Re-Visiting and Re-Vising Experience After the Fact
I’ve got two heavy interrelated posts coming up, but they require a little prep, and I had a flashback, the other morning, that got me to thinking.
My first week in the field, my friend Kwadwo (name changed) invited me to a funeral in Yaase — the town a few kilometres up the Lake Road of which Adwafo might have been considered a colony. I was new to town, didn’t really know what I was doing, and wanted to know everything. So, I borrowed a funerary toga, grabbed my camera, and tucked my notebook and pen into my boxers (togas have no pockets!). Kwadwo waved down a pick-up truck (not a hard thing to do when you’ve got a white guy in tow), and we were off.
Funerals are carnivalesque bacchanals in Asante. I won’t get into the details (see pp. 78-81 of my thesis for a description of one funeral; it’s not the best research on Asante funerals, but it’s the only piece I know of on-line), but suffice it to say that rare is the person of either sex who does not go home drunk or hung-over. It’s like a toga party in Bizarro Delta House. Kwadwo was theoretically a teetotaller, and I hadn’t yet learned the bottle, so we took it easy — a couple of calabashes of corn beer mixed with Coca-Cola (petoo alone tastes like piss, so it’s good to temper it with high fructose corn syrup). We were both a little tipsy heading up the road to catch a trɔtrɔ or taxi back to Adwafo, and my bladder hadn’t taken easily to the petoo. ‘Charlie… Ɛhia sɛ megu nsuo… Mekɔ aba.’ ‘Dude… I must pour water… I’ll be right back.’ I took a few steps into the bush, did my business, and returned. Kwadwo: ‘You know what we call that, right?’ I nodded, and repeated the phrase I’d picked up from some book or other: ‘Gu nsuo.’ ‘Well, yeah, but there’s also another word.’ I shrugged. ‘We call it dwense.’
At the time, I took this exchange at face value: Kwadwo was just trying to help me improve my Twi. Looking back, I suddenly wonder…
My translation of gu nsuo as ‘to pour water’ is incomplete. The term also means ‘to pour a libation’. Kwadwo, when I knew him, was in some ways a typical Asante Christian syncretist — he believed in and obeyed the nna bɔne — ‘bad days’ on which one should not head out into the field, or else run the risk of seeing ’something we should not see.’ But he was also a stricter Christian than most, and would not attend the pouring of libations at the old, beaten-down Adwafo shrine. Libations have been something of an issue in Ghanaian Christian theology. The Catholic Bishop Sarpong of Kumase (a trained Oxford anthropologist!) has written a book on Asante libation-pouring, explaining the practice and justifying it from a Christian standpoint. However, in Ghana, Catholicism is politically fairly radical, and most Protestant churches oppose nsuogu. Kwadwo came from one of the more conservative of those churches. Perhaps his correction reflected his own prudery?
Or… Living in the million-person city of Kumase for six months, I had picked up a very particular flavour of the Twi language. l actually thought myself fluent, as I could follow any conversation I heard in Kumase, and could participate in discussions of politics, religion, and culture. When I arrived in Adwafo, I was suddenly mute. The Twi that I had learned could just barely drag me by. I understood maybe 5% of what I heard, and the majority of the borrowed English that was part of my standard Kumase vocabulary was suddenly useless. My Twi, as well, was horribly imbalanced: Words like ‘hoe’, ‘machete’, ‘fertile’, and such were of no use to me in Kumase; likewise ’streetlight’ and ‘piece on the side’ in Adwafo. When I’d described to my Twi guru, the famous Owura Yɛboa, people bathing in Lake Bosomtwe, he’d exclaimed ‘These villagers know no shame!’ Despite a distance of less than fifty kilometres, there were significant differences in language and propriety. Perhaps Kwadwo pushed me past the euphemism because I seemed the prude.
Or maybe he was just trying to help me with my Twi.
I’m sure everyone has these down-the-road wonderings, but I’ve been having them more and more in relation to my Asante fieldwork. Somehow, I need to get back.