Quote from :Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo. (October 1998)

Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia. pg-153.

 

 

            Need I say that the dimensions of the Ewe dyad of bought people and parents of the house are not the same as those of Western-created master and slave relationships? This was brought home to me when I was informed by an Afa diviner in Togo that I must prepare a Mama Tchamba shrine to worship the spirits of slaves once owned by my ancestors in the United States:"Why should you not pay your debts to the slave spirits the way we Ewe do? You would be better off for it,  the bokono [diviner] advised." Some of them died violently. Their spirits are powerful; they can help, heal, and protect you when you need them, if you honor them fully."

 

           I struggled to consider these words in all sobriety. The entire population of descendants of slave owners in the United States would do well to think very seriously about this concept of indebtedness to slaves, of overdue recognition of beholdenness, on the part of American families, cultures, and even nations (if it is not historically and culturally too late, and even if it would be an ever temporary healing of the unhealable).In Togo both descendants of slaves and descendants of slave owners must give time to the slave spirits, take care of them, and lavish ceremony upon them. But the descendants of slave owners also think in terms of reparations, eternal payments for services previously rendered. The reward is a continuing relationship of mutual service, care, and respect.

 

           According to the Afa diviner, those who neglect the slave spirits and the debt they are owed risk communitywide illness, bad luck, unsatisfying personal relationships, lawessness, the disintegration of social structures, widespread murder, and thus unseasonal death.

 

           When the slave spirits are honored, however, there is reciprocal possession in a complex sense. The caretakers and the slave spirits are in each others  hands and thereby have access to each others  talents, personalities, and languages as additional personhood (gods also have personhood). The challenge of the Fa diviner provoked a  long reverie in which I allowed myself to imagine naïvely what might happen if white Americans could experience being taken in trance by the spirits of the slaves their forebears owned. (I emphasize whiteness as a major element of identity in the racist West, a culturally constructed essence just as blackness is.)

 

           What follows is an exercise of my moral imagination, romantic and utopian, yet also nihilistic (in the above sense) and political, even as it provokes smiles, thanks to its wild improbability. What if descendants of both slave owners and slaves could become, for a moment, those slaves, empowered and divinized, with African languages glossing their tongues, and the steps of ancestral dances enlivening their bodies the way Ewe, through trance, become their ancestors  slaves from the north? What if European Americans as well as Mexican Americans (and all the other Americans) could become "mimetically capacious" (Taussig 1993) in this context? The slaves would come back to heal their descendants and the descendants of the slave  owners and to cyclically receive payments for ancient debt, for lives and labor spent in the service of the white people..

 

            The African slave spirits would be the beloved stranger gods (although their own descendants are no longer foreign but are also hosts); the descendants on both sides would be the host-worshipers. The hospitality would be sacred and reciprocal, a seasonal remarking of history that cannot be undone but that must be commemorated with full honors, gratitude, and eloquence. It would also be a request on the part of the white people generation after generation, to be forgiven for having inflicted the unhealable wound of slavery not a request for this unspeakable injustice to be forgotten. Finally, on an individual plane, this recognition would include a conscious and respectful invitation of the uncanny into ones very personhood, the embracing of the ultimate Other as a consummately desirable being overlapping with ones own self (as well as the knowledge that ones self overlaps with the Others)."