High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [77]
“Well, here we are all different tribes. We identify ourselves by tribe, and that’s how we greet strangers.”
I felt faintly consoled, and tried to represent myself—in this land of differences—as a cheerful, upstanding member of the Yovo tribe. Eventually I arrived in Natitingou about the same color as anyone, covered from teeth to shoes in fine red grit. I gratefully showered at the home of my friends, Peace Corps volunteers who taught in Natitingou’s secondary school. Their cement house nestled with several others under the canopy of a cashew tree. All night long the apple-sized cashew fruits dropped, socking the tin roof like wayward softballs. Around midnight the bats began to sing in unearthly voices that rang like bells. I lay under my mosquito net, wide awake, unable either to shut away or resist the foreign night.
Northwestern Benin, divided by the dramatic escarpments of the Atakora Chain, is rolling savannah, baobab trees, the Pendjari National Wildlife Refuge, and the remarkable tatas of the Somba people. These compounds, scattered out of earshot of one another over the plain, are built of hard red mud like the termite nests and bulge in the same organic way, each one housing an extended family. The cylindrical towers hold stored grain, and high walls connecting them enclose private courtyards. Animals dwell on the ground floor; people sleep upstairs.
I’d been warned that the Somba people are private. But I was fascinated by the lumpy, castlelike tatas, and too curious. After visiting the market one day I ambled out across a rutted mealie field, vaguely in the direction of a tata. Whistling, I paused to inspect the baobab trees, the ants, the sky, enjoying my nature walk. When I stepped within a stone’s throw of the tata, an old woman flew out the door, brandishing over her head a yam the size of my arm. I hastened away.
I’d caught only a glimpse of the inner courtyard and its host of fetishes—low mud pedestals crowned with calabash bowls—representing the spirits of ancestors and a conduit to higher powers. Not only the tatas but most other villages have fetishes. Usually they appear darkly spattered with fresh blood, a disturbing sight for eyes unaccustomed to such. In Beninois markets I’d seen surly dogs lined up for sale—not as pets. And once along a roadside I caught sight of a procession of young women with live chickens clasped to their heads, dancing toward a ceremonial animal sacrifice.
This part of Africa is the birthplace of vodoun, which emigrated with the slave trade to Haiti, Brazil, and other lands where voodoo still thrives. Seventy percent of Beninois place themselves in the category of “animist,” where religion is concerned, and nearly everyone wears the gris-gris, a personal fetish to ward off bad luck and bad will. It doesn’t necessarily preclude belief in Catholicism or Islam; it’s simply an acknowledgment of the powers at work here.
My visit happened to coincide with a much-publicized vodoun festival, and a pamphlet published for this event explained, in its way, the premise: “Every creature—animal, vegetable, or human, in an obligatory rapport with nature—disposes an energy intermingled with and dependent upon the vibrations of Djoogbe, the most powerful of the vodoun mysteries.”
I began to fathom the extent of these mysteries while talking with a man named Julian, who was born in the north but went to Cotonou for a university education. I found him articulate, practical, and by his own assertion, not religious. When we spoke of his family he told me his mother had ten children, of whom five were killed.
I asked, “Five of them died?”
“They were killed,” he repeated, pointedly. “My father’s other wife was very jealous of my mother.”
I was incredulous. “So she murdered your brothers and sisters?”
“No, not herself.” He was patient with my ignorance. “She went to a fetisher who knew how to use vodoun.”
Several days later, on the road south again, I kept my eyes on the horizon, where lightning was glancing up like sparks in dry grass. Suddenly