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Gatekeepers Between Worlds

Malidoma Patrice Some knows firsthand how alienation feels.

Born in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), West Africa, Somé was taken from his tribe as a child and imprisoned in a Jesuit seminary for 15 years. Trained to be a Catholic priest, he nonetheless longed to return home, a journey he finally accomplished by fleeing across 125 miles of dense jungle. But his homecoming was viewed with suspicion: Having learned white ways, he was now an outsider in his own village.

Acceptance came through the perilous Dagara initiation in the wilderness, a supernatural ritual that reconnected him to his ancestral past and led him on the path to becoming a shaman.

Today Somé's mission is to bring African spiritual knowledge to the world, a small slice of which he recently offered a CSU, Chico audience in a March 12 talk hosted by the Council of Arts and Letters, the A.S. Multicultural Council, the Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies, and the Department of Philosophy.

Author of several books, including his autobiography Of Water and the Spirit, Somé holds doctorates from both the Sorbonne and Brandeis, and his talk provided an intellectual weaving of heartfelt philosophy and articulate vision.

By addressing the esteem regarded individuals who are gay or lesbian in Dagara culture, Somé said he hoped to fire up the imagination of Western listeners. "It's in fire," he said, "where new ideas get born."

In a deeply spiritual culture where "gods and goddesses walk in the village," the Dagara not only embrace gay and lesbian diversity, he noted, but honor such individuals as "gatekeepers" between the physical world and the divine.

In Dagara cosmology, geography is not only physical, but an energetic existence encompassing other realities crucial to the spiritual health of the individual and the community, explained Somé. Entrance to these worlds is facilitated by the gatekeeper, who is born with the ability to participate in a wider web of consciousness.

Although not all gatekeepers in the Dagara tribe are gay or lesbian, "all gays and lesbians are gatekeepers," said Somé.

"Without the gatekeeper," he added, "we're left with a gate unattended" -- a sort of spiritual clamping down. Not only is the gatekeeper then robbed of his or her identity, but the community is left without a source of spiritual solace.

Everywhere he goes, noted Somé, people are interested in the issue of belonging. "How much do I belong, and to what?" he said. This is why he emphasizes the notion that we're each born with a gift.

"Everyone comes into this world to hold onto some gate, with some role to make his or her position sacred," he said. Without it, there's no relevance. And with it, life takes on a new meaning."

Zu Vincent