drumming I had been hoping for. There was all of this drumming, and it was exciting. We went to the central square of the village, and I had to get into a small, makeshift wedding bed with the ram. I had been told it would be very, very bad luck if the ram escaped, and that I had to hold on to him, and that the reason we were in this wedding bed was that all my depression and all my problems were caused by my spirits. In Senegal you have spirits all over you, the way you have microbes in the developed world. Some are good for you. Some are bad for you. Some are neutral. My bad spirits, I was told, were extremely jealous of my real-life sex partners, and we had to mollify the anger of the spirits. So I had to get into this wedding bed with the ram, and I had to hold the ram tightly. He, of course, immediately relieved himself on my leg.

The entire village had taken the day off from their work in the fields, and they were dancing around the ram and me in concentric circles. As they danced, they threw blankets and sheets of cloth over us, so we were gradually being buried. It was unbelievably hot and completely stifling. Along with the sound of these stamping feet as everyone danced around us, the drums got louder and louder and more and more ecstatic. I thought I was just about to faint or pass out. At that key moment, all of the cloths were suddenly lifted. I was yanked to my feet. The villagers pulled off the loincloth that was all I was wearing. The poor old ram’s throat was slit, as were the throats of the two cockerels. Madame Diouf and her assistants plunged their hands into the blood of the freshly slaughtered ram and cockerels and rubbed it over my entire body. It had to cover every inch of me; they rubbed it through my hair and across my face and over my genitals and on the bottoms of my feet. It was warm, and when the semi-coagulated parts were smushed over me, the experience was peculiarly pleasurable.

So there I was, naked, totally covered in blood, and they said, “Okay, that’s the end of this part of it. The next piece comes now.”

And I said, “Okay,” and we went back over to the area where we had done the morning preparations.

One of them said, “Look, it’s lunchtime. Why don’t we just take a break for a minute? Would you like a Coke?” I don’t drink Coke that much, but at that moment it seemed like a really, really good idea, and I said yes. So I sat there, naked and completely covered in animal blood, with flies gathering all over me, as they will when you’re naked and covered in animal blood. And I drank my Coke.

When I had finished the Coke, they said, “Okay, now we have the final parts of the ritual. First you have to put your hands by your sides and stand very straight and very erect.” Then they tied me up with the intestines of the ram. Its body was hanging from a nearby tree, where someone was butchering it. They removed some of the organs and reserved the head. Another man had taken a long knife and he slowly dug three perfectly circular holes, each about eighteen inches deep. I stood around trying to keep the flies out of my eyes and ears.

Then I had to kind of shuffle over, all tied up in intestines, which most of you probably haven’t done, but it’s hard. They had divided the ram’s head into three parts, and I had to put one in each of the holes; you can drop things in there even when you’re tied up. Then we filled the holes and I had to stamp on each one three times with my right foot, which was a bit trickier. And I had to say something. What I had to say was incredibly, strangely touching in the middle of this weird experience. I had to say, “Spirits, leave me alone to complete the business of my life and know that I will never forget you.” And I thought, “What a kind thing to say to the evil spirits you’re exorcising: ‘I’ll never forget you.’ ” And I haven’t.

Various other little bits and pieces followed. I was given a piece of paper in which all of the millet from the morning had been gathered. I was told that I should sleep with it under my pillow and in the morning get up and give it to a beggar who had good hearing and no deformities, and that when I gave it to him, that would be the end of my troubles. Then the women all filled their mouths with water and began spitting it all over me—a surround-shower effect—rinsing the blood away. It gradually came off, and when I was clean, they gave me back my jeans. Everyone danced, they barbecued the ram, and we had dinner.

I felt so up. I felt so up! It had been quite an astonishing experience. Even though I didn’t believe in the animist principles behind it, all of these people had been gathered together, cheering for me, and it was exhilarating.

I had an odd experience five years later, when I was in Rwanda working on my subsequent book. In a conversation with someone there, I described the experience I had had in Senegal, and he said, “Oh, you know, we have something that’s a little like that. That’s West Africa. This is East Africa. It’s quite different, but there are some similarities to rituals here.” He paused. “You know, we had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide, and we had to ask some of them to leave.”

“What was the problem?” I asked.

“Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun, like you’re describing, which is, after all, where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed, and you’re low, and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgment that the depression is something invasive and external that can actually be cast out of you again.” He paused meaningfully. “Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them.” He shook his head. “We had to ask them to leave the country.”

Senegal has fewer than fifty psychiatrists to serve a population of 14 million, and almost no other doctors who have any training in psychiatry. Western-style mental health services are available only in Dakar, and not in rural areas. Nonetheless, the attitude toward those with mental illnesses is accepting in Senegal, with family members involved in care and with communities helping, for example, to feed people with mental illness who are unable to tend to themselves.
While trained psychiatrists used to separate themselves from traditional healers, the lines are now breaking down, and collaboration has become commonplace. In psychiatric hospitals in Dakar, elements of the
n’deup
are often incorporated into group therapy, held in a traditional group circle. Animist healers are often called in to help with especially difficult cases.

As the number of Senegalese immigrants to the United States increases, there are calls for mental health treatments that are specific to the Senegalese understanding of the spirit world. No resolution of psychiatric illness can occur without deep cultural respect. The blanket assumption that modern medicine is right and that ancient ritual is mere superstition is increasingly understood to be a poor model for mental health treatment. According to William Louis Conwill, who pioneered academic study of the
n’deup
, “Without openness to Lebou beliefs and culture, it would be easy to dismiss
n’deup
spirit possession as mere suggestibility and the ritual slaying of animals as primitive superstition.
N’deup
’s rituals open the door between the physical world of cause-and-effect that Western health professionals typically promote, and the world of spirits who protect the Lebou from illness and catastrophe. Without acknowledgment of the true believer’s world and the power of the
n’deup
priestess, the counselor working with Senegalese immigrants in the US might view
n’deup
as nothing more than ‘smoke and mirrors,’ thereby rendering the counselor’s efforts futile.”

New York Times
, March 10, 2002

I was in New York on September 11, 2001. Having often rushed headlong toward danger, I found myself hiding out in my house for a week and then taking the first plane out. I had grown up in New York, and a physical attack on the city wasn’t among the fears I nurtured into adulthood. When it happened, I felt like Samson after the haircut. Later, I was ashamed of my paralyzed disengagement. It was too late to volunteer in lower Manhattan, but it was not too late to help understand the war in which we’d entangled ourselves.

The most successful piece of modern diplomacy is the Marshall Plan, and I believe that if we had invested the money squandered on a pointless invasion of Iraq on rebuilding Afghanistan, we would now have a secure ally in Central Asia. Remember that 1960s Afghanistan was a center of liberalism where women wore miniskirts. Of the many brief upsurges of buoyancy on which I have reported, no other has seemed so exalted or has been so swiftly and brutally dashed.

This article, though based on the
Times
story I had been assigned, also includes some details from a story I did for
Food & Wine
about our final dinner.

T
he reopening of the National Gallery in Kabul in February 2002 took place in the dark. The electricity was out again, a casualty of war, and no one could get the gallery’s generator to work. A certain grimness lingered in the air. More striking than much of the art was a special display of the ripped-up drawings and broken frames left by the Taliban, lest anyone forget. Yet the mood was hopeful, victorious, even joyful. Presiding over the ceremony, Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan’s interim government, spoke emotionally of the gallery as the locus of “great hope and brightness,” where Afghan culture could come out of hiding. “This is more, so much more, than the reopening of a museum,” he declared, toasting the moment with a cup of tea. Then, with great delight, he watched Dr. Yousof Asefi perform an act of sweet triumph.

Asefi is an artist who, at great personal risk, had disguised the figures of human beings in eighty oil paintings at the gallery by applying a veneer of watercolor paint over them. He had thus saved the pictures from destruction at the hands of the Taliban, who had forbidden representations of the human form as sacrilege. Now, as an assortment of ministers, journalists, artists, and local intellectuals looked on, Asefi, scrubbed up in a starchy new suit, approached a painting, dipped a cloth in water, and began washing the watercolor away, revealing the original figures beneath, still intact. There was applause all around.

I had come to Afghanistan to see what remained of the country’s culture after the depredations of the Taliban and the devastation of war. I was astonished to find, amid the bombed-out ruins of Kabul, an artistic community that was not merely optimistic but exuberant. Everyone I talked to had extraordinary stories to tell about the Taliban era, but members of this community had survived that time surprisingly well and were taking up much where they had left off. You would think from the Western news reports that Kabul is populated only by desperate peasants, many of them warlike, and government
bureaucrats and soldiers. In fact, Kabul also has a population of cultured, soigné Afghans, some of whom stayed through the Taliban years, some of whom have flooded back into the country from self-imposed exile.

But the beginning of a renaissance is not taking place only among a small elite. The Union of Artists, closed by the Taliban, quietly reopened three months ago and has already attracted more than three thousand members countrywide, including two hundred women. “Our future depends on these people,” Karzai told me. “We need to save our culture and bring it forward, make a new culture of Afghanistan. This is at the top of our agenda.”

Afghan women have been slow to give up the enshrouding burka, to Westerners the most potent symbol of the Taliban’s oppression. During a two-week visit to Kabul in mid-February, I spotted no more than a dozen women showing their faces on the streets, and none showing their hair, despite the lifting of the ban. Their clinging to the garment points to a deep cultural basis for this concealment. But while the emergence of women has been slow and ambivalent, the recent proliferation of art—high, low, traditional, new, Western, Eastern—shows how suddenly free urban Afghans now are.

Contrary to the Taliban’s propaganda, the prohibitions against art were never based in Islam. “The very idea is ridiculous,” said the minister of information and culture, Said Makhtoum Rahim. “There is no religious justification for such laws.” Nancy Hatch Dupree, a leading Western expert on Afghan culture, calls the restrictions “total claptrap, entirely political.” Abdul Mansour, director of Afghanistan television and former president of the cultural ministry, said, “They said it was religion, but it was just a combination of thuggery, profiteering, and fulfilling the agenda of the ISI.” He was referring to Pakistan’s intelligence service, then underwriting the Taliban. The ISI, he said, “wanted to see the weakest possible Afghanistan.” He continued, “And Pakistan is jealous. Pakistan is a new country, a fake country, with no history. While we—we have a splendid history.”

Rahim said, “Afghan culture has been destroyed many times. By Alexander the Great. By the British army. In the thirteenth century,
Genghis Khan attacked Herat and killed everyone. Sixteen people were out of town for various reasons, and they returned to find that their city no longer existed. First, they wept. But then they decided to rebuild, and though they were just sixteen, Herat rose from the ashes. We will do it again. We want to export a message of love and cooperation for all the world, and to show our great art, so that people understand this is not just a country of warlords and battle.”

Strikingly, in its early days the Taliban supported art and was involved in programs of cultural preservation. Only later in the regime, when the terrorist group al-Qaeda and foreign agents had begun to wield most of the power, were the anti-art policies established and many of the most beautiful objects in the country, some two thousand national treasures, wantonly destroyed. The Taliban’s purpose was to wipe out Afghan identity so that nationalist resistance to the new regime would be weak. Unlike Soviets or Maoist Chinese, who interfered with the arts in an effort to eliminate whatever history could not be used to construct patriotic propaganda, the Taliban worked toward annihilation. The whole idea of being an Afghan was to be eradicated. This program required interference not only with intellectuals and artists but also with ordinary people and their ordinary pleasures. “They succeeded in destroying about eighty percent of our cultural identity,” Rahim says. “The Soviets had already done their damage; they wanted to turn a thousand years of history into nineteenth-century Marxism. But the Taliban wanted to destroy everything.”