Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

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  The problem of depression in Greenland remains acute; suicide is the leading cause of mortality there, accounting for a full tenth of all deaths. The overall rate has held steady since 1980 despite programs designed to reduce it; the rate among younger people is escalating, often tied to alcoholism and domestic abuse. The suicide rate for 2014 was 78 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2015, Astrid Olsen, who works to reduce suicide in Ilulissat, explained that she and her colleagues had ceased to use the word imminorneq, which loosely translates to “taking one’s own life,” and had started to use imminut toqunneq, which means “to kill oneself.” The new term more vividly evokes the reality of suicide as a form of murder, and evokes the emotional trauma that suicide can inflict upon a community. “It was as if a huge, heavy blanket lay over the whole town,” she said. “We had to lift that blanket off.”

  In 2009, Greenland voted for and received self-rule. It is no longer a colony of Denmark’s as it was when I was there. Huge strides have been made with the establishment of hydroelectric power, which allows more of the population in settlements to live comfortably. Despite this cheering progress, the primary news from Greenland is that it is melting: in 2015, the Jakobshavn Glacier lost a piece of ice the size of Manhattan, an event so dramatic that it could be seen from space. Areas that were solid ice when I was in Greenland are now farms. Comparing photos I took in 1999 to photos sent to me since, my heart breaks. The loss of that landscape of ice is not merely an environmental catastrophe, but also a cultural one.

  SENEGAL

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  Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good

  Esquire, February 2014

  I remember thinking even as I was having this experience that I’d tell the story for the rest of my life. A detailed version went into The Noonday Demon, but when it came time to recount the experience for the storytelling organization the Moth, I had to condense it and make it punchier. A transcript of the live version was included in the group’s first anthology, The Moth, then picked up by Esquire. There’s more information in the original, but the thrust and context of the experience are here. I’ve cleaned up some of the phrasing from the oral version. Though Esquire ran the piece only in 2014, I’ve placed it here in the book in keeping with the time I visited Senegal in 2000.

  * * *

  I’m not depressed now—but I was depressed for a long time. I lived with blinding depression and had long stretches when everything seemed hopeless and pointless, when returning calls from friends seemed like more than I could do, when getting up and going out into the world seemed painful, when I was completely crippled by anxiety.

  When I finally got better and started writing about recovery, I became interested in all the different treatments for depression. Having started as a kind of medical conservative, thinking that only a couple of things worked—medication, electroconvulsive therapy, and certain talk therapies—I gradually changed my mind. I realized that if you have brain cancer and you decide that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour every day makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but the likelihood is that you still have brain cancer, and without other treatment you’re still going to die from it. But if you have depression and you say that standing on your head and gargling for half an hour makes you feel better, then you are cured—because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel great, then you’re no longer depressed.

  So I began to open up to alternative treatments. I researched everything from experimental brain surgeries to hypnotic regimens. People wrote to me constantly because I had been publishing on this subject. One woman wrote that she had tried medication, therapy, electroshock treatments, and a variety of other approaches and had finally found what worked for her. She wanted me to tell the world about it. It was “making little things from yarn,” and she sent me numerous examples, as well as a photograph of herself in a room with two thousand identical teddy bears. Not that obsessive-compulsive disorder is the same as depression, but, hey—she’d been miserable before and she was pretty happy now.

  As I was doing this work, I also became interested in the idea that depression has pitched up not only in the modern, industrialized West, as people tended to assume, but also across cultures, and across time. So when one of my dearest friends, David Hecht, who was living for a little while in Senegal, asked, “Do you know about the tribal rituals that are used for the treatment of depression here?” I said, “No, I don’t—but I would like to.” And he said, “Well, if you come for a visit, we could help you do some research.”

  So I set off for Senegal, where I met David’s then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife, Hélène. She had a cousin whose mother was a friend of someone who went to school with the daughter of a person who actually practiced the n’deup, the ritual David had mentioned, so she arranged for me to go and interview this woman. I went off to a small town about two hours outside Dakar and was introduced to an extraordinary, old, large priestess wrapped in miles and miles of African fabric printed with pictures of eyes. She was Madame Diouf. We spoke for about an hour, and she told me all about the n’deup. At the end of our interview, feeling rather daring, I said, “Listen, I don’t know whether this is something you would even consider, but would it be possible for me to attend an n’deup?”

  And she said, “Well, I’ve never had a toubab”—the local word for “foreigner”—“attend one of these before, but you’ve come through friends. Yes, the next time I perform an n’deup, you may be present.”

  And I said, “That’s fantastic. When are you next going to be doing an n’deup?”

  “Oh, it’ll be sometime in the next six months.”

  “Six months is quite a long time for me to stay here in this town, waiting for you to do one,” I remarked. “Maybe we could expedite one for somebody, move it forward? I’ll pitch in.”

  “No, it really doesn’t work that way,” she said with a tone of mild apology.

  “Well, I guess I won’t be able to see an n’deup, then, but even so this conversation has been so interesting and so helpful to me. I’m a little sad about leaving here not actually getting to see one, but I thank you.”

  “Well, I’m glad that you could come. I’m glad it was helpful . . . but there is one other thing. I hope you don’t mind my saying this.”

  “No, what? What is it?”

  “You don’t look that great yourself. Are you suffering from depression?”

  I hesitated. “Well, yes. Depression. Yes, I suffer from depression. It was very acute. It’s a little better now, but I still do actually suffer from depression.”

  “Well, I’ve certainly never done this for a toubab before, but I could actually do an n’deup for you.”

  “Oh!” I said. “What an interesting idea. Well, um, yes, sure. Yeah, absolutely, yes, let’s do that. I’ll have an n’deup.”

  “Good. I think it will help you.”

  She gave me some fairly basic instructions, and then I left.

  My translator, Hélène, the aforementioned then-girlfriend-now-ex-wife of my friend David, turned to me and said, “Are you completely crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into? You’re crazy. You’re totally crazy. But I’ll help you if you want.”

  First, I had a shopping list. I had to buy seven yards of African fabric. I had to get a calabash, which was a large bowl fashioned from a gourd. I had to get three kilos of millet. I had to get sugar and kola beans. And then I had to get two live cockerels and a ram. So Hélène and I went to the market with David and we got most of the things, and I said, “But what about the ram?”

  Hélène said, “We can’t buy the ram today. What are we going to do with it overnight?” I saw the sense of that.

  The next day, when we got into a taxi for the two-hour drive to the n’deup, I said, “What about the ram?”

  Hélène said, “Oh, we’ll see a ram along the way.” So we were going along and going along, and there, indeed
, was a Senegalese shepherd by the side of the road with his flock. We stopped the cab, got out, negotiated a bit, and bought a ram for seven dollars. Then we had a little bit of a struggle getting the live ram into the trunk of the taxicab. But the cabdriver seemed not at all worried, even when the ram kept relieving himself in the trunk.

  When we got there, I said to Madame Diouf, “Well, here I am. I’m ready for my n’deup.”

  Now, the n’deup varies enormously depending on a whole truckload of signals and symbols that come from above. So we had to go through this whole shamanistic process to figure out my n’deup. I still didn’t know much about what was going to happen. First I had to change out of my jeans and my T-shirt and put on a loincloth. Then I sat down, and I had my chest and my arms rubbed with millet. Someone said, “Oh, we really should have music for this.”

  I said, “Oh, great.” And I thought, yes, drumming, some atmospheric, wonderfully West African sort of thing.

  Madame Diouf came out with her prized possession, a battery-operated tape player, for which she had one tape: Chariots of Fire. So we listened to Chariots of Fire. I was given various shamanistic objects to hold with my hands and drop. I then had to hold them with my feet and drop them. Madame Diouf’s five assistants had all gathered around. They would say, “Oh, this augurs well.” “This augurs badly.” We spent the morning like this. We’d started at about eight o’clock, and at maybe about eleven, eleven thirty, they said, “Well, now it’s actually time for the central part of the ritual.”

  I said, “Oh, okay,” and drumming began—the drumming I had been hoping for. There was all of this drumming, and it was exciting. We went to the central square of the village, and I had to get into a small, makeshift wedding bed with the ram. I had been told it would be very, very bad luck if the ram escaped, and that I had to hold on to him, and that the reason we were in this wedding bed was that all my depression and all my problems were caused by my spirits. In Senegal you have spirits all over you, the way you have microbes in the developed world. Some are good for you. Some are bad for you. Some are neutral. My bad spirits, I was told, were extremely jealous of my real-life sex partners, and we had to mollify the anger of the spirits. So I had to get into this wedding bed with the ram, and I had to hold the ram tightly. He, of course, immediately relieved himself on my leg.

  The entire village had taken the day off from their work in the fields, and they were dancing around the ram and me in concentric circles. As they danced, they threw blankets and sheets of cloth over us, so we were gradually being buried. It was unbelievably hot and completely stifling. Along with the sound of these stamping feet as everyone danced around us, the drums got louder and louder and more and more ecstatic. I thought I was just about to faint or pass out. At that key moment, all of the cloths were suddenly lifted. I was yanked to my feet. The villagers pulled off the loincloth that was all I was wearing. The poor old ram’s throat was slit, as were the throats of the two cockerels. Madame Diouf and her assistants plunged their hands into the blood of the freshly slaughtered ram and cockerels and rubbed it over my entire body. It had to cover every inch of me; they rubbed it through my hair and across my face and over my genitals and on the bottoms of my feet. It was warm, and when the semi-coagulated parts were smushed over me, the experience was peculiarly pleasurable.

  So there I was, naked, totally covered in blood, and they said, “Okay, that’s the end of this part of it. The next piece comes now.”

  And I said, “Okay,” and we went back over to the area where we had done the morning preparations.

  One of them said, “Look, it’s lunchtime. Why don’t we just take a break for a minute? Would you like a Coke?” I don’t drink Coke that much, but at that moment it seemed like a really, really good idea, and I said yes. So I sat there, naked and completely covered in animal blood, with flies gathering all over me, as they will when you’re naked and covered in animal blood. And I drank my Coke.

  When I had finished the Coke, they said, “Okay, now we have the final parts of the ritual. First you have to put your hands by your sides and stand very straight and very erect.” Then they tied me up with the intestines of the ram. Its body was hanging from a nearby tree, where someone was butchering it. They removed some of the organs and reserved the head. Another man had taken a long knife and he slowly dug three perfectly circular holes, each about eighteen inches deep. I stood around trying to keep the flies out of my eyes and ears.

  Then I had to kind of shuffle over, all tied up in intestines, which most of you probably haven’t done, but it’s hard. They had divided the ram’s head into three parts, and I had to put one in each of the holes; you can drop things in there even when you’re tied up. Then we filled the holes and I had to stamp on each one three times with my right foot, which was a bit trickier. And I had to say something. What I had to say was incredibly, strangely touching in the middle of this weird experience. I had to say, “Spirits, leave me alone to complete the business of my life and know that I will never forget you.” And I thought, “What a kind thing to say to the evil spirits you’re exorcising: ‘I’ll never forget you.’ ” And I haven’t.

  Various other little bits and pieces followed. I was given a piece of paper in which all of the millet from the morning had been gathered. I was told that I should sleep with it under my pillow and in the morning get up and give it to a beggar who had good hearing and no deformities, and that when I gave it to him, that would be the end of my troubles. Then the women all filled their mouths with water and began spitting it all over me—a surround-shower effect—rinsing the blood away. It gradually came off, and when I was clean, they gave me back my jeans. Everyone danced, they barbecued the ram, and we had dinner.

  I felt so up. I felt so up! It had been quite an astonishing experience. Even though I didn’t believe in the animist principles behind it, all of these people had been gathered together, cheering for me, and it was exhilarating.

  I had an odd experience five years later, when I was in Rwanda working on my subsequent book. In a conversation with someone there, I described the experience I had had in Senegal, and he said, “Oh, you know, we have something that’s a little like that. That’s West Africa. This is East Africa. It’s quite different, but there are some similarities to rituals here.” He paused. “You know, we had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide, and we had to ask some of them to leave.”

  “What was the problem?” I asked.

  “Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun, like you’re describing, which is, after all, where you begin to feel better. There was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed, and you’re low, and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgment that the depression is something invasive and external that can actually be cast out of you again.” He paused meaningfully. “Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them.” He shook his head. “We had to ask them to leave the country.”

  * * *

  Senegal has fewer than fifty psychiatrists to serve a population of 14 million, and almost no other doctors who have any training in psychiatry. Western-style mental health services are available only in Dakar, and not in rural areas. Nonetheless, the attitude toward those with mental illnesses is accepting in Senegal, with family members involved in care and with communities helping, for example, to feed people with mental illness who are unable to tend to themselves. While trained psychiatrists used to separate themselves from traditional healers, the lines are now breaking down, and collaboration has become commonplace. In psychiatric hospitals in Dakar, elements of the n’deup are often incorporated into group therapy, held in a traditional group circle. Animist healers are
often called in to help with especially difficult cases.

  As the number of Senegalese immigrants to the United States increases, there are calls for mental health treatments that are specific to the Senegalese understanding of the spirit world. No resolution of psychiatric illness can occur without deep cultural respect. The blanket assumption that modern medicine is right and that ancient ritual is mere superstition is increasingly understood to be a poor model for mental health treatment. According to William Louis Conwill, who pioneered academic study of the n’deup, “Without openness to Lebou beliefs and culture, it would be easy to dismiss n’deup spirit possession as mere suggestibility and the ritual slaying of animals as primitive superstition. N’deup’s rituals open the door between the physical world of cause-and-effect that Western health professionals typically promote, and the world of spirits who protect the Lebou from illness and catastrophe. Without acknowledgment of the true believer’s world and the power of the n’deup priestess, the counselor working with Senegalese immigrants in the US might view n’deup as nothing more than ‘smoke and mirrors,’ thereby rendering the counselor’s efforts futile.”