Hidden - part1

About one third into the Lila Ceremony, sometime near 3AM, I noticed that my Gnawa Priestess friend Malika, who had been spiritually in charge of the evening, was nowhere to be seen. A bit surprised, I turned to her daughter who told me that Malika had left. She gave me no reason. I got a bit worried. Who was in charge? But a few minutes later, the Blue spirits (my favorites) began to be played and I quickly joined the inner circle of dancers who were slowly and gracefully circling a blue bowl of rose water laid on the ground. The bowl of water is used in a dance where the adept places it on his or her head and dances with it, carrying inside those waters, the spirit of Moses who comes bearing down the seas to take the slaves away from their imprisoned fate. It’s a powerful image, a testament; some have confided me, to the influence of Jewish culture on the Gnawa of Casablanca. Ten years ago, it this very section of the ritual that ultimately “broke me down”. Here’s a decade old description of that event:

The next color was blue. Here the other companion who came on the bus, Hassan, performed and incredible dance. From the moment I had seen him that morning I was struck by him. It is as if you could see his aura around him. This man had presence. He was my size with androgynous features. A very chiseled face, always quiet and soft spoken, with eyes that reveal but the outer edges of his mystery. He was seduction itself. He began to dance with a bowl of boiling water and fresh mint leaves placed on top of his head. He moved like a snake in water. Actually this blue color represented and an ancient spirit that swims across the waters. The color of Moses. At one point the bowl of water fell and spilled on the carpet. Silence! He gasped for air as if coming to the surface after a long swim and collapsed his face in agony. Quickly his friends helped him up, filled the bowl and encouraged him to start again. The music began and this time it was as if he was flying through water like a dolphin. He moved in four different directions at once, lied down on the floor and began to undulate as if a continuous stream of waves were pouring through his body, the bowl still on his head. He was water! And he was very far away from us at that moment. He stood up and finished his dance as calmly as he had begun it. Someone took the bowl of water from him and offered it around. I was very impressed by what I had seen. The earlier mistake had given his dance a powerful drive. We all wanted him to succeed. It was high drama indeed and as I took a drink from the bowl he had carried on his head back from the other side I felt moved and full of tenderness. I was given a blue shawl and invited to join three other participants who were already dancing in a row facing the musician. My head bowed, wrapped in blue, I began to follow with the steps I had seen others take. Slow at first, two little hops to the right and then two little hops to the left, a gentle swaying, a calm sea. The music began to intensify and so did my dancing and as I was breathing in that blue incense my mind began to wander away, my body felt very tired, exhausted, spent, as if I was ready to let go and die. Calm and peaceful. Now this was not a “near death experience” or an “out of body experience”. I just felt taken by something very powerful which made me collapse to my hands and knees. At this point my breathing was long and deep. I don’t remember what happened next but I was lying on the ground against the cushions. The sounds of the room seemed very far away. I opened my eyes and Hassan (the one with the bowl) had also collapsed next to me. His body was shaking and his eyes were white. His hand fell on my chest but I could not move. I remember curling up like a child and then I began to cry. I cried for a long time. I cried and I cried. I was thinking of Chile and how I was robbed of the possibility of having a community like this, to be part of an ancient tradition, to feel the deep meaning of belonging. I cried for my father who lost Chile and my grandfather who lost Russia.. Like an endless wheel I was also thinking of Isabella, my soon to be born daughter and how I did not want her to live how I lived. And I cried even more and all the sadness of these past twenty five years came streaming out like rivers absorbed into the sea and the sea was this community of people I barely knew but they were here and Chile, my country of my lost childhood, was not.

I have cried before thinking of what I lost after the coup but never quite like this. It made sense here. There was a reason, a way out. If I cried enough maybe Isabella will never be able to see in me what I have lost but rather what I have gained. I don’t want her to be born in a world where her father’s emotional psyche is torn to pieces across continents and ideologies.

It took me a while to come back to where I was. The music subsided and people milled around. There was also another woman who had been crying just like me. She was sitting at the other side of the room her puffy eyes still far away, her pain not yet gone. I stood up slowly. I felt so weak I almost collapsed. I drank a little water and felt better.

I never expected a replay of what had happened ten years ago. But I expected a deepening of my relationship to this to this color, to this sound, to this vibration in the key of Blue. All through this voyage I’ve been reading a most precious book, Rebecca Solnit’s, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, and it offers an endless supply of powerful living metaphors for anyone who has made wandering his or her mode of consciousness in life.

In the book, Solnit has a remarkable chapter titled the Blue of Distance where she explores the significance of the color blue as the physical and spiritual recipient of “distance”. “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us”, she writes. “ It disperses among the molecules of air, it scatters in water...This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, this light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue...The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”

Solnit’s writings a full of longing and I can recognize its submission to certain laws of our known universe. As we walk into the Blue, the blue disappears; as we try to grasp the intense energy that flows through our bodies during a Sufi Zikr Ceremony, that energy will also disappear. It seems that this is our everyday condition, to be always reaching for what is just beyond our grasp. It’s the fire that fuels human folly and human evolution. But once in a while I believe it is possible be inside the Blue. The trick (and it feels like a trick!) is to understand that it is always there in the first place. The problem is our desire to grasp it, to understand it, to own it, the “be one with it”. This type of consciousness will make us “deaf dumb and blind”, as it is written in the Q’ran. We forget that we are already inside the Blue, if we could only transcend our drive to individuate and separate. “There is no there there”, goes the famous Sufi maxim. Of course, transcendence is often the realm of fools and playing the fool is a dangerous game indeed. It’s a game that saddles madness, sickness and despair. Three qualities any real Gnawa has to inhabit, I have been told. Rimbaud was a Gnawa you ask? Baudelaire, Poe, Schubert, Van Gogh, Kurt Kobain? There is a price to pay for being possessed. That much is clear. The reward is the incomparable experience of possessing – if be for an instant – that very Blue that Solnit so longingly describes. In a nut shell, this is the art of the Gnawa. To posses and to be possessed at once. Not through substance intoxication or expert meditation but through communal celebration. It is often violent and euphoric full blood, screams, convulsions and contortions; but it can also be soft and silent when the only sounds heard are the thumping of the goat strings against the camel throated body of the guembri and the heavy breaths of the Priestess, usually a woman of age, a woman who carries with her the life experience of living among a cohort of Master Spirits she literally “works” during the Lila Ceremony.

What comes out, what is transferred and negotiated is the most desired and yet most ephemeral of energies: what is referred to in popular Islam as the Baraka. The Blessings of the Divine Creator. In Morocco, the term is used in everyday life when you give an extra tip, when you give alms, when you give a gift but it is also used when you want to stop giving. Baraka! That’s it! Enough! You got it, now enjoy it! But inside the sacred realm of the Lila Ceremony the Baraka is serious business. I use the ideologically charged term “business” very carefully here. Trying to understand the relationship between money and blessings is as tricky as trying to understand why people have faith. After a while it’s bound to be a waste of time because it’s not a rational equation. During the Lila, extra money is given by those who want to be openly and verbally blessed by the Gnawa Couyous, the musicians who accompany the Master of the Guembri. Money flows, the blessings flow. The bigger the bill, the bigger the blessing both in terms of volume and gesture. Now, on a very rudimentary level this sounds like a scam. And it has every potential to be one. This is where the “art of the Gnawa” comes to play an essential role in trying to understand why the hell Malika left at the 3 AM, well before the Lila was over. To put is simply if Dali doodles on a napkin and sells that doodle for a small fortune, it’s OK, no matter how outrageous this may seem. He’s a Master of the form. The doodle has Baraka. Aura. Authenticity. Simple. But, on the other hand, if someone impersonating Dali does the same trick, it’s a scam, even if the doodles are formally identical.

I had written about the proliferation of “fake” Gnawas and the dangers they posed to the integrity of the culture. But I had only witnessed it in the streets or restaurants. Never during a Lila. As we danced around the blue bowl of rose water I was about to see first hand how deep this crisis of identity really is.