Karnavas 1

William Karnavas
December 13, 2016
LBST 2102-339

Of Water and the Spirit: Final Exam Questions

Question 1:
Of Water and the Spirit begins with an account of Malidomas relationship with his grandfather.
Grandfather Bakhye was a great and respected leader of his family, the Birifor, and he treated Malidoma
himself as an equal and a reincarnation of his deceased brother. Malidomas talks and interactions with
Bakhye were some of his earliest memories, so early that they had to be revived later with the aid of a
village elder, Guisso. Grandfather Bakhye, however, died while Malidoma was four years old, before
Malidoma even understood death, and his funeral is the first significant ritual described in Of Water and
the Spirit.
Analysis of the funeral ritual:
The funeral of Grandfather Bakhye was an example of a long, ideological ritual, which took place over
several days with both family and public events. Malidoma, as a small child with a close relationship to
Bakhye, was allowed close access to both the public and private scenes of the funeral. Through his
viewpoint, the funeral is used in the book as it was used by the Dagara, to exhibit and reinforce the
traditional beliefs, customs, and behaviors of the Dagara.
The funerary ritual could be considered in three stages from the perspective of a Dagara participant.
There was a separation stage, a transitional and mourning stage, and a stage of reincorporation of the
experience back into Dagara life.
In the first, separation stage, the corpse of Grandfather is brought to the family compound, cleaned, and
in Grandfather Bakhyes exceptional case, was given a satulmo meal. This meal was prepared using
secret medicines that temporarily reversed gravity around the food, imitating the gravity of the
underworld and other worlds where Bakhyes spirit was to travel. Soups were prepared in upside-down
pots. Magical acts were emphasized throughout this first stage of the funeral. These acts for the family

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of the deceased served to move the grandfathers spirit and the spirits of the family into the other world
of the ritual, and prepare them for the longest, transitional stage of the ritual.
Some symbols in the liminal stage:
In the liminal stage of the funeral, after Grandfather addresses his first son, Malidomas father,
passing authority of the family to him, symbolically through the manipulations of other elders standing
behind him, the mourning begins among the group of Dagara massed outside. In this stage, lasting two
days, the community dances to the unceasing beat of the ceremonial drum and xylophone. This drum
beat, accompanies weeping and mourning among the people assembled. This grieving is a powerful
symbol of releasing the power of the spirits inside the grievers, and therefore crying is very dangerous,
especially for males, except when the taboo is broken in the contained ritual environment of a funeral.
Malidomas father is accompanied by six elders in these two days, grieving and weeping in the costume
of his new priesthood.
Another set of symbols is arranged around Bakhye himself, underneath the 200-year old baobab tree
from where he surveys the three days of the funeral. Bakhye is positioned underneath a silk tent, in the
priestly costume of his family. A bow and quiver are positioned nearby, silently telling the story of his
past as a warrior. Most potent among the symbols was an upside-down arrow; the upside-down arrow
symbolized the pintul magic of the upside-down arrow that was used to fight back using magic against
white men back in the time of Bakhyes brother and father, successfully. This magic was a secret of the
Birifor, and the symbol of the arrow was only meant to have meaning to those in the Birifor family. A set
of skulls arranged around Bakhye had symbolic value as well, communicating domination and chiefdom
to all assembled.
Bakhye: neither here nor there:
Grandfather Bakhye sitting beneath the tree during the three public days of the funeral represents an inbetween state, where he is neither in the world of the living or in the underworld. His body still lives
on the surface, as when he walks to the site of the tent in the ritual of the hyena tail, but his spirit has
travelled on to different planes, assisted by the satulmo meal given in the gravity of the other world. In
the minds of the people assembled, too, Bakhye is treated as in a transitional phase. Stories are told by
the drummers and musicians on the xylophones about Bakhyes deeds and the Birifor family, and the
grievers assembled work to pay back debts against the family and grandfather for the donations they

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have made, such as food in times of famine and poor crops to families with weaker crop-surveying and
protecting medicine than the Birifor.
Final funeral stage analysis:
Only after the debts are paid, the grief expressed safely, and the stories of the past of the family and
Dagara have been communicated to all the Dagara assembled, can the liminal phase of the funeral end.
On the third and final day, the events of the funeral are reincorporated back into the community. A
market day is held, and celebrations help to put the minds and spirits of participants back into their
regular places safely. Medicine men alert the community to a magical stampede of animals coming to
mourn the deceased, and the Kontombili, magical dwarves with oversized genitals from the other world,
come to mourn as well. A burial is performed, and a final poem recited accompanied by the
xylophonists. Then the music stops for the first time in the three day ritual, and the funeral ritual ends
with it.

Question 2:
When Malidoma was about four or five years old, he was formally kidnapped from his family and taken
to receive a Christian spiritual education, first at a presbytery a short distance away from the Dagara
villages, then at a seminary dozens of miles away. This kidnapping was consensual Malidomas mother
and father were brainwashed by Father Malliot, and Father Malliot came to take Malidoma away while
mother and father retreated, unusually, into the bush. In our classes, we discussed the kidnapping of
Australian Aborigine children by force and by government legislation for reeducation. This episode was
different, as it was accomplished through befriending the Dagara instead of by creating and exploiting
dependency for food and land as in Australia with the Aborigine, and all the more appalling because
Malidomas mother and father couldnt even bear to stay and reassure Malidoma how his reeducation
would lead him towards the destiny held in his name, to befriend the enemy / white man.
Later, after experiencing both the presbytery and the seminary, studying at both and advancing far in
the latter before escaping, Malidoma receives a traditional education by initiation. These two
educations could not have been more different, and not only because one was more natural for a
spiritual Dagara man. One was held in a set of orderly, clean, isolated buildings. (Cleanliness is close to
godliness, Malidoma recites in the text of, Of Water and the Spirit). The initiation was held in the bush.
However, both aimed to achieve the same goal, communication with ancestors, by different means.

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Malidoma was shocked at the different living conditions at the seminary schools. Even in the small
presbytery, the students were given beds to sleep in, however sparse, compared with the mud
platforms where the Dagara slept. The conditions of the boarding school feel unnatural to Malidoma: he
describes the seminary boarding school as a fortress. The lessons are divided into classrooms, and the
students into two competing groups. A lower division, the Greeks, and a higher division, the
Romans. The students are clothed in white, and fed plain food. Students are held to a strict schedule,
and are forbidden to leave the seminary or interact with or travel to the female school nearby. In class,
Malidoma has trouble staying awake from time to time, even motivated to compete along with his
friends for higher grades as an outlet for their rebellious rage. Students around Malidoma who tried to
escape, such as his friend Robert who tried to sneak over to the female seminary, could be caught by
patrolling priests, as he was by Father Simon.
By contrast, when Malidoma finally escaped and walked back to his home village, he underwent a
traditional education to rejoin his family in spirit and become more Dagara again after his fifteen year
absence. This education was located out in the bush. Initiates were driven into the bush by Dagara
elders and a coach, and given much freedom between tasks. Where in the boarding schools Malidoma
had to fight for spare moments to spend with rebellious friends in the Garibaldi group, in the initiation it
was trivial for Malidoma to find a friend, a 13 year old named Nyangoli. Similarly, in exercises, there was
no chance to fall asleep as Malidoma was forced to explore the bush himself to find mountains and
caves and perform other tasks alone. The Dagara felt no need to keep people chained down and behind
walls in their education, but this did create danger, as initiates did die, as one did from drowning while
crossing a river in one of the solo exploration tasks, with Malidoma nearby but helpless to save him.
In these two vastly different environments, though, both groups of students struggled to reach the same
goal: to communicate and learn from their ancestors. In the seminary, the ancestors were the great
minds of the West: authors and scientists, such as Galileo, and mathematicians through math classes, as
well as Christians and Christ through scripture and prayer. Malidoma, however, sees this basic act of
learning through reading as flawed. He believes that words are shadows of the communication you can
achieve by communicating with your ancestors directly, and he believes that the West is ill, largely
because Westerners do not communicate with their ancestors. The Dagara initiation ceremony is,
therefore, a sequence of communications with ancestors directly, through producing altered states of
mind similar to how, in class, we discussed the Native American Church using peyote to produce an
altered state of mind to communicate with ancestors.

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Both of these forms of education, for all their differences and similarities, bore many resemblances to
my own college education. Malidomas experiences and mine are rites of passage, whether through
abuse and altered mind states in Africa or through engineering macho for me, and both require the
exercise of creativity to fully experience them: in writing any essay, even this one, I feel frustration
similar to how Malidoma felt trying to find meaning in the tree during his initiation.
I am pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer engineering. There is a certain culture surrounding
college engineering education, which, at its fullest expression, emphasizes hazing by STEM homework in
study groups, and self-discovery over clear directions. The professors encourage it: one excellent and
clear teacher I had for circuits invited us to study with him for multiple nights from midnight until past
two in the morning. The jokes circulated by my peer circle orally and on social media encourage it,
mocking people for having free time or relationships outside the classroom. Similarly, the initiation that
Malidoma experienced encouraged free exploration in sleep deprived situations, with peers pushing you
on and using sleep deprivation to create shared altered mind states, just as in Malidomas independent
midnight search for the egg-shaped mountain during his initiation. Both experiences are designed to
create a shared culture and camaraderie through a rite of passage ritual and behavior reversals.
Malidoma and I both have experienced, I feel, relatable creative frustrations. Malidoma, in front of a
tree during initiation, sat enduring the sun and his own sweat one day, staring at a small tree and
impatiently trying to find something in it. What, he was not told and did not know. He was pushed to
create, against a clock with his elders behind him, watching him as a curious case and scoffing if he tried
to simply make up stories halfheartedly to escape. Similarly, I have on many occasions encountered
similar frustrations, pressured to start creating creative works under the gun of the expectations of
parents, peers, in the class, and professors. Writing this essay, for example, I have overrun the deadline
of the assignment, and so am in a similar state to Malidoma, sweating into my dorm-room chair,
knowing that I have missed some mark and am a curious case, throwing aside dismissive half-baked
stories and searching for meaning in not a tree, but a paper book. Both experiences, however, will be
transformative.

Question 3:
The central event of Of Water and The Spirit is the initiation of Malidoma into his Dagara village.
Malidoma was kidnapped from his village at the age of four or five, and when he came back to the

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village, he had still not undergone traditional initiation. In Dagara society, an uninitiated adolescent
would be an adolescent for his entire life: initiation was necessary to be regarded as a man. This was
regarded as a strange and unnatural situation. Malidoma was also unfamiliar with the culture of his birth
after fifteen years living among white people in seminary schools: he all but forgot how to speak Dagara,
lost his familiarity with nudity, and preferred light to the darkness of the village compound in the places
he stayed and slept.
Further, the elders of Malidomas village had concerns about Malidomas return and were concerned
about how he would stay if he remained uninitiated, or even whether initiation would change him.
Different elders in a meeting, with Malidoma present, were concerned about whether literacy
fundamentally changed Malidoma, whether the restless philosophies of the white man framed
everything Malidoma saw in a way that could not be shaken off. One elder claimed to have observed
that Malidoma had no si, or double, tying Malidoma to the ancestral world. They were concerned that
there was a ghost in him, and that medicine alone was not enough to drive it away.
For all of these reasons, Malidoma agreed to undergo Baor, the Dagara male initiation ritual. The
purpose of the Baor was to fundamentally make Malidoma a man, as regarded by the community, to
better educate him in himself and Dagara culture, and to let Malidoma be seen as more than an
awkward adolescent in the community. As an initiation ritual, the Baor had all three of the stages
outlined in the Rites of Passage handout from this class: a separation, a liminal stage, and finally a stage
of incorporation.
The separation stage was brief and simple: the boys were taken, at an unannounced time, away from
the village, and led away. After a long walk into the bush, the boys were told what the goals of the
initiation would be: to rediscover the ancestral center that they were born with, and that life had caused
them to grow away from.
The liminal stage was long, several weeks long. In that time, the boys experienced a long period of
ordeals, fasting, sleep deprivation, scarring injuries, and altered states of mind. Part of the education
was through symbols and symbolism important to Dagara culture. The theme of the womb is the
tomb, in particular, reoccurred frequently.
In one trial of the initiation, the boys were assigned in pairs to dig graves and bury each other alive up to
their heads in the dirt all night long. Malidoma experienced intense heat, a feeling of encasement or
entrapment, then passed out. While in that state, he saw visions of a force wordlessly instructing him in

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the ways of the universe until an elder woke him in the morning with a splash of cold water. This
experience, symbolically, placed the initiates into a tomb, in order to force them inside of themselves, to
see a piece of their birth truths, finding the womb inside of themselves.
This theme repeated in a second trial of the initiation, in a cave where Malidoma found a doorway into
the underworld. After searching for the cave in an egg-shaped mountain, Malidoma found a cave near
the top. In the text of the book, Malidoma remarks that it felt like a womb, with a soft sandy floor. The
back of the cave grew too narrow to move, entrapping him like a tomb where he could not move
enough to even swat away bugs. Crawling farther and farther back into the narrowing cave, eventually
Malidoma found a light: the end of the cave led directly into the underworld, a part of his rebirth in the
Baor, another quest and exploration.
After many such events, most of which were forbidden to detail, Malidoma rejoined the village in a
closing incorporation phase of the initiation. The other people of the village celebrated the return of the
initiates with music and dancing, and showed them where they would be incorporated back into the
village community, with white-painted rooms and newly constructed spaces for them to live. Further,
the initiation allowed Malidoma to really experience deep contact with his center, his destiny, and his
ancestors, in a way that transcended words, and exposed him to Dagara language and culture in a way
that let him afterwards feel as though he belonged in his village and his culture more than any time
since he was kidnapped away by the seminary.

Question 4:
As the Baors focus, finding ones lost center, illustrates, destiny is a strong theme of life in Dagara.
Infants are named for their destinies in a ceremony called the hearing, and Malidomas life is narrated in
Of Water and The Spirit through the lens of his own destiny.
In a hearing, the infant is channeled through its mother. A priest asks the mother, who is put into an
altered state of consciousness where she is more clearly able to communicate with the ancestors,
questions about the baby. The purpose of the hearing is for the ancestors to tell the priest what the
babys center or destiny is, and choose a name that helps remind the child constantly through their lives
of their destiny.

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Malidomas name, given at his hearing, means to make friends with the stranger / enemy. This has been
interpereted, through observation and through the choices Malidoama and the Dagara elders made. At
various times, Malidoma is sent out for education, accepted into the Dagara community, given both
educations, and is given access to both literacy in French and English and to his ancestors. The current
group of elders towards the end of Of Water and The Spirit do not belive that they can repeat previous
millitary victorys against encroaching white culture influcence again, in the style of those who fought
with the upside-down arrow. Malidomas destiny since has been as a condiut between the two worlds,
for example in teaching the Dagara how to coexist with the whites, and giving talks and camps to those
curious in the West. One way he expressed this destiny early on was at the seminary school, where he
wrote a rebellious play, telling the stories of his tribe fighting back white French invaders, much to the
chagrin of the head of the school watching.
A second example, and the most potent, is why Malidoma wrote Of Water and The Spirit in the first
place. He wrote it to give his African and Dagara people a more accessible place in the common
literature, away from the pretentious or condescending words of outsiders. He wrote it to make a direct
appeal to the hearts of his readers, and to the western society he views as ill, and repeatedly in the text
of the book returns to a theme of alientation, and how the West seperates people from their ancestors.
He sees this particular message as most important, and uses all the events of the book and all the
ceremonies and fantastic tales in it to try to convey it, befriending the stranger and defending the status
of his people and family, on the bookshelf and back at home, to fulfill his destiny.