Makeda (29 page)
The day dying, I asked the librarian for manuscripts written by and about the Dogon people. He said he would try and find them for me.
I then, as an afterthought, asked for any manuscripts that had been written by scientists and religious scholars associated with Sankore University in the early 1400s. He said this would be easier to locate and returned ten minutes later with two manuscripts that had been translated into French from the original Arabic.
Jeanne began to read to me again. In the first of the two manuscripts, an African surgeon named Musa described a successful new surgery he had performed in 1405 at Sankore to remove “clouds from the lens of an elderly religious leader’s eyes.” The patient had been all but blind. Musa had restored the old man’s sight.
I said to Jeanne that the clouds Musa described were cataracts. I then asked her, “What else does Musa’s report say about the surgery?”
“Nothing, except the patient’s name.”
“What was it?”
“Ongnonlu.”
I withdrew from the old plastic sleeve the notes I had taken at age fifteen from my grandmother’s description of her Dogon life in the late 1300s. I gave it to Jeanne to read. Within moments, she gasped.
Ongnonlu was the name of my grandmother’s Dogon father.
I
t was easily the most stunning natural formation that I had ever seen. It soared 600 feet above the baked ground like an undulating river-wall of marble red stone. The great Bandiagara escarpment that my grandmother described to me from her dream.
Three of us and a driver had traveled three hours by donkey cart from Bankass, a gateway village to Dogon country. Jeanne sat beside Douda, the driver, on the little wooden bench board. I sat in the load-bearing section of the cart beside a foreign-educated Dogon guide who had been introduced to us by the solicitous curator of the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library.
The guide’s name was Yéhéné. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and was otherwise unremarkable of appearance save for his eyes which were pacifistically quiet and inward-looking. I asked him a number of questions about the Dogon’s Bado rites, how they were performed, their mystical meaning.
The rocky road, winding snugly along the base of the cliff, traveled noisily under the
crick-crack
of the steel-belted wooden wheels of the cart, making conversation all but impossible.
The sky was high and clear. The cliff ribboned ahead as far into the distance as the eye could see.
It was late afternoon and cool under the great cliff’s canopy of shade. I watched the back of Jeanne’s body rocking in lazy counterpoise over the irregularities of the bumpy trail. She turned and smiled toward me before looking up at the sculpted striated massiveness of the bluff. In a communion of discovery, she glanced back at me again and shook her head in marvel.
Impressively—since there was no telephone service to Teli at that time—Yéhéné had somehow managed to arrange a meeting for us in the little cliff-side village with a
hogon
, the highest of Dogon religious authorities.
Yéhéné told us that he did not normally make such arrangements, but he had done so in our case because it was plain to him that we were not conventional tourists, and that we knew a great deal about Dogon religious beliefs as well. This knowledge was uncommon, he said, particularly in Americans.
Before leaving Timbuktu in a weathered Renault station wagon, Jeanne had studied my ten-year-old handwritten record of my grandmother’s dream, as well as her sketch of the elliptical orbits of Sirius A, Sirius B (Po Tolo), and Emme Ya (the Sorghum Female) around the bright star, Sirius.
On the morning of our departure, we had talked over both the notes and the drawing with Yéhéné. He affirmed to us their general accuracy and did not inquire into the provenance of either.
Yéhéné had briefly visited New York City for the first time the year before on diplomatic assignment to the Malian Mission at the United Nations. He half-jokingly told us that he had been “surprised” at the way Americans casually disparage their religious and political leaders publicly. He had not seen the practice as an expression of free speech, but rather as a show of “bad manners and a failure of human charity.” When he spoke to us of his own local officials, his
hogon
, his elders, his priest, he used words (“peaceful … loving”) that would strike most Americans as hagiographic. (He did not speak of the president in Bamako who was a military man.) Though he did not say it in so many words, our impression was that Americans appeared to him generally crude and overly aggressive.
Much of this had come out over a lunch of rice and vegetables that we had taken back at Bankass, the village in which we transferred from the Renault station wagon to the more terrain-appropriate donkey cart.
Onward, the little cart creaked.
I felt inexpressibly
free
beneath the cloudless sky, undisturbed, comforted even, by the unobtrusive salving sounds of nature—the small bray of the donkey, the caw of an unfamiliar fowl, the unintelligible quiet greeting of a passerby, nature’s soothing rhythm unmarred.
Western civilization, wherever it could, had laid waste to the natural world, while forgetting the human animal’s essential need of it.
Here was time passing without the metronomic measure of its relentlessly invasive tick. We were
here
at the base of the magnificent escarpment. That was all. Jeanne, Yéhéné, Douda, and I.
Being
. Just. By itself sufficient. Time, neither enemy nor friend. Only
there
. As witness. Assigning value to life in its silent ration of it.
In the swirling high stone face of the escarpment, Yéhéné pointed out to us pockets where homes had been carved out and decorated with elaborately fashioned dark hardwood doors. The doors, Yéhéné told us, were displayed as works of art in homes around the world.
In centuries past, the cliff had provided a living refuge for the Dogon from slave hunters. Now it further served as a Dogon burial ground.
Approaching Teli, we heard the two-volume percussion music of women rhythmically striking millet against stone mortars with long-handled wooden pestles. Hard and sharp against the mortars’ bottoms. Next, pulled soft and long against the side. Twenty or more mortars struck thus in concert. Syncopated. And then once in a while, the anomalous and wonderful offbeat blow for jazz.
Somewhere in the soft, sweetly timed swooshing dragnote, I sensed an elemental tug of kinship.
The male luminaries of the village, the elders and chiefs, were assembled on the
togu-na
, a gazebo-like structure of ideograms carved into pillars beneath an ornate roof.
Yéhéné made the introductions.
The men seemed to have been put on notice that we were coming. They were most gracious, presenting Jeanne with an array of well-crafted artifacts and a bouquet of pretty flowers. As Americans, it had not occurred to Jeanne and me that we should bring gifts.
The Dogon elders and chiefs at the
togu-na
spoke to us in Dogon, not in French. Thus, we were to rely upon Yéhéné to translate.
Jeanne said to Yéhéné in English, “Please express to them our gratitude for their hospitality.”
When Yéhéné translated this, the tallest of the five men was looking at me, I guessed, with an expectation that I would speak first. He turned toward Jeanne and said, “We are honored to have you as guests of our village.”
It may have been at this point that I began to know, for the first time, the limitations of language. The elders and chiefs had been effusively welcoming to us. At the time, owing to certain cultural presuppositions that were unfortunately wired into me, I embarrassingly mistook what was to them an obligatory courtesy for deference. The aggressive kindness of theirs that I had ascribed to our selftouted Americanness, I would later learn, they extended without exception to
all
visitors.
Yéhéné said, “They have asked you to join them for tea but I have explained to them that the
hogon
should not be kept waiting.”
Yéhéné then drew us away amidst handshakes and warmly expressed pleasantries. As we were going, the youngest of the men spoke softly to Yéhéné in Dogon. Yéhéné smiled at the man and shook his head in sympathetic discouragement.
“What did he say to you?” I asked.
“He said to tell you that he’s sorry.”
“Sorry about what?”
Yéhéné looked uncomfortable. “He wanted me to tell you that he is sorry for what happened to you.”
I said, “I don’t understand.”
Yéhéné averted his eyes. “My people possess a very old knowledge. For thousands of years we have known about the workings of the universe and we remember all.”
Jeanne and I must have looked hopelessly confused, causing Yéhéné to breathe deeply before saying, “He wants to tell you that he is sorry that you were taken away.”
W
e walked into the cool shade of a giant banyan tree that grew near the base of the escarpment. The tree was old and wide and appeared to require in support of its great weight the six huge trunk roots that muscled over and under the ground to a radius of sixty feet or more.
I read the recognition in Jeanne’s expression.
“How long do these trees live?” she asked.
I smiled and did not answer as we sat with Yéhéné on the knees of the tree’s gnarled buttress roots.
Moments later a dark, very small, very elderly man walked toward us alone. He was dressed simply in a long white robe and a cap not unlike that which my grandmother said that the Dogon priest who was her father had worn.
The small man looked directly at us as he walked. His face was long with well-cut features that were fixed in a grave arrangement.
“This is the
hogon
,” Yéhéné said, as we rose to greet the high priest.
Yéhéné had said to us before leaving Timbuktu that the
hogon
we would be meeting was “special,” that he was not only a spiritual leader but “carries the story of the Dogon people in his head.” I had heard of such figures in Africa, as had Jeanne. I had been told that they were called
griots
, but Jeanne said that the term
griot
was a French coinage, and that the indigenous word
djeli
was more appropriate.
Four hand-carved chairs were brought from a nearby ochre-colored masonry building and the
hogon
, whose name was not told to us, invited us to sit. A thick sweet tea was served by a pretty young girl in a long brilliant yellow dress.
The
hogon
was pleasant of mien, but enigmatically quiet, as if the exigencies of the moment were less important to him than the demands of Amma and the burden of remembered history.
Jeanne and I had talked at length the night before about how best to proceed. Besides the straight-forward questions that had to be asked, we were, for the most part, culturally very much at sea. Remembering that Haiti had remained culturally more African than black America— indeed, more so than any black society in the western hemisphere—Jeanne strongly advised that we not advance too quickly to the business at hand, as Americans were prone to do, but to pay, first, punctilious attention to the requirements of courtesy, requirements we’d already run afoul of by arriving without gifts.
Jeanne said, “No matter how anxious you feel about charging forward with the questions, hold yourself back or you’ll seem—what is it the English-speaking Caribbeans say?—
broogoo
to him. Crude.”
I followed Jeanne’s advice although this was not easy to do.
We drank tea and spoke of inconsequential matters. The
hogon
asked what our impressions were thus far of Timbuktu, and Mali in general. He told us that he had heard much about America but did not think it likely that he would ever visit.
After a space in our talk, he said calmly, “What is it that you wish to ask me?”
He appeared possessed of a certain prescience and the suddenness of his question for a moment put me off my stride. I gathered resolve. Beginning then with this: “Was there ever a priest here named Ongnonlou?”
“There have been many priests here by that name.”
Yéhéné, translating, seemed surprised by the question. It was foreign to any context that we’d discussed with him. If the
hogon
was surprised, he did not show it.
I drew a long breath and looked at Jeanne before going on. “In the year 1394, was there a priest here named Ongnonlou?”
“By your calendar?”
There are others?
“The Dogon have four calendars: a solar calendar, a Sirius calendar, a Venus calendar, and a lunar calendar.”
“I mean 1394 years after the death of Christ.” I feared that I may have offended him.
He smiled distantly. “Yes.”
“There was a Dogon priest here by that name in 1394 A.D.?”
“Yes.” The answer had come without hesitation.
I did not know quite how to continue. I had the odd feeling that he knew why we had come, that he—how else can one say it?—sympathized with us, and wanted to help.
“He was the blind priest who became a great
hogon
.”
“Did he have a daughter?” I was growing nervous. Jeanne put the tips of her fingers on my forearm and touched me lightly, briefly.
“He had four daughters and five sons.”
“Nine children?”
“Yes.” Again the distant smile. Knowing. Terribly knowing.
“Who was the youngest child?”
This time he drew the smile between us. “The youngest child of the great
hogon
Ongnonlou was a girl. Her name was …”
He called the girl’s name, but I could not hear it discerningly enough to lend to it the sounds and symbols of an English-language phonetic.
“Bright Light,” said Yéhéné, completing the translation of what the
hogon
had said.
“It was known before she was born that she was to be a divine soul, a soul that had lived before and would live many times again. Thus the name Bright Light.”