Divination and Madness

Power, Personhood, THE E D G E of ISLAM and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast Janet M c i n t o s h DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2009 r CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX NOTE ON LANGUAGE xiii INTRODUCTION The Edge of Islam 1 CHAPTER I Origin Stories: The Rise of Ethnic Boundaries on the Coast 45 CHAPTER 2 Blood Money in Motion: Profit, Personhood, and the Jini Narratives 89 CHAPTER 3 Toxic Bodies and Intentional Minds: Hegemony and Ideology in Giriama Conversion Experiences 127 CHAPTER 4 Rethinking Syncretism: Religious Pluralism and Code Choice in a Context of Ethnoreligious Tension 177 CHAPTER 5 Divination and Madness: The Powers and Dangers of Arabic 221 EPILOGUE -» 257 NOTES 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY 289 INDEX 313 Chapters f\ DIVINATION AND MADNESS The Powers and Dangers of Arabic Idealized and vilified, Islam is regarded as both a source of ritual potency and* a" cause of suffering among Giriama in Malindi. This is in some respects a familiar pattern; in many subSaharan African societies those who wield occult powers are viewed with both awe,and suspicion should they choose to use their abilities for ill, and-the same -duality holds for uganga "from-the Giriama side." But itt'Malindi the extremes of hope and fear that attach to Islam seem to outstrip the sentiments typically directed at Giriama ritual powers. Surely, then, the ambiguities surrounding Islam are connected t a the ambivalent relationships between Giriama^and their more powerful Muslim neighbors, including the stark socioeconomic hierarchy between the two groups and Giriama's simultaneous longing for and resentment of the status of Swahili living in the core of town. A .second expression of this ambivalence can be found in Giriama interactions with Arabic and its associated texts, both of which Giriama consider to be linguistic embodiments of Islam. In fact, the mysteries of Arabic and Arabic texts are tapped by both Giriama and Swahili in their divinatory and healing rites in ways that suggest language serves not just as a communicative medium or as a means of projecting associations between ethnicities and religions (as seen in chapter 4), but also as a congealed locus of occult power. The hegemonic assumption that Arabic is a source of exceptionaLmystical potency is common not only among Swahili but also among Giriama, including non-Muslims. For members of both ethnic groups Arabic is so tightly associated with Islam and Muslim peoples that the language itself could be likened to the Bakhtinian word that "tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life" (Bakhtin 1981: 293). For many Swahili in the core of Malindi Arabic is associated with familiar contexts, including the social milieu of Arabs in town, the mosque, and the madarasa. For most Giriama living on the margins of town, however, such contexts are at a remove, and Arabic is treated as an Other locus of enunciation that offers the vague promise of apprehending and understanding the world in an extraordinary way. In a familiar dilemma, Giriama respond to this situation by ritually appropriating Islamic forces, at the same time that they reinforce the hegemonic notion that Swahili are the proprietors of Islamic power and knowledge. Swahili too sometimes reify this hegemony by rejecting Giriama ritual efforts as inadequate and primitive forms of mimicry that -are less powerful, and certainly less pious, than textually based forms of Swahili divination. As in the preceding chapters, we see that different models of personhood among Swahili and Giriama play an important role in this hegemony by inflecting the structure of their most popular divination rituals in Malindi and indirectly feeding back into preexisting social hierarchies. The most widely accepted Swahili divination rituals in Malindi empha* size internal, -individualized forms of competence such as literacy and mentation, whereas most Giriama diviners in Malindi draw on the expertise of literate possessing spirits who "read" and "write" the Arabic that their hosts do not understand. These" different relationships to Arabic can thus be located along a spectrum of linguistic agency that extends from the vaunted, privately wielded mastery of Swahili walimu wa kitabu (diviners and healers; literally, "teachers of/by the book"), to the sharing of agency between Giriama aganga a mburuga (spirit-medium diviners) and the Muslim possessing spirits who speak through them. This spectrum of agency emerges from-the differentially valorized models of personhood in these social groups. Ultimately, these differences play into the hegemonic dynamics I have described, for just as Swahili tend to be cynical about Giriama's spirit-forced conversions and -their polyontologist rituals, so too do Swahili critics scorn Giriama divination as lacking independence and the proper intentional attitude of piety. Although most Giriama do not share the Swahili preoccupation with intentional states and self-control, there is a limit to the amount of agency Giriama are willing to relinquish. This limit is exceeded in a particular kind of madness in which the Giriama self is unwittingly 222 CHAPTERS displaced by an Arabic-speaking spirit who colonizes his or h'er speech and actions in a grotesque and chronic simulation of Islam. I suggest that possession by these Arabic-speakirig spirits may represent the erasure of Giriama personhood, the reductio'ad absurdum, perhaps, of the many occult ways in which Giriama partake of Muslim powers while risking being overtaken by them. This form of madness, furthermore, provides an,acute reminder that although Giriama folk models of personhood accommodate the sharing of agency partially or temporarily with possessing spirits (particularly those who can help them in some fashion), Giriama draw the line at situations that extinguish their ability to act, whether that situation be slavery at the hands of Arabs or madness at the hands of Arabic-speaking spirits. Arabic Mystified A common ideology in the West treats language as a primarily referential instrument, whose role is. merely to stand for things in the world. This denotational view of language is sometimes contrasted with more performative views in which linguistic signs, far from being mere signifiers, are able to effect changes upon.the world in their yery uttering (Austin 1962; Kang 2006).,Speech acts can bring states of affairs into being by, for instance, securing a new institutional, status for a bride and groom, a baptized child,„or a-president. Performativity in language also extends to more mystical acts, such as the recitation of magical spells or healing prayers (Keane 1997b; Tambiah 1968). As linguistic anthropologists have noted, languages and utterances can play still more expansive roles, including as objects for exchange in the marketplace (Irvine 1989) and as indices of the social order (Silverstein 2003). In the preceding chapter we saw that languages sometimes come to stand in for entire ethnic groups and to invoke the-religious forces with which they are associated. Language thus has a multifunctional, socially charged life, in which the medium and its associated forces may be just as important as the message*: In this chapter my discussions of Arabic point to what might bexalled a magical essentialist function of language, for not only can speech acts be construed as magically efficacious, but entire languages themselves can also be construed as having intrinsic, underlying potencies (Mcintosh 2005a, 2005b). A degree of magical essentialism seems to underlie DIVINATION AND MADNESS 223 the ritual code-shifting practices I detail in chapter 4 in which languages are selected according to the supernatural powers they invoke, but such essentialism announces itself more obviously in both Swahili and Giriama treatments of Arabic, which rfresume that Arabic has mystical properties that set it off from other languages. While these practices involve what Tambiah (1968) has called "the magical power of words," they also extend beyond it. Indeed, the use of Quranic verses for talismanic and healing effects is widespread across-fhe Muslim world, but in many such contexts the medium is just as important asMhe semantic content of the words in question. This pattern can be forind among Swahili ritual practitioners, but among Giriama the-fixation on the medium is particularly obvious since so few members of their own community have achieved sufficient Arabic literacy to understand the semantics of the text (cf. Lambek 1993). Coherent locutionary statements sometimes take a backseat to individual letters, to spiritually-generated simulacra of Arabic, to elixirs prepared from impressionistic visual renderings of the language, and to torn fragments of printed text whose semantic meaning cannot be discerned. The imagined essence of Arabic also confers a special part-whole relationship upon the language, such that mere linguistic fragments may contain the congealed potencies associated with the entire language. In some of its ritual uses on the Kenya coast the Arabic language isn't treated much like alanguage at all—not, anyway, in the Western folk sense of asemanticall • y based medium of communication. Instead, it is treated more like an object that contains the essence of Islam's oqcult potency. While this mystification is enacted differently by each group, it is generally shared by Swahili and Giriama alike, with important consequences for hegemony. The uses of Arabic in Swahili and Giriama divination in the Malindi area can be understood only with reference to the more general ideologies of Arabic that circulate through their communities and, to some degree, throughout the Muslim world. Muslims believe that Allah dictated the Quran to Mohammed in classical Arabic; since it is still read in the original, it is thought to bind the faithful to Allah as they speak his words (cf. Haeri 2003). So important is the medium of the original language that some Muslim scholars refer to attempted translations of the text as mere "interpretations." Translations of the Quran into Kiswahili (or any other language) must be flanked by the Arabic original, thus 224 CHAPTER 5 1 binding together text and language. But Arabic's importance extends beyond the Quran; it is regarded by most Swahili not only as the language of Allah and all the souls in heaven, but also as a connection to wealfhyand sacred Arabian lands and as the pan-national language of the wider.Muslim community to which Swahili aspire to belong. It is also the language of Arabs, and in the centuries leading up to European colonialism Kiswahili-was written in Arabic script as if .to valorize the Arab ancestry (sometimes actual, sometimes fictive) of its primary coastal speakers. Historically Arabic has had such cachet among Swahili that in his analysis of the development of Swahili civilization Khalid (1977: 55) writes, "Arabic filled for [ancient Swahili] the same function which Latin served in medieval Europe" and this is, to a lesser extent, still its place today." Like Latin, Arabic serves a double function: as a sacred language that embodies the powers of a religion and a language of hierarchy and exclusion known only to citizens with specialized education. The first of these functions has by no means been historically universal to the Arab world,1 but since the rise of Wahhabism in the 1970s many Arabs have embraced the-revivified sanctity of Arabic as God's chosen language (21). The association between Arabic and piety reverberates in the conversational habits of many of Malindi's Swahili. Romanized Zanzibari Kiswahili has been considered standard since the British colonial era, yet the Kiswahili spoken on the coast.has many local variants,2 and many Swahili who wish to sound more pious infuse their language with interjections, modifiers, greetings, phonological properties, and stress patterns of Arabic origin (Russell 1981). These include terms and phrases such as alhamdulillahi (praise be to Allah), ala (an interjection of surprise), asalaam aleikum (peace be with you), and waaleikum salaam (and with you peace), as well as an emphasis on sounds such as the rough fricative in sheikh. "Why do some Swahili mix Arabic into their speech?" I asked one Swahili friend. "To identify oneself [as a Muslim] [Kujitambulisha]," he replied. The association between Arabic and piety is surely strengthened by the fact that the language is often heard in overtly'religious contexts: in the calls to prayer emanating from mosque loudspeakers, the chanted prayers floating out of the windows of madarasas, and the fragments of prayer woven into conversation by pious Swahili. Swahili circulate numerous narratives about the mystical potencies also that sociCenya di ideome diedin his anal DIVINATION AND MADNESS 225 1 1 111 and startling qualities of Arabic. At one time or another I was informed that Arabic is perfect in every way because it is the language of Allah, Mohammed, and the Quean; that it is the oldest living language, influencing all otheir extant languages; that it is so condensed it can express in a handful of words what might require hundreds in another language; that it has exceptional signaling power, reaching Allah "like a smoke signal," where another, more earthly language would fall short; that as a medium of prayer it invites the most favorable response from Allah; that it "feels good to pray in"; that it has the vastest, vocabulary of any language; that it is so semantically rich a single term may have hundreds of meanings; that it is uniquely inscrutable and impenetrable to those who have not studied it for their entire lives; that it cannot be translated; and that it confers "weight" (uzito) on anything expressed in it.3 Fluency in classical or colloquial Arabic, furthermore, is such a great source of cultural capital among Swahili that one Swahili intellectual, Sheriff Nassir, bemoaned in his Ramadan lectures of 1998 that those who study Arabic in Arabia and return to East Africa are sometimes considered authorities in Islam on the basis of their language abilities alone.4 Pride in knowledge of Arabic is evident in the minutiae of daily life among Swahili in Malindi. As is the case in other Muslim African societies (see, for instance, Lambek 1993), social hierarchy is at least partly established on the basis of Islamic expertise, which in turn relies heavily on textual expertise. But in Malindi's urban core basic textual knowledge of Arabic is not restricted to an elite few. Small madarasas for Quranic training -can be found all over town and in some courtyards of private Swahili homes. Today girls have more opportunities than ever before to study in (single-sex) madarasa classes, while adult women sometimes speak longingly about the opportunity they missed, for most women older than thirty did not study Arabic.s Nowadays boys and girls alike eagerly show off their knowledge of the language. I lost count of the number of times children in a Swahili household brought me unbidden their notebooks filled with lines of Arabic or recited the prayers they had just learned. One little Swahili girl surprised me while we were on a walk by stopping at a cactus at the roadside, breaking off a spine, and proudly carving my name in Arabic letters onto one of its stiff leaves.6 The headmaster of the ethnically and religiously mixed Malindi Secondary School reported that his Muslim pupils of both sexes perform with 226 CHAPTER 5 exceptional motivation in their Arabic classes even when their work in secular subjects is poor. And in recent decades more and more instructors in-madarasas and more advanced religious, schools have taken to emphasizing comprehension and content rather than rote memorization as they instruct their pupils in Quranic Arabic. This emphasis on the intellectual agency of Quranic students contrasts, with pedagogic practices in some other areas of the East African coast, where students are taught to-read the Quran with little understanding of its- semantics and syntax (Ghris Walley, personal communication, 20 May 2006; see also Lambek 1993:141).7 Despite the growing emphasis in religious schools on Arabic comprehension, most students jdo not emerge fluent from their studies. The asymmetrical distribution of knowledge of Arabic has underpinned a decades-old debate in Malindi's Swahili community about the relationship between Arabic and sermonizing in.the mosque. All Islamic authorities agree that the five daily prayers should be performed in Arabic, but some have also contended that it is sunna (in accordance with the practices* and,desires of the Prophet'and his followers) to conduct the weekly Friday sermonln Arabic as* well. Only a few establishments, such as the Jamii mosqu*e, actually follow-suiti, others strike a compromise. In the Malindi mosque, for example, the imam first relatesa translation of the sermon in Kiswahili, then climbs to the^elevated mimbar to redeliver the sermon from a loftier vantage point in Arabic. Yet even detractors of the use of Arabic for sermonizing do not relinquish their admiration for the language. One elderly Swahili man informed me that those who insist on the use of Arabic for sermons are obstinate or bigoted (washupavu), that translations into Kiswahili are important for "those who have notyet had the good fortune to learn Arabic," but he added that Arabic is "the greatest language of them all [bora kushinda lugha zote]" Since Swahili and Giriama live in a partially shared cultural field, the status of Arabic is not lost onjjiriama. The language is so steeped in religiosity that some Swahili and Giriama alike refer to it as Kiallah, "the language of Allah." But Giriama do not see Kiallah as readily accessible to them. While some-Giriama converts.to Islam attend madarasa, many, such as those pressured to convert by a possessing spirit, do not have a Muslim sponsor to enroll them and feel too socially marginal and economically disadvantaged to pursue this education- themselves. SevDIVINATION AND MADNESS 227 eral Giriama I know resisted pressures to convert to Islam on the very grounds fhat-one must learn Arabic in order to do so, considering that demand heyond their reach. Said one Giriama Christian, "Islam is for those Swahili people. The Quran itself says: JFor I have sent you the Prophet who can speak your language.' Isn't that speaking to Arabs only? Jesus, On the other hand, is here for alLof us." We see in this pbjection not only the common conflation of Swahili and Arab people in Giriama discourse, but also the notion that Swahili and Arabs, Islam, and Arabic are bound together in an ethnic, religious, and linguistic triumvirate that feels forbiddingly closed off to some Giriama. \ This cynicism does not prevent Arabic from being mystified. Much of the time this mystification is so widespread it goes without saying, but I was struck when a particularly insightful Giriama friend brought this hegemony to the surface in our discussion of divinatory Arabic, saying outright, "We think their language contains their power." Some Giriama mobilize strategic counteressentialisms to uphold the forces of Kigiriama, arguing, "Our aganga" find powers in Kigiriama they can't find in Kiswahili or English,"-and "If you curse God or your mother in Kigiriama it carries force" that it wouldn't in another language. Yet Arabic (or some version of it) appears again and again in Giriama divination and healing rituals, suggesting how powerfully it has Captured the Giriama imagination. Its status" is due no doubt to its ethnoreligious associations, but it may also be compounded by the code's sheer alterity in the eyes of most Giriama. As Helms (1993) has noted, numerous cultures impute occult qualities to foreign objects, and while language pronounced in an unfamiliar phonology antl written in an unfamiliar script may not always be as object-like as some cultural artifacts, it is in a sense the ideal subject 'of mystification, for it hides its meaning beneath an exterior that seems wholly impenetrable to the outsfder. To,nearly all Giriama the obscurity of Arabic is daunting and the Otherness of its orthography vivid to,any who have been schooled (to whatever grade level) only in the Roman letters of English and Kiswahili. Perhaps, then, in Giriama divination the ability to* tap into such a thoroughly mystified language is treated as a synecdoche for the more general talent of discerning the unknown as *a whole. In summary, both Swahili and Giriama communities- adopt a magical essentialist stance toward Arabic, imputing it with intense properties and 228 CHAPTER 5 on the very idering that [slam is for :nt you the ab • s only? [jection not Giriama id Arabic Ivirate that . Much of ig, but I bught this labic, saysome'Gi| forces of ley can't lother in et Arabic divinaired the Ireligious • alterity limerous tnguage (familiar It is in a beneath parly all of its grade fc, then, rstified jf-dislagical esand potencies. In both groups Arabic is treated as a kind of seam that opens out from the ordinary world into a supernatural domain within which resides a wealth of special knowledge and power. In ritual the language is treated as though it contains hidden information, answers to questions, the ability to ward off danger, and healing forces. Such notions of Arabic are widespread among- Muslims in Africa and elsewhere (Bloch 1968; Bravmann 1983; Lambek 1993; Whyte 1991), but in Malindi Arabic has special implications for the socioeconomic hierarchy that currently divides Swahili and Giriama, for this jointly held essentialism reproduces the hegemonic association between Islam and power, at the same time that Giriama tend to presume that such power attaches more to Swahili and Arabs than to themselves. Textual Hegemony As in many Muslim societies, Islam is vitally linked to literacy on the Kenya coast. When Swahili in Malindi study the Quran in madarasa, the ability to reproduce Quranic prayers with one's own pen (or chalk, as the case may be for many young students) is nearly as important as the ability to recite them. The divinatory and healing specialists in Malindi's Swahili community also rely on texts such as the Quran and the Arabic geomancy text known as Falak. In fact, Swahili in Malindi distinguish between their two types of diviner healers along lines of literacy; waganga, who are usually female, tend to use spirits as their primary aids, whereas walimu wa kitabu draw heavily on the Quran and other Arabic texts and are usually literate men (as I have noted, the growing number of girls enrolled in madarasa is a relatively recent development). In Malindi female waganga are a small minority, while walimu wa kitabu, whose work is more likely to be considered acceptable (halali) within the parameters of Islam, dominate in numbers and in status. Perhaps the most popular text in Swahili divination is Falak. This Arabic book- is devoted primarily to forms of astrology and numerology that allow the user to calculate propitious and unpropitious dates and timesfor activities such as travel, but it can also be used for more morally suspect forms of divination and spell casting. According to Pouwels (1987), Falak has its origins in 'Urn al-Falak, astronomy and. astrology practices that were brought to Africa by Omanis and other Arab groups. Apparently Omani seamen helped develop a "magical" aspect of Falak DIVINATION AND MADNESS 229 (120), and therein lies the origin of a long-standing controversy about whether the book is forbidden by Islam (1-32). In the mid-nineteenth century Richard Burton (1872: 422) suggested that at least some coastal residents considered it a form of "sorcery." According to one Swahili man I spoke to, Falak was brought down to earth by two angels and wound up in the hands of the Devil (Iblis). Another related a lengthy tale about one Mwalimu Kisisina who used Falak so often and to such effect that his powers began to surmount those of the angels and became evil. God sent down the angel Gabriel to take the book away, but Mwalimu Kisisina used his own powers to fly up after him. Gabriel tore off the front cover of the book and tossed it to earth as a decoy to fool Mwalimu. "It worked," says my informant: "Mwalimu Kisisina chased it all the way back down and Gabriel arrived safely in heaven with the book. But Mwalimu Kisisina had written [crib] notes on the front cover, and still had them! So Falak has survived, particularly the portions that instruct a person how to destroy and kill."8 Many other Swahili contend that Falak has- a dark side involving harmful powers forbidden by God, such as "placing a snake in someone's belly" and inflicting spirit possession. The* book is said to be easily abused by witches or groups such as Somali, who are considered by some in Malindi to be bandits (mashifta) and inadequate in their practice of Islam. In keeping with its controversial reputation, Falak has historically been taught in some madarasas in East Africa, but it is generally avoided in those in Malindi. Le*ss common than Falak is the short text known as Al-Badiri, the reading of which is widely thought to be a means of bewitching its human target. The other main text used by Swahili walimu wa kitabu is the Quran. While Falak is used primarily for .divination, the Quran is more often used for healing and protective purposes, since.it is believed by many that, as one mwalimu put it to me, "there is medicine inside those prayers." Prayers may be copied by hand or (increasingly) by photocopier, folded tight, then placed onto a door lintel, under a bed, or into a talisman worn on the body in order to facilitate various kinds of good fortune and ward off bad. Many walimu also concoct kombe cures by writing Quranic prayers (in Arabic, of course) onto a piece of paper using water-soluble ink, .then inserting the paper into a bottle or glass of rosewater, whereupon the ink dissolves. The patient is instructed to 230 CHAPTER 5 IT drink the rosewater, ingesting the dissolved prayer in its original language.9 The most legitimate means of mystical healing, according'to most religious authorities, is the reading aloud of Quranic prayers.. Several Malindi-based practitioners circulated a 1993 pamphlet "in Arabic (and said to be from Arabia) by Abu Mundhir Khalid bin Ibrahim Amin titled Lawful [Sharia] Means of Curing Witchcraft, Jealousy, and Spirit Possession.10 Amin instructs readers that verses of the Quran, when read aloud, contain potential cures for these ailments, and he urges them to cleave to this path so clearly sanctioned by God. He also contends that "the masses" too often turn to "witchcraft and other unlawful methods" instead of the Quranic cure (3), thus providing a Middle Eastern sanction for the lament I sometimes heard from Swahili religious authorities in Malindi as-well. Giriama are keenly aware of the close association between Arabic and textuality. "Arabic is associated with the literate side of things," said one Giriama woman, and, as mentioned in chapter 2, this "literate side" is considered relatively alien by many Giriama in Malindi. Paper is not the customary means of consolidating Giriama institutional arrangements or securing landownership; indeed, some Giriama lament the indifference of certain members of their community to the title deeds that would establish their tenure. Marriages and other institutional arrangements are traditionally documented and secured through public ceremony and orally delivered oaths (cf. Parkin 1991a)'. Some Giriama thus* feel intimidated by Swahili's use of literate ritual technologies. "The books Swahili use—-Falak, Quran, Al-Badiri—they're dangerous," said a woman who sells palm wine in Muyeye. "You can be bewitched!" Another man told me, "They can bewitch you with their pen alone," while his neighbor said he fears Swahili and Arabs "because they study." One Giriama elder articulated the common sentiment, "[Arabs and Swahili use] the original uganga that comes from the Quran and is more powerful than ours." Indeed, the Giriama mganga Hawe-Baya told me, "If the Arabs know you have a good spirit [pepo], they'll do their uganga to steal the spirit. They'll lull you and then they'll take it'away. ^They'll know you have it by reading their Quran and burning some incense, then all is revealed to them. Their own spirit [rohant; Hawe Baya mayhave intended an Islamic connotation] will come and explain that so-and-so has such-and-such a spirit [pepo]— then they'll just take it from you." DIVINATION AND MADNESS 231 Giriama attribute Arab and Swahili power not only to the Quran but also to, Falak, a text that everyone seems to talk about but almost no Giriama have seen. Giriama discourse about Falak is complicated by the fact that the 113th sura in the Quran is titled "Falaq," or "The Dawn." Sura Al-Falaq is a call to God for deliverance frbm "the mischief of those who practice secret arts , . . [and] the evil of those who blow on knots." Despite its wholly defensive content, the sura seems tainted by the magic and witchcraft it mentions, being associated, i n the minds of many „Giriama and a few Swahili, with malevolent powers. Furthermore,-for those who are not well trained in Arabic the terms Falak and'Ealaq create phonemic confusion since their final consonants-(the, kaaf of Falak and the aaaf of Falaq) are allomorphs to any ear unaccustomed to the Arabic alphabet, and hence the two names are indistinguishable. As a result qualities that Giriama credit to the book Falak are sometimes imputed to Sura Al-Falaq, and vice versa. Regardless, all Giriama know that Falak (or Falaq) is an Arabic text with special potency used by Arabs and Swahili, though that potency is interpreted in numerous ways. "It's used by Arabs to bewitch others in the neighborhood," said one Giriama boy. "They use the book to change themselves into cats, dogs, and birds," said another. A young Giriama woman claimed, "They just read the book and speak their wish." Another .saw it-as mainly divinatory and an index of expertise: "It's like [Giriama-style] divination• [mburuga] , but it's more work You have to have the special Falak knowledge to work with it." Quite a few Giriama claimed that Falak has the power to win court cases, which Giriama uganga does not, suggesting that Swahili and Arab uganga is considered an effective, way to intervene in state bureaucracy through a kind of sympathetic magic in which texts combat texts.11 The late Giriama healer Kahindi wa Ruwa told me, "Falak has more power than Giriama herbalism [mitishamba]; it can help you wia court cases and give you the power to fly." Thus he summed up two domains associated with Swahili and Arab expertise: bureaucracy and the forms, of speed, velocity, and flight attributed to the rhoney-gathering jinx spirits associated with Swahili. The gap between Giriama and Falak-style expertise is magnified by the fact that Giriama say one must inherit a copy of the book from Swahili or Arab kin to own or use-it, something very unlikely to happen for most Giriama. Although many Giriafria fear the potency associated with Arabic and 232 CHAPTER 5 Arabic texts, some are angered,by t h e hegemonic assumption o£ Swahili textual power. Said one mganga cynically, "The Giriama-style ritual language hasn't been written in books so it's not considered holy^it's considered evil. Yet the 1 Muslim style is considered holy because it's in the books!" Another mganga defiandy asserted the superiority of Giriama powersj on grounds that the Arabs and Swahili "get their uganga from books, and.if the books are taken away they won't have uganga, but the Giriama, aren't book-dependent." Yet these currents of resentment are not sufficient to.prevent Giriama from engaging in widespread mimetic uses of Arabic and Arabic texts in ritual. Falak may be considered inaccessible because it must be inherited or gifted, but the Quran is a widely used device' b y Giriama aganga in Malindi. Many purchase copies at book stores and printers in town; however, most unwittingly wind up with an abridged version of the full text because the owners of the store, often Swahili, sell them a children's text comprising Arabic exercises for the untutored hand-and a few select chapters (juzuu) of the holy book.-12 These texts are used by Giriama to divine as well as to heal and protect. Healing rituals sometimes involve tearing the original text or photocopies of it against the grain of the words'and scattering the pieces on the ground for clients to s.tep over in a repetitive fashion that resembles the classically Giriama-style mihambo.mifungdhe ritual mentioned in chapter 4. Giriama aganga may also wave the Quran around the head of the afflicted or tap it on the body in a kind of consecration, sometimes just below the armpits. And Giriama manufacture their own versions oikombe, in-which the writing of the Arabic prayers is sometimes aehieved by a possessing Muslim spirit who uses a scallopine hand to create a rough simulacrum of Arabic, often with paint on a white ceramic plate. In these brief examples we see that most Giriama uses of Arabic texts focus rtqt on the semantic meaning of the words, but on the potency thought to be condensed in the language or the text itself, potency that can be transferred through simulation and contact. In divination the language becomes a source not only dfpotency but of specialized knowledge. Literacy, Epistemology, and Personhood in Divination To divine is to know through extraordinary means, and the means usually involve objects—seeds, cowrie shells, goat intestines, tarot cards, or stars, for example—that are read for the privileged information they DIVINATION AND MADNESS 233 1 embody. If Peek (1991: 2) is accurate in deeming divination "the primary institutional means of articulating the epistemology of a people," then we can seek broad cultural significance in the similarities and differences between the epistemological strategies of Giriama and Swahili diviners. Both Giriama and Swahili appear to reify Arabic and its associated texts and to project powers onto them. Members of both communities hope that by using Arabic as a divinatory tool they can better grasp the forces at work in their world and bring prosperity and health to themselves and their communities. But the deep socioeconomic division between Giriama and Swahili is reflected in the fact that in Malindi most Giriama diviners are illiterate women, while most Swahili diviners are literate men. 13 These differences, in combination with the different prevailing models of personhood in their communities, beget contrasting epistemological strategies that are emblematic of the imbalance between their social groups. In many Giriama divination rituals women are possessed by Arab spirits who tell fortunes by appearing to read the Quran. In much Swahili divination men use written Arabic (including Arabic texts such as the Quran and Falak) in extraordinary ways that flout conventional relationships between linguistic sign and meaning, while requiring elaborate interpretive skills accessible only to a literate specialist. These different epistemologies beg the question of just what is entailed in and meant by "reading" in these mystical contexts and how different forms of reading articulate with different models of personhood. Since the advent of the so-called new literacy studies (Barton 1991; Street 1984) many anthropologists have embraced the idea that literacy, a term that connotes the ability to communicate by means of visual signs, typically in the form of the written word, 'has no predictable social meaning or cognitive outcome. Instead, reading and writing are embedded in historical, sociocultural, and economic practices and only make sense with respect to those (see also Ahearn 2001; Besnier 1995; Messick 1993). Not only does literacy have different social valences across cultural contexts, but different ways of interacting with the written word can subtend the ordinary scope of writing and reading. During the Mau Mau revolt in upcountry Kenya in the 1950s, for instance, Kikuyu freedom fighters sometimes ingested paper with writing on it as a means of assimilating the powers associated with the colonial bureaucracy, a mode of interaction that tapped into a preexisting Kikuyu idiom in which 234 CHAPTER 5 persons are partially composed of material transactions and eating is a primary means of internalizing the social world (Smith 1998). Similarly Swahili and Giriama interactions with written Arabic in divination are inflected by their respective understandings of personhood. '- Giriama divination and other ritual practices have not always been and are not everywhere so centered on Other languages. Missionary accounts in the nineteenth century indicate that Giriama divination may have relied largely on manipulating objects. Some aganga used a s'tick, putting one end on the earth, holding the other end upright with a finger, then releasing it and reading significance, into how or where it fell. Others counted seeds in a bag four-separate-times/prognosticating evil if each counting did not turn up the-same number (Sperling 1995:" 93). Another device involved a gourd threaded onto a vertical string called malumulo; yes-no questions were asked of it, and its reply was based orr where it stopped in its course up and down the string. While Islam and Arabic in the nineteenth century were regarded as powerful devices, Sperling suggests that they tended to be used by aganga primarily during healing rituals (after divination, that is), and the relationship'between healer and Arabic was quite indirect. When a Giriama mganga wanted an Islamic healing talisman, he or she solicited the help of a literate Swahili Muslim to write Arabic prayers or incantations on scraps of paper and make talismans. The mganga then would purchase the talismans, the paper already closed up within them, and distribute them to clients. It is hard to know how much regional variation there was in these practices, for historical sources such as missionaries* did* not always attend to internal cultural heterogeneity. However, 'there may'have been important differences between urban and rural Giriama society due to such matters as proximity to urban Swahili and Arab life. In Udvardy's (1989) extensive account of Giriama protective charms in hinterland Kaloleni in'the 1980s, for instance, Islam does not appear to factor in at all (see chapter 4, note lo'for further details on such charms), whereas Malindi's aganga of today very frequently include Islamic symbolism in their talismans. As for divination, mechanical devices such as those mentioned earlier were in use among hinterland Giriama i n Magarini in the 1980s (S. G. Thompson 1990), as-they are among Giriama in Malindi today (in fact, they are sometimes used by male healers to complement their practices). But in Malindi such devices are not used nearly as DIVINATION AND MADNESS 235 commonly as divination through-spirit possession. While high-status Islamic spirits were certainly in evidence among the diviners studied by Thompson* in Magarini, they seem to h e still more prevalent among urban and semiurban Giriama in the Malindi area. Another important difference in divinatory practice involves language use. In her work in hinterland Magarini in the 1980s S. G. Thompson (1990:186) found that during dialogue witlxtheir helping spirits, diviners used a spirit language termed Kipepo (literally, "the language of the pepos"), -which "cannot be understood at all by humans unless they are possessed diviners."'Still, Thompson does not suggest that this language was thought to he Arabic or ethnically identified-in any way. After a dialogue with their spirits, diviners would shift into a register of cryptic Kigiriama, described as well by Parkin (1991b), that was common among diviners in the hinterland area of Kaloleni. This register involves special lexical, indexical, and metaphorical devices. A woman is referred to as figa (cooking stone), for instance, and a man as tsano (literally, "five," which may refer to the-five days of funereal ritual accorded a deceased male, or to the presence of five limbs, including the penis, of the male body). Pronominal reference tends to slip around; 4iviners might refer to t h e client as both "you" and "she" in the same narrative. Elaborate metaphors (likening the diviner to the moon, for ihstance) may be used. S. G. Thompson (1990:186) argues that this register "demands a client's attention and direct participation," thus, compelling-the client to help clarify the nature of his or her own complaint.-Similarly,^Parkin (1991b: 185) found that Giriama diviners sometimes opened a divination session using what he calls "jumbled speech" that becomes progressively clearer as the diviner's language iconically tracks, the-client's healing path from confusion to wholeness. While Islamic spirits certainly circulated in the Magarini and Kaloleni communities, neither Thompson's nor Parkin's descriptions of'divination suggest that Islamic spirits or their language were as central as they are in contemporary Malindi, where^Swahili and Arab power is so close at hand. Hence there are important differences between prevailing patterns of divination in Malindi and those described in these other sources.*Sperling'contends that (at least in some places) early Giriama uses of Arabic relied on Muslim intermediaries, yet in today's Malindi the(appropriation of Arab powers is more direct. Diviners cofnmonly channel the language 236 CHAPTER 5 itself through their bodies via spirit possession, using it as a window into the unknown, perhaps suggesting the rise of Giriama's mimesis of Islam even as their assimilation into Swahili communities has dwindled. Furthermore, the rise of possession language in Giriama divination in Malindi appears to have accompanied a drop in the special divination register recorded by Parkin (1991b) and S. G. Thompson (1990). That elite register, obscure and poetic, has surely been important in making clients feel they were in the presence of an'expert with ties to a mystical world. But in today's Malindi the use of opaque metaphors and "jumbled speech" is somewhat less common. Giriama say (to paraphrase a claim I heard often), "Those diviners in the hinterland speak the PURE Kigiriama, the ORIGINAL Kigiriama, and you won't understand a word of it" But such claims are made precisely to distinguish the putatively uncorrupt Giriamaness of hinterland diviners from the reliance on Other languages that is now the most popular linguistic means for Malindi's aganga a mburuga to establish their authority. Perhaps the intense multiethnic context of Malindi has made the very idea of ethnoreligious difference so salient that it has become the dominant idiom for divination. In a typical divination session in contemporary Malindi the diviner summons a-foreign spirit who arrives speaking a language which the spirit then translates into Kigiriama to communicate the client's problem and a suitable remedy. While some of these helping spirits come from ethnic groups with whom Giriama have interacted historically, such as Kamba, Maasai, and Somali, the most popular helping spirits are Arabs, whose language seems to be a repository of mystery and promise. To convey a fairly representative example of Giriama divination in Malindi, I describe the routine followed by a middle-aged woman named Kadzo, who lives on the outskirts of Muyeye. Like most Giriama women of her generation, Kadzo was not sent to school as a child and cannot read or write in any language. After making her living for two decades as a subsistence agriculturalist, she developed heart trouble in her forties. A mganga informed Kadzo that she was being tormented by Muslim spirits who demanded that she convert to Islam and begin to practice as a diviner, working with them as her assistants. She complied and her health improved. Some time later her husband also converted to Islam of his own volition and began to practice as a healer, taking on,the clients that his wife referred to him. DIVINATION AND MADNESS 237 Kadzo's homestead consists of a small courtyard and two mud-andthatch huts, one with a dividing wall that separates a kitchen area from an empty room where she sees clients. In this room Kadzo sits on a short, three-legged stool, holding a beaded calabash rattle (kititi) in one hand and a ragged Quran in the other, for she plans to call upon an Arab spirit. She bought the Quran at a printer's in Malindi and appears unaware that it is a children's version containing only a selection of prayers; preceded by instructional exercises written in enlarged Arabic script. Kadzo closes her eyes and rattles hard directly into her ear while whistling a highpitched, meandering tune intended to invoke the spirit. She addresses the spirit in Kiswahili, following the pattern described in chapter 4 in which Giriama aganga use Kiswahili when invoking the powers associated with Islam. She explained her client's grievance: "I want to know quickly. His* heart is saddened [Anasikitika kwa roho*yake]. Nothing is working out for him, not even a little. So I want to know why things are ruined for him. What kind of thing is ruining his financial situation? His wealth? They [the client and his employer] aren't speaking well to each other. They aren't understanding each other. He [the employer] doesn't want to pay him [the client] well. [To client] Is it so, or not [Ndivyo, sivyo] ?" The client agrees. Kadzo proceeds to rattle and whisde. When the spirit arrives, it announces itself not through dramatic physical symptoms, but through intermittent gasps, rapid exhalations, and twitching toes. Holding the Quran at an angle, sometimes upside down, and tilting the pages this way and that, the spirit then reads the Arabic text in a-loud monotone (I use the apostrophe to indicate "glottal stops in the spirit's utterance): 14 Dakumini dhabha kharanaduni kibhando khoronqdini kavi na kordhani kavano ujiri naa siki [inaudible] varanadini ndivo kaziya kueleza. Nii ii durini kifato komiri kazi komari ujiri kavi na rudeni kiza ai. Mm-mmh. Nadu 'iri nataka ware najiri nasoko mawaridini yazo khoromidima khavina dure nukusika 'aguri na kazi ya kueleza. Mmm-mmh. Dukubiri nazokonga 'amirijiri kavi haya kuuza ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ah-ha-ha-ha kumira kavani kivirenadeni kiva kazi hayu kuza kaya ndiyo kazi ndiyo. Mm hmmh? When the spirit has exhausted its prophecy, Kadzo shifts into Kigiriama, translating for the client with a didactic air: "The spirit says you 238 CHAPTER 5 are suffering at work; your boss does not pay you enough. You feel ill at ease with worry. You may have walked through a place where the spirits attacked you to bring you problems." As she speaks to the client, she asks repeatedly whether he agrees (a form of collusion common in Giriama divination but less typical in the Swahili divination sessions I witnessed), thus co-constructing a narrative to the clients' satisfaction. Her voice is somewhat louder than usual, as, if to establish a professional or authoritative mien; otherwise, the only extraordinary linguistic element, that which confers on her authority, as a diviner, is her use of a language she does not herself know, use that extends to reading the Quran.- Interestingly, whatis read from the sacred book has no obvious connection to the fixed verses within it, but instead is translated as a prophecy tailored to the contingent personal situation of the client. The Arabic of Kadzo's spirit has little resemblance to Arabic dialects and does not make sense to local Arabic speakers ,(to whom I played back this and other, related samples). While Kadzo's spirit does use a few Arabic sounds, particularly the glottal stop and the guttural uvular fricative kh sound popular among Swahili who wish to sound more Islamized, the resemblance stops there. Instead, Kadzo's spirit uses quite a few morphemes and words from Kiswahili, including kumi (ten), dini (religion), kazi ya kueleza (the work to be explained), soko (the marketplace), and kuuza (to sell). None of these appears in any meaningful, pro-positional sequence. The Arabic of other Giriama diviners' spirits is similarly patterned. One mganga named Haluwa, for instance, called upon her Arab spirit in the same fashion as Kadzo to offer a client an oracle about his prospect of finding a job and produced a stream of sounds: Sahadi salahari ayasadesadah. Saradahe saraya saraha hasali sadajira. Deka sahadi chera sareha sashade sadah saharadi. Dakuresarahahasrade elariya sadajira. Hatira sahadi esi areahas aya sade sadah sqhidi saahnala. Isihali yakide saraya saraha hasali tirasirajia sahad.ls Haluwa's spirit does not speak recognizable Arabic or Kiswahili words, but it draws repeatedly on sound groupings that may be inspired by Arabic words known to many Giriama in Malindi, such as salama (a popular greeting, literally "peace"), sura (a Quranic prayer), and shaDIV1NATION AND MADNESS 239 hada (the verbal confession of faith in Islam that performatively signals conversion).16 But the issue at hand is not whether these spirit languages are real. To focus on proving or disproving the authenticity of divinatory techniques and other occult forms is to fail to do justice to the question of what such techniques mean to those on the ground (see Lambek 1993: 287-95 f° r a related, and more fully elaborated, statement). These utterances remain deeply meaningful, for clients persistently believe .that Arab-spirits speak Arabic. Even clients with a rudimentary understanding of Arabic tend to let spirit versions pass without question. In part this-is because the firm belief that spirits speak Arabic through diviners, is overdetermined in Giriama culture, and so can override evidence to the contrary. But the acceptance of spirit versions of Arabic also suggests that the most important thing about Arabic is not its formal, perceptible qualities (the way a given rendering of Arabic looks or sounds). Rather, the crux of the language, that which gives it its identity and its power, appears to be some imperceptible essence that carries the stamp of the Arab Muslim world (cf.-Mcintosh 2005b).17 Interestingly, informants repeatedly stressed that spirit versions of Arabic are "original," "pure," "authentic," "ancient," or "exact." Such claims may constitute a version of language ideology in which properties imputed to languages are iconically mapped onto'the speakers associated with the language (Irvine and Gal 2000); perhaps when the Arabic is "pure" ot "authentic," so too are the Arab spirits who speak it, suggesting the depth of their occult potency. These extraordinary claims about the spirits' language also underscore the achievement of the diviners themselves, who lack validation from Islamic authorities but who in the context of possession are indirectly able to lay claim to a standard they would never ordinarily attain. Indeed, despite the potentially oppressive significance of possession, it remains the case that possession can open social possibilities for diviners (cf. Lewis 1971), as they gain access to invisible worlds of knowledge. In Kadzo's case, whatever advantages she accrues come not only from the financial rewards of being a diviner (very meager for most, significant for a few who are exceptionally well known and respected), but from her ability to wield a prized epistemological tool in a 'social context that emphasizes'Islamization and education as'routes to upward mobility. With one strategy diviners lacking in Arabic literacy are able to deliver an 240 CHAPTER 5 oracle and to corifer upon themselves a modicum of reflected glory as they traffic in an intrinsically potent medium. The literate male Swahili diviners called walimu wa kitabu living in the heart of Malindi interact with Arabic texts in quite a-different way. To be sure> not all Swahili diviners and healers use the techniques I ^describe. Some diviners faVor the scrutiny of objects that evoke technology, education, and rhastery, such as clocks or^watches; others may hold stethoscopes to the client's heart to determine, in the words of one, "[whether] the person has many worries that have led to illness, and whether the source of the illness is* someone else's jealousy." A few Swahili women divine in Malindi; "although some are literate in Arabic and can use the techniques associated with* Falak, most use other means, including mechanical means such as throwing and interpreting cowrie shells. As discussed in chapter 4, furthermore, spirit possession has a historical precedent in many Swahili societies (Giles 1987), and while possession is not endorsed as acceptable or-desirable by most Swahili in Malindi it is nevertheless used by.some'Swahili diviners. Like Giriama, for instance, a handful of female Swahili waganga use the assistance of spirits to write scallopine Arabic and, read the Quran, while a small minority of male Swahili diviners also use possession to augment their textual'practices. Yet the technique of possession is increasingly* marginalized b y selfconsciousrymodern forms of personhood and by the linkbetween piety and rational persons encouraged by the reformist -Ahlul Sunna movement in Malindi's urban core. The most prestigious Swahili diviners tend to eschew; possession and to base their practice on-the Quran and Falak, which they read and interpret "using elaborate exegetical skills learned through apprenticeship or extensive scholarship in settings as far away as Lamu, Tanzania, or Arabia itself. One mwalimu wa kitabu, Mwalimu Mzee, lives in the heart of Barani and receives clients at a desk in a one-room stone dwelling built especially for'his work. The inner walls are whitewashed and covered from floor to^eiling with Arabic script. Verses from the Quran spill from one wall onto the next; a Muslim invocation (yaa Allah) is written large in outline and filled with Quranic prayers in smaller script, physically layering meaning within meaning. Mwalimu Mzee has inscribed small grids onto the back of the door, filling each cell with an Arabic numeral, reflecting a focus on numerology and geometric patterns associated with DIVINATION AND MADNESS 241 l'"l Islam in many other areas of Muslim Africa and beyond .(Bravmann 1983; Lambek 1993). To prognosticate for clients Mwalimu Mzee uses several techniques widely shared by other walimu in the'area. In Swahili belief, as for many Muslims, letters of the. Quranic alphabet also correspond to individual numbers, which themselves can he interpreted as reflecting archaic meanings. In one such system (sometimes referred to as abjad, Ar.), the numeric values in an Arabic word are added and the sum treated as" shorthand for the word itself. The number 786, for>instance, means bismillahi, "in the name of God" (Salvadori 198*3: 195). According to one mwalimu living in Malindi but trained in Lamu, particular numbers also correspond to one of four personality types (water, wind, fire, and earth), of which there may be harmonious and dissonant combinations that can influence a person's fate. A mwalimu can further manipulate letters andnumbers by, for example, taking the letters of a client's name and of some other relevant name (say, that of his or her mother or a potential lover), translating each into numbers, performing sums on these, and then scrutinizing the numerical result for significance. During one session conducted for a young man who dropped by to request a divination session (ramli) without any introduction of himself or his problems, Mwalimu Mzee wrote three names in a row—his own name, the name of the client, and that of the client's mother—in Arabic lettering. He drew a star under each, a figurative allusion to the distinctive fate of every person. Under each Arabic letter he wrote a corresponding nufnber, then consulted the Falak text at his side to translate that row of numbers into a second row of numbers. He-added the two rows together into a third row, scrutinized the Falak again, then delivered the oracle, an open-ended diagnosis that may have allowed the client to detect his concerns in it, while bringing him back to the Quran as the remedy: "Here is the problem—sometimes your fortune [bahati] is good, sometimes it's bad* Many people are jealous of you. This isn't your first divination; you've done it before because you've been having problems. You sometimes get sick with a fever, sometimes feeling the cold and sometimes the heat. Sometimes you get enough sleep, sometimes you lack it. But -there are jealous people. You feel worries and this brings illness. The cure for you is to have the Quran read to you." 242 CHAPTER 5 Mwalimu Mzee alsp uses grids (copied out from books such as Falak or obtained from other walimu) with individual Arabic terms in each cell standing for "soul," "money," and other important and fateful concepts. To choose a term, a diviner may close his eyes and mutter a prayer from the Quran (in Arabic, of course) while moving his hand in a circle over the grid, then let his hand fall, apparently randomly on a word.18 Mwalimu Mzeejprefers to place the day of the week on one axis of-the grid and the time pf day on another axis, sp that the combination of anygiven date and time corresponds to one term. He then decodes the significance of the term, depending on the client's 'needs. One client anxious about a court case is informed that she will prevail; another is told that her wayward husband is losing interest and needs .occult intervention, mediated by Mwalimu Mzee himself, to bring him hoine. Falak also contains elaborate instructions'for numerically generating sixteen quadrigrams that encode a client's fate, a system of prognostication-that a select few walimu are able to study in Arabia itself but others learn through local apprenticeship.19 When Mwalimu Mzee uses the Ealak technique, he begins by writing the invocations yaa Allah, zn&yaa Mohammedan either side of several stars and quadrigrams (others prefer to write out a brief prayer from the Quran in Arabic). Then, placing his left hand and the client's hand atop these, he takes a pen in his right hand and rapidly draws a row of short vertical lines from right to left, starting a new row of lines when he runs out of room on the page, until he has inscribed eight rows. The physical contact with the invocation or prayer at the top of the page apparently, focuses the process, influencing the diviner's hand so that the number of lines reflects the client's fortune. Then Mwalimu Mzee counts off the lines in each row, indicating to the right of the row whether it contains an odd or even number of lines. Odd rows are designated 1; even rows are designated N. The is andNs are then ordered and recombined through an elaborate procedure dictated by Falak, until Mwalimu Mzee has sixteen quadrigrams called koo (pi. makoo), each composed of four, is andjNs. Falak assigns an Arabic name to each koo; INNN, for instance, is termed "Mushtara Dhahika" and suggests the involvement of the client's, soul, while mm is "Daghala" and suggests money is at stake. Yet, says Mwalimu Mzee, the significance of each koo can be fully understood only according to its location relative to DIVINATION AND MADNESS 243 II i the other makoo, in combination with the client's situation. The significance of a koo thus requires deep interpretation that goes far beyond its simple semantic meaning. Many Swahili diviners thus rely on an exegetical approach to Arabic that presumes that individual words, letters, or numbers bear magical essentialist meanings, in ways not predicted by ordinary semantics (or mathematics). As in the recursive writing on Mwalimu Mzee's wall) meanings are layered within meanirigs to the point that accessing an oracular message requires a quasi-algorithmic techrtique. This condensed notion of signs applies too in Swahili healing practices. The talismans used to effect spiritual and physical cures often consist of writings sewn into a cloth or leather pouch; these may include prayers from the Quran, individual letters from the alphabet (such as miim and waaw) repeated in rows, and mysterious symbols such as numbers, curlicues bisected by a line, pentacles, and cross-hatches, some of which m a y b e intended to represent t h e khawatim, the "excellent names" of God (cf. Bravmann 1983:50). The interspersion of Arabic letters amid unfamiliar symbols has a suggestive effect, as if to imply that Arabic letters themselves contain as much mysterious, condensed power as an archaic, obscure symbol. In all of these examples, the meaning of a small unit ofArabic (a letter, number, or word) is treated as so densely embedded that it requires elaborate procedures of extraction.20, The contrast between Swahili and Giriama styles of interaction with Arabic in Malindi emerges in part from their different models of ideal personhood. I do not mean to erase the "overlap in divinatory practices between these groups; particularly the presence of spirit possession among Swahili diviners; it is nevertheless the case that the most prestigious and most popular form of divination among Swahili involves the textual interactions I have described. The contrast between private, individualized agency valorized by Swahili and the patterns of shared agency evident in 'Giriama possession is played out in very particular relationships between'people and utterances or texts. What kinds of agency do Giriama imagine are present among their female diviners, who nearly always receive their oracles through spirit possession? Because the diviner becomes" host to a possessing spirit, the most basic task of animating the prophecy seems divided between the diviner (whose body is the channel for the animated talk) and the spirit 244 CHAPTER 5 (whose voice emanates from that body). As for the intellectual experience of understanding Arabic, this capacity seems ambiguously divided between spirit and diviner. On the one hand, in our conversations aganga frequentiy impressed upon me the sudden linguistic proficiency conferred upon them by the spirit: "When I'm possessed, I can speak [some said 'read,' some said 'write'] Arabic, and I never even studied it!" Such locutions clearly announce the spirit's role in the feat but appear to share in the glory of it, and they suggest the difficulty in teasing apart host and spirit in Giriama folk models of the possessed person. Giriama diviners also have the skill of translating the spirits'.-oracles into Kigiriama for the benefit and understanding^ their listeners; although the aganga do not themselves speak or understand Arabic when riot possessed, they can nevertheless translate it after the spirit has receded, a potential contradiction that never seems to attract attention/presumably because of the blurring of lines between spirit and diviner. On the other hand, the capacityto produce Arabic vanishes altogether when the spirit departs or is angered, and many Giriama, diviners included, speak with envy of the textual mastery of Swahili who have studied Arabic intensively. All in all, the literacy of Giriama diviners is contingent on their shared agency with their helping spirits, and* while it is celebrated by Giriama, it is not considered a match for the competence of those who understand how to use the Falak text or those who have (to invoke Hawe Baya's words again) their "own" Quran. Among Swahili walimu wa kitabu like Mwalimu Mzee agency is differently distributed, involving a kind of self-possession rather than possession by spirits. Allah, of course, is seen by the pious as the ultimate cause of successful divination, but the diviner's skill is the proximate cause. Those walimu who do not use spirit possession not only understand the semantic meaning of the Arabic they use as they read and write from the Quran and Falak, but through a process of ratiocination, manipulation, and interpretation they also locate deeper significance in the language. This practice goes beyond standard notions of textual exegesis. Notice that Mwalimu Mzee does not merely access obscure information lurking within Arabic; he has mastered the obscure procedures required to crack the language's -codes. Ideally, a mwalimu wa kitabu will have studied his craft under the tutelage of numerous other diviners in different geographic areas, such as Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lamu, DIVINATION AND MADNESS 245 I1 Zanzibar, and Tanzania. He will know how to generate the Falak quadrigrams, how to translate a single-Arabic word in a grid into a proposition about a client's life, and howio decompose a client's name into numerical form, intermingle it with other numbers, and translate the results back info semantic form. He will know obscure meanings of the prayers within the .Quran, meanings that are treated as inherently medicinal. Such expertise amounts to a kind of epistemological one-upmanship, for its dissection of the forms of Arabic supersedes even the capacities of native Arabic speakers. v These valorized forms of agency among Swahili are linked to themes I discussed in chapter 3, in which I explained the ideological importance of rationality, faith or-belief; and intention (nia) to Islamic piety among many Swahili in Malindi today. While 'directing one's deeds through pious nia or applying one's reasoning to religious questions are explicitly moral acts in *a way that the diviner's decipherment is not (indeed, Swahili diviners -run the risk of accusations of imperfect piety), these efforts nevertheless have something in common. All of these forms of agency—the capacity for comprehension and decipherment on the part of the diviner; the rationality, faith, and good intentions of the good Muslim—require the cultivation of a kind of inward-looking effort and private prowess, the control and mastery of one's inner states and abilities.' «, These themes come together in some Swahili valorizations of textual divination and critiques of spirit-based forms of divination. One mwalimu, Abubakari, explained: There is one kind of uganga a person can be proud of: that of education [elimu], where a person uses his intelligence [akili] and he is not possessed. He's not possessed, and he shows that he can divine and heal without the help of spirits. If a mgahga depends on the help of spirits alone, he'll bring problems upon himself. The kind* of uganga where you use the help of spirits is harmful, especially when the spirit refuses to possess. That mganga won't be able to work at all. I use the uganga of reading, not the kind that requires me to be possessed. Abubakari derides spirit-based divination on grounds that it is unreliable and overly dependent; it is better, he implies, to be in command of one's faculties and divinatory powers, by drawing on one's education. Some 246 CHAPTER 5 elite Swahili laypeople also disdain diviners and healers who use possession. One cosmopolitan Swahili man told me he had tried to "research" the matter of possession among Swahili diviners in his original home, Lamu, saying (in English), "Only the poorly educated in matters of Islam engage in possession. They'll speak maybe four words of Arabic and the rest is gibberish. I've been arguing with these guys for years about whether there's such a thing as spirit language. Of course there isn't." Not surprisingly, such critiques are often leveled by Swahili not only at lowerstatus (sometimes female) Swahili diviners but also at Giriama aganga. One Swahili woman in Malindi named Fatima weighed in on the inadequacy of Giriama uses of the Quran while possessed: "When you pray in Arabic you must mean the prayer with all of your heart and your nia. The Giriama diviners don't even know what they are praying; they can't see what is on the page." One Swahili mwalimu claimed that the Falak text he uses affords "direct power," whereas the Giriama divination strategy using spirit possession is "indirect," drawing on powers that attenuate rapidly, "like a kerosene lamp running out of oil." In such critiques we see the implication that those engaging in possession to divine or heal are trafficking in a kind of weak mimicry of real skill since they lack the educated or self-possessed agency thatldeally ought to underlie a person's use of texts and words. Walimu wa kitabu may defend the superiority of their methods, but their skills at decipherment are nevertheless controversial. While reading the Quran for healing purposes is widely considered acceptable—"The Quran is medicine [shifaa, Ar.]," as one mwalimu put it—there is anxiety about whether other divinatory and healing practices might be considered ushirikina (Kisw.) or shirk (Ar.), "disrespectful of God's omnipotence." The techniques of divinatory probing used in Falak divination are so profound that some regard it as excessive; as one pious Muslim put it, Falak requires a kind of "calculation, like modern technology," the use of which requires "research . . . into matters that have been hidden and forbidden by God himself." The agency wielded by walimu, in other words, threatens to exceed that allowed by God. If this threat is triggered by the exceptional knowledge of these practitioners, the defense against it also involves an inner capacity, for walimu sometimes defend their use of Falak by way of the notions of belief and nia. Said one mwalimu, "If you still believe that God is omnipotent and you are just using Falak to DIVINATION AND MADNESS 247 help improve your knowledge of God's will, it is acceptable [halali]" In other words, the mere fact of inward humility, a private playing down of one's power in relation to God, can salvage the moral viability of divination. Another echoed this sentiment, underscoring as well that one must accept the epistemological limitations of Falak: "Falak should be for forecasting only. If you believe that that book is the only truth then it's unacceptable [haramu]. But in fact it's just a few details about causes and effects, and things that may or may not happen. If you believe that God is omnipotent and you just use your knowledge to get a little help from Falak, it's okay. Your nia is the key. You see, this one thing may be haramu but with a little turning of the point, it may become halali" Among these Swahili the cultivation of skills and knowledge offers the key to successful divination but poses a potential danger-to their status as good Muslims. To mitigate this agency and salvage his or her-piety, the good Muslim must attend to inner states such as belief and nia. Hence, whether Swahili are trafficking in potentially illicit "calculations" over Arabic words, letters, and numbers or reminding themselves of their devout intentions as they use mystical texts, their discourse surrounding these actions returns again and again to a model of personhood in which internal qualities are cultivated, measured, and monitored. Yet Giriama interactions with Arabic tend to rely on an ambiguous sharing Of agency in which the inner? states of the diviner are not generally spoken of, and the Giriama person is reliant upon a possessing spirit in order to interact with the text. In sum, Giriama and-Swahili in Malindi a*ppear to have jointly reified the mystical potency and epistemological potential of the Arabic language, which therefore enjoys a symbolic power that perpetuates the hegemonic notion that Islam is a supernatural force to be reckoned with, and one that attaches more to those who have studied Arabic than to those who have not. Giriama are also in awe of and fear what they perceive as Swahili diviners' and healers' mastery of Arabic texts. Giriama diviners use Arabic and the Quran in hopes of attaining mystical knowledge. While they may gain a modicum of status among other Giriama, their epistemological methods lack authority among Swahili,-for the Giriama models of personhood played out in their interactions with Arabic texts allow for the sharing of agency with spirits and pay little attention to an individual's distinctive knowledge or controlled inner 248 CHAPTER 5 states. Some Swahili diviners also use spirit possession, but their methods are regarded by many as religiously forbidden or as demonstrations of weakness. Once again .we see that the prevailing understandings of personhood among Swahili and Giriama play a role in thesociocultural hierarchies between (and even within) these groups. The Language of Madness and the Obliteration of the Giriama Person Arabic is also interwoven with Giriama personhood in another, much darker fashion, -one that speaks eloquently to the tensions; in Giriama attitudes.toward Islam. I first b'ecame aware of this phenomenon when I encountered a peculiar man walking down the road running between Malindi and its tiny airport. His hair hung irom -his head in brown clumps, his genitalia dangled from a,flimsy clothe and as he approached he spoke loudly and gesticulated to an invisible interlocutor. I strained to understand -him but did: not- recognize the sounds he produced as Kiswahili or a Mijikenda dialect. When I described him to my Giriama friends, they told me he was a well-known mad (wazimu, Kisw., Kigir.) person,21 who "has.spoken in other languages since he went mad. Now he speaks Arabic and the Somali language." Madness everywhere is diagnosed by a catastrophic breakdown in the social self. The madmay become violent, paranoid, wildly sexually inappropriate, or obsessive-compulsive./They may hallucinate, suffer from extreme mood swings, and neglect theirhygierie and clothing.Xanguage is often deeply compromised in this equation, for as* Wilce (2004: 416) reminds us, sane speech involves "pragmatic or indexical competence" that is devastated by these social failures. Among schizophrenics,, for instance, the shattering of the -self is often accompanied by incoherent speech. The subtie metacommunicative signs that indicate what is going on, how messages should h e framed, and how turns ought to be structured are»sometimes ignored or misperceive'd by schizophrenic (as well as autistic-and otherwise impaired) listeners (Ochs et al. 2004; Ribeiro 1994). These pragmatic infelicities extend telanguage play, babbling to invisible interlocutors, and, in some cases, to rapid, socially inappropriate code switching (Wilce 2004: 424). The behavior of the mad may be chaotic, but it is not without meaning. Indeed, some have argued that madness has an intelligible poetics, DIVINATION AND MADNESS 249 offering an imaginative intensification of the anxieties of ordinary cultural life (Comaroff and Comaroff 1987;"Friedrich 1979). Afnong Giriama in Malindi any interpretation of the poetics of madness must attend closely to language, for one of the most recurrent symptoms of madness in this community is said to be the sudden onset of the use of Other languages, most prominently Arabic. This form of mimetic behavior begs for interpretation since its disastrous implications for the Giriama person preclude its evaluation as an appropriation of mystical power. As part of the context for interpreting this type of madness, it is worth exploring how its symptoms speak to themes addressed in chapters* 2 and 3, in which I discussed the bloodthirsty;im-spirits that gather money for their Swahili masters and the often unwanted possession of Giriama individuals by Muslim spirits who demand their conversion to Islam. Several example's will help to demonstrate how these themes play out. Kadenge was the hardworking twenty-something son of impoverished parents who had managed to secure a well-paying job in town. He owned two cows and had begun to build himself a large mud-and-fhatch house in Muyeye when he spontaneously began to babble in a tongue his family and neighbors term Arabic* There is some collective puzzlement about the cause of his condition, but a common account is that Kadenge's own grandmother was jealous*of his fortune and hired someone to bewitch him. The professional who did the job, say his neighbors,.enlisted Muslim spirits and "threw" them at Kadenge. "Most of fhe witchery involved in. madness," explained Kade,nge's neighbor Thvtva; "originates with fhe Arabs." Today Kadenge wanders around the streets of Malindi eating from" trash he'aps, refusing to bathe, and producing a stream of largely unintelligible -speech that Thuva deems "the best Arabic," most volubly on Fridays. When he requests something of another person he sometimes says "Bismillahi!" before pantomiming his desires, and at prayer time he cries out like a muzzein. "J don't know how he keeps time to know when [the prayers] happen," said Thuva, "but he always gets it perfecdy." Another young man, Kaluwa, began to show signs of acute madness during the Muslim calls for prayer, growing panicky and trying to-hide. Eventually he began speaking what his 'friend Mashd' calls "something like Arabic," while his social behavior deteriorated into unpredictability, vacillating between violence and-aloofriess as he took to collecting gar250 CHAPTER 5 bage on the streets. Masha has a theory as to what happened. Kaluwa was working in a Swahili house as a cook at the time of the onset of this illness, and-Masha suspects he broughtpork into the house. As punishment, "the majini slapped him and his brain-has been misbehaving ever since." Masha added, "Kaluwa's family is from Kakuyuni, close to Ganda, where there was a Swahili slave market." This allusion seems at first like a non sequitur, until I realize that it encodes the association between Swahili arid ownership of Mijikenda slaves. The reference seems ominous, perhaps drawing a'rhetorical link between the history of Swahili slavery, Kaluwa's employment by a Swahili, and his current subjugation at the hands of possessing Muslim spirits. Kiponda was working for a Swahili iri Sheila when a jini pounced on him. His friends speculate he may have "picked up some money that dropped on the floor," precisely the sort of act that the money-gathering jini will swiftly avenge to preserve the fortunes of their Arab and Swahili masters. Said Kiponda's friend Kitsao, "[Now] he responds to the call for prayers—in fact, when the time comes,-you.can hear him calling on his own" Kitsao continued, "[Today Kiponda] speaks fhe language we don't understand; he speaks Arabic, the pure Arabic . . . especially at noon prayers and on Friday. He never spoke a wbrd of it before he went mad." It's ironic, Kitsao added, because Kiponda never liked Swahili people, and even today, despite his state of dementia, "he likes mocking the bui bui women when they pass by him." Kiponda's sister Kadii asserts (independently of Kitsao) that he now speaks "the original Arabic [Kiarabu asili, Kisw., Kigir.]," prays following the calls from the muzzein, and fasts during Ramadan. As in a number of other cases, Kiponda also-began to speak other languages with the onset of his madness, such as Kikamba and Kisomali, but his friends and relations mentioned those only in passing before their narratives focused on Arabic and on the Muslim spirits that underlie it. L return to the matter of language below, but first it is important to discuss some of the other themes raised in these vignettes, for they shed light on^fhe prevalence of Muslim spirits as the cause of madness. A number of cases of madness, not just Kiponda's, involve a striking association between money and fhe Muslim spirits that drive a person mad. Some Giriama regard madness as* a* common result of jealousy within their community, a sentiment that has been on the rise over the generaDIVINATION AND MADNESS 251 • 1 tions as opportunities for accumulation have risen and threatened to displace traditions of redistribution (cf. Parkin 1972). An elderly denizen of Muyeye, Yaah Baya, said, "Most people become mad when someone casts a spirit upon them; it can be a jealous person Our people won't let you grow rich. Once you start, they bewitch you. It's often a Swahili jini—you see, we don't have jini in our witchcraft." In this formulation jealous Giriama eager to level the playing field enlist the help of Swahili witches to send possessing jini to their victim. This is what Kadenge's neighbors assume happened to him. Other Giriama I^poke to pin madness directiy on the cruel whimsy of the Muslim spirits Giriama encounter in their interactions with Swahili, spirits especially likely to be provoked by those who steal from Muslim employers, as Kiponda may have done. In both-scenarios Muslim spirits, which are already considered brokers of Swahili and Arab wealth (see chapter 2), become punitive devices againstXJiriama attempting to rise above their economic station. Granted,, there are cases of madness caused by Muslim spirits that don't involve economics; sometimes Muslim spirits are said to cause madness in individuals who have insulted them (for example, through cursing or drunkenness), and in other instances, "they just want to torment you," as one person put it.22 Still, the link between madness, money, and Muslim spirits is striking and may help to account for the fact that most cases of madness I encountered involved men, who are somewhat more likely than women to serve as laborers under Muslim employers. There are also interesting comparisons.to.be drawn between these cases of madness and the common pattern in which Giriama are pressured to convert to Islam by a possessing Muslim spirit. Both involve the domination of Giriama by Islamic forces and the partial or total loss of Giriama agency at the hands of a Muslim spirit. The cases of madness represent the most extreme version of Muslim spiritual coercion, for the Giriama person is completely divested of both control and consciousness. There are also, however, some intriguing patterns of difference between spirit-forced conversion and spirit-induced madness. The first difference provokes questions about just what the mimetic behaviors in madness could mean, while the second difference invites speculation about the semiotic weight of language itself to Giriama identity. The first -difference has to do with purity and pollution. In spiritforced conversion the Muslim spirits demand and emphasize new forms 252 CHAPTER 5 of purity of their Giriama hosts, through the bodily rejection of haramu food and drink, fasting during Ramadan, the donning of pristine white robes, arid ablutions. In stark contrast, fhe hygiene of the mad utterly collapses. Giriama explanations for the filfhiness of the mad sometimes link the condition to the perverse wishes of the spirits, who seem to want to humiliate their victims as much as possible. It is worth exploring, then, whether the mimetic behaviors of the mad as they go through the motions of Islam have an ironic or cautionary semiotic value, the result of a lifetime of feeling beleaguered or even traumatized by Muslim hegemony. Ferguson (2002) has noted a tension in the scholarly literature between interpretations of mimesis as earnest pragmatism and interpretations' of mimesis as a kind -of resistant parody or mockery of the powerful. Certainly some Giriama appropriations of Islam are entirely earnest and strategic, such as their use of the Quran for divination and healing. But might their madness mark another, darker face of mimesis? For instance, perhaps the -distorted condition of the mad, calling to prayer while wearing filthy rags, provides a kind of monstrous parody of Islam. Perhaps, more subdy the behaviors of the mad parody or warn against Giriama aspirations to become Muslim, suggesting that once a Giriama crosses over to "the Muslim side" he-or she becomes a mere shell of a person, an automaton without dignity. Perhaps the behavior of the mad could even be read as a kind of rejoinder to Muslim hegemony, a thumb in its eye, a defiant grotesquerie of its terms. A final interpretation of this phenomenon eludes, for the mad hardly know what t h e y are doing, nor do their.interpreters offer a wholly coherent account of the meaning of their deeds. At the very least, however, the mimesis involved in madness reveals what preoccupies Giriama in Maliridi, for there is little more vexing to them than the dilemma" of living on the edge of Islam. The second contrast between spirit-forced conversion, and madness foregrounds the relationship'between language, ethnicity, and personhood in Giriama life. Giriama narratives ahout conversion tend to focus on the bodily demands the spirit makes of its host (rejection of Giriama foods, ejtc), but narratives about spirit-induced madness place particular emphasis upon the linguistic domain, most often the use of Arabic. Just as many accounts of divination focus on the Arabic language used by the diviner, so too are discussions of madness often dominated bya focus on the language itself as the source of awe. Young men and women working DIVINATION AND MADNESS 253 for Muslim employers are possessed by the jini that live at their employers' homes and said to "babble in Arabic. The curses of drunken men walking past a baobab tree offend the Arab spirits, who descend, say the narrators of such events, and take over their tongues. In fact, even some of the beach boys whose madness is thought to have been caused by smoking too much banghi weed are said to speak Arabic, despite the fact that their condition is not caused by spirit possession. The association of madness with Arabic even in the absence of a Muslim spirit is revealing." It suggests that language, like spirits, can get into people in a way that can strip them of their appropriate social orientation. To be* c6lonized*not only by an'Arab spirit, but by the Arabic language itself, is to have utterly lost'oneVbearings/ a contention borne out in the words of one Giriama speculating about why the mad speak Arabic: "I think they speak it because they live in a totally different world. . . . They feel they're in their other world when they speak that other language." Arguably, in fact, the same logic that informs the use of Arabic in Giriama divination seems to be magnified in the role language plays in madness. Arabic, a wholly Other language, can offer the diviner-a window into a 'wholly different perspective, but taken to an extreme these alternative ways of knowing can lead to fhe loss of self, for madness is a kind of epistemology gone haywire, an intrusive parallel universe that detaches subjectivity from the here and"now. But this parallel universe is not simply detached; it is also ethnoreligrously marked by the language associated precisely with the lives that many Giriama envy and resent. Ifmadness*and its associated linguistic failures represent what Wilce (2004: 422)' calls *a breakdown in "essential humanity," then Giriama madness is a breakdown of essentially Giriama'humanity-It is precisely because personhood is ethnoreligiously marked for Giriama in today's Malindi ("Personhood is culture," as Phillip, the communityiadvocate, insists) thatthe primary symptom^of their madness is similarly marked. And because madness involves Arabic and Islam, it indexes with precision the kinds of aborted longing and frustration experiencedhy so many Giriama. Finally, Giriama madness bears with if alesson about the parameters of Giriama personhood and -the limits of its permeability. We have seen that Giriama tend to-valorize a sociocentric model of the person, in which reciprocal obligations are-morally upheld, agency may be distributed 254 CHAPTER 5 between persons and other agents such as spirits, and introspective tendencies are not given much play. Yet, as Jacobson-Widding (1990: 34) observed in the Lower Congo, some African societies entertain both sociocentric and egocentric views of personhood simultaneously, with the former assuming the status of "official ideology" and the latter making itself known more implicitly, as an element of the person "to be reckoned with." Among Giriama, we are reminded of the egocentric person perhaps most palpably when personhood has been wholly destroyed. All Giriama see madness as a terrifying and tragic prospect, for while they are not as a whole particularly invested in internalist or individualistic models of personhood, they nevertheless prize certain forms of autonomy. Sufficient agency to sustain one's social competence and sanity is clearly the sine qua non of a viable life, and this, it seems, is utterly stripped away by Arabic-speaking spirits who come and never leave. In ordinary divination, temporary, voluntary spirit possession can benefit the host, who ultimately returns to awareness to interpret the spirit's message. In madness, though, there is no such return to self-command and no such process of interpretation. The spirit is free to meddle with the possessed, who functions merely as the addled co-animator of unintelligible speech and calls to prayer. In those calls to prayer, in fact, the possessed go through the motions of advertising Islam; having been ensnared by its potencies, they proceed, zombie-like, to solicit others, even though, like Kiponda, some of them when sane reportedly despised the ethnic groups associated with Islam. (Once again, the possibility arises that such mimetic behaviors have a parodic or critical dimension; fhe mad individual attempts to lure others to the same fate, but what a dreadful fate it plainly is.) This untenable situation clarifies the importance for Giriama of the self-control of the sane. All in all, the Arabic-speaking mad represent the ultimate loss of Giriama identity and autonomy in a social force field they find greatly oppressive. Giriama seem caught in a double bind, for the very devices they sometimes use to recoup power appear to reinscribe elements of this same sqcial dynamic, one made up of ethnoreligious boundaries, essentialized social categories, and the repeated valorization of the power of other religious and ethnic groups. Recent events in Kenya at large have done much to reinforce, tragically, ethnoreligious boundaries and ethnoterritorial dynamics. 1 DIVINATION AND MADNESS 255 1