On reviving lost rituals and when to maybe let go.

I was speaking with my mother recently about Igbo culture and tradition and ‘things we’ve forgotten’. I’d recently made a t-shirt design using a drawing of mine inspired by the masquerades I saw and heard of as a child.

And although she’s talked to me about them many times before, it was comforting, as usual, to hear about the many different masquerades and the lives of their human bearers.

As always, during these types of conversations with her, I had a profound feeling of loss and being unmoored from an anchor that feels familiar to learn about. I don’t tell her that – I think it would make her a little sad and perhaps a little curious about what exactly in our conversation about masquerades I resonate with. I think she knows anyway because she usually follows up with an apocryphal story I’ve heard time and again, warning about the danger of messing with things ‘beyond my ken’ as it were.

In this story, my great-grandfather (my mum’s dad’s dad) is a highly revered dibia in his clan, someone with an ear to the gods, to whom they occasionally send messages, and on whose advice clan actions were carried out. Apparently, after the missionaries came and settled in his town, a number of families eventually became converts and turned from Odinani to the Christian god. She’s recounted to me, as it was to her, of a few ‘colourful’ incidents during this transition, but the overwhelming sentiment is one of a generally accepting town towards the new faith.

Anyway, when my great-grandmother, his wife, decided to convert and afterwards take her children along to church, my great-grandfather gave a warning,

She always delivers this story with a vaguely ominous tone and is careful to clarify that it was less a threat and more a stern warning.

I’ve been thinking about this warning a lot lately – the first few times I heard it, I thought, oh, let’s stay far away from this. The next few times, huh, I wonder why. Eventually, my thoughts turned angry about all of that loss of connection and now I’m at that stage where I wonder how I can work around it.

When I say ‘work around it’, I mean figuring out a way to accept that I have drifted very far away from the culture my parents and grandparents grew up in and that I have to make a decision on whether or not to re-integrate with it or to move on. For both these options, there is so much to consider that I wonder if there’s any point to doing it.

First, re-integrating – what would that mean for me? Perhaps travel to my ‘state of origin’ to live with my people and develop a connection with the land. It could mean learning academically about the many tenets of Odinani and whatever variations of it applied to where my mother is from or where my father is from – how do I even decide which ‘homeland’ to go with? Intuition?, Information?, the presence of a teacher?

The second option is ‘moving on’ and this can take a number of forms; I could just accept the chasm that is my connection to my parents’ places of birth and build a new culture for myself based on the life I have lived in a very multi-ethnic city or I could build a two-way periscope so that the chasm can stare back at me.

These days, I lean very heavily towards the latter form of the second option – I am figuring out ways to build bridges that fill in important gaps in my history and learning as much as I can about the culture and rituals of the places my parents were born. In the process, I come to terms with the fear and repulsion caused by a lack of information and develop a more healthy respect (and wariness) founded on an understanding that these cultures are not any less than the ones I live now. There’s no guarantee I will always do this, there are still many days I wonder if it isn’t a waste of time, but sometimes, even though your answers are wrong, the puzzling can be such an enlightening process.