“Fish die by their tongue.” That was the legend I read underneath the drawing of a fish in a wooden frame hanging on the gate. It was the Summer of ’77. I was descending the slope from a Kumina celebration in St. Thomas, Jamaica. I went home and typed four foolscap pages on my old typewriter. I hid them and never looked at them again. Years later, I read an article by a colleague who had been an onlooker at the same event. He described many of the things we had seen. He is still alive. Fish don’t ALWAYS die by their tongue. So heartened now, I feel free to write about the candomblé celebration I witnessed not so long ago in Salvador da Bahia.
The drumming didn’t stop as the van unloaded us, fifteen tourists. We stood on the outside briefly. Soon we were herded in to sit mostly on the concrete floor. All the seats were taken. At first, I thought there was sand on the floor. It certainly looked that way. I immediately thought of parallels with the Jewish synagogues I had visited elsewhere. I let one hand down, running it slowly over the area where I would sit. Surprisingly there were no grains. The surface was smooth. I slid my whole body down and sat cross- legged on it. I still don’t know what gave the effect of sand or whether my eyes were just playing tricks on me.
The building was simple, rectangular-shaped with one short side open so people could enter. The centre of activity with the table and other paraphernalia formed the other short side. Beyond that other you could peep, if you were so minded, into a room. There was no way to tell what went on in that room, but whatever it was, it was obviously important. Devotees were constantly coming and going in and out of it. Along one long side of the rectangle was a row of chairs on which men were seated. Thick rows of women were on the opposite side. The division was deliberate. When we were herded in, the guide had told a couple, “You will have to separate.”
The men were all dressed in white costumes of varying elegance. One that impressed me wore a shirt and pants of an expensive cotton material with the waist of the shirt and the edges of each pant leg decorated with broderie anglaise. They were sitting solemnly on chairs, motionless as if they represented ancestors silently supervising, looking on to make sure everything went as it should. The women opposite, two rows of them, and my row seated on the floor seemed more like onlookers in varying degrees of engagement.
The only instruction we had been given was not to wear black, white if possible, or any other colour. I remembered my attendance years earlier at the Dabuyaba, where the Dugu was taking place in Dangriga, Belize, and the naivety with which I had put on a black T-shirt under my tunic, out of respect, to hide my naked back before entering the building, and how quickly the frowns of older women sent me questioning what I was doing wrong till my sister/friend hurried me to a place for appropriate clothes. Black was wrong there as well. Here, my peach-coloured summer dress was fine.
In the central area, women and men danced around in the kind of circle which allowed people to enter at will. Not just anybody. There were women with elaborate costumes as well as women with ordinary dresses complicated by sashes of white cotton or lace, draped across the body from shoulder to hip, and men dressed in white garments of cool cotton. Some women wore many tiered dresses which ballooned from just below the neck, both front and back. The underskirts and the leggings were all fringed with lace or other decorative material. The general theme was “white”, but two women wore clothes integrating shades of brown and other colours, with the white sometimes eclipsing it.
The drums were constant. The dancers, mostly women with just two men among them, danced non-stop as the drumming continued. Every now and then someone shuddered or did a half-fall as the spirits indicated their intention to overpower them.
Less than an hour after my group arrived, men and women came from the back room carrying huge trays laden with popcorn and slivered dry coconut meat. Solemn-faced devotees took handfuls of this fare and supplied everyone seated and standing. Soon the whole room was chewing white food.
We ate till it was done. The drums and other instruments I could not see kept going. The dancers did intricate steps as they moved in orderly, formal motions in the centre. The music intensified, and two women in the most complicated of the balloon dresses fell quietly on the ground, and began to roll their bodies laterally from the male side of the room to the female side and back. They rolled in these ample skirts, but there was no show of disarray. Not even a little blowing up of skirt. In the corner where I sat, two young girls were being possessed, one more intensely than the other. She shuddered with downward movements and collapsed in an almost daze, her eyes staring out into the nothingness beyond the faces around her. I don’t know which spirit possessed her. Women came to minister to her, touching her hands and face carefully, and eventually taking her into a private room where presumably they would keep her till the spirit freed her.
The dancing did not stop. Every now and then someone in the circle got a mild pos- session but never quite fell. In that state of half-trance, the affected/afflicted one would go over to the chairs of men and be hugged and patted and generally recognised as someone to be loved.
I had read that not all celebrations were as exciting as tourists expected. I felt no disappointment when it was clear that no neck of chicken would be rung. There wasn’t always sacrifice, wasn’t always blood. In fact, the overall “whiteness” of this particular celebration suggested there would be no blood. The orisha being honoured was not one involved with blood sacrifice.
I kept remembering the tremendous energy of the spirits invading the devotees at the first Kumina I ever saw, the one I didn’t talk about and couldn’t write about. People climbed up on rafters, people rolled convulsively on the ground, and loving bodies had to “ride them out”. What this celebration shared with that one was the care of fellow devotees, the love and comfort they offered the possessed. As I remember it, men would ride women old and young out of it, riding no matter how long it took till they were calm. Here in this cool enclosure men helped men and women equally, and I wondered how that would go down in the pathologically homophobic society I come from.