SIMULATING RITES OF PASSAGE
The PVK group facilitators’ conceptual framework for psychosocial healing was largely founded in conventions that have evolved in DMT, as developed and practiced over the last several decades in the United States. Among DMT’s core premises is the notion that “the visible movement behavior of individuals is analogous to their intrapsychic dynamics” (Schmais, 1974, p. 10). When examining the meaning of the former boy combatant slicing his own neck when purporting to illustrate his childhood role in executing someone else, I drew on fundamental DMT assumptions that movement behavior reflects both personality and personal history or culture and sometimes discloses otherwise hidden attitudes about the self.
Over the last couple of decades, however, a critique of what is deemed an unnecessarily limited focus on intrapsychic matters, as defined in the global North, has emerged as a prevalent perspective among mental health practitioners serving survivors of war and organized violence from the global South (Harris, 2002). Beyond objecting to the “medicalization” of problems that might otherwise be understood in social, economic, or political terms, these psychotherapists, theorists, and researchers have chosen to “emphasise the social aspects of suffering and healing” (Bracken & Petty, 1998, p. 190). Accordingly, it has not been uncommon among international agencies providing sendees to demobilized child soldiers in Africa and elsewhere to avoid altogether mechanisms of “trauma healing,” viewed as vestiges of colonialism, and to seek the support of traditional healers instead. Research suggests that sanctioned purification rites have, indeed, helped renew participating children’s dignity and self-esteem while restoring their standing locally (Stark, 2006). Thus, without abandoning the intrapsychic altogether, I sought to deepen our work in Kailahun by grounding it in the district’s foundational rites.
Accordingly, in many ways the PVK youths’ understanding of the meaning of our shared process was informed by the ritual order into which they had been born. I recognized that within Sierra Leone and in many sub-Saharan African cultures “secret societies” had long been central to the transfer of local values, traditions, and expectations from one generation to the next (Peddle, Moneiro, Guluma, & Macaulay, 1999). Given my status as an outsider, I was far from privy to the operations of Kailahun’s “societies”; even my co-fa-cilitators had to respect the taboo against speaking to me about techniques and mysteries kept in utter secrecy.
It was clear, nonetheless, that for the former boy soldiers in our group the unthinkable had come to pass: 11 years of war had preempted participation in the local Poro Society’s obligatory initiation rites such that the youths in PVK had been unable to undergo the rituals required to become adult men. While realizing that our circle dances lacked the ancestors’ blessings, I posited that our gatherings resembled society initiations in certain significant ways, which my three local co-facilitators corroborated. In the absence of any sanctioned alternative to the Poro ceremonies, PVK offered an experience unique in the youths’ lifetimes: our sessions brought together a dozen teenage males with adult men who offered guidance in ritualized dance and discussion within a time frame set apart from the ordinary activities and spaces of Koindu life, all for the expressed purpose of fostering lasting collective growth and transformation. By separating the youths from the routines of their daily lives and introducing them to a liminal ordeal rooted in bodily engagement, our DMT group primed its participants for the concluding reaggregation phase of their rite of passage. Altered for good by the PVK journey, the youths, when eventually returning to their community, demonstrated a readiness to reconcile, and their people accepted them back fully—as the transformed young men that they had truly become (Harris, 2010).
PROCESSING TOWARD THE FUTURE WITH THE RAST
IN MIND
Van Gennep differentiated between two types of rites of passage: Beyond such life crisis rites as initiations, performed in hidden places and associated with status changes, he identified rites consecrated in public, as when a society as a whole confronts a major change as from plenty to famine, or peace to war (Turner, 1977a). Some such ritual performances linked to seasonal cycles or patterns observed in the heavens foster renewal and regeneration among numerous of the globe’s traditional cultures by summoning celestial powers to frame what is otherwise time’s overwhelming indifference. According to Turner (1977a), every type of society has its own “dominant mode of public liminality, the subjunctive space/time that is the counterstroke to its pragmatic indicative texture” (p. 34). Dance and DMT both offer incursions into the subjunctive realm that is the fertile soil of restoration and healing, as are seasonal rites and ceremonies in numerous cultural contexts.
Passing Crossroads
In 1989, 1 lived for a number of months in Antigua, Guatemala, a baroque relic of a city, where I witnessed the celebrated Holy Week processions. For generations, at the start of each Semana Santa, large crews of volunteer artisans have filled the colonial capital’s cobblestone streets with vast alfombras'. extraordinarily intricate “carpets” composed of seeds, flower petals, bark, and tinted sawdust and bedecked with astonishing abstract designs as well as true-to-life motifs of birds, flowers, and other natural marvels. Each Good Friday—the most solemn day in the Christian calendar, markingjesus’ surrender to torture and death at Golgotha—a parade passes over these dazzling, freshly completed displays of artistry. Scores of men dressed in robes styled after Renaissance images of biblical figures tread slowly together, while carrying on their collective shoulders massive wooden platforms topped with sculptured tableaux from the life of Christ up to and including the crucifixion. Invoking images of the Savior dragging his own cross, the costumed characters struggle under the tonnage of these ship-sized “floats.” In order to avoid capsizing under the weight, the men rock side-to-side together, deliberately, and in striking unison as they move forward, step by step. While the disciples thus inch their way down the narrow streets, their sandaled feet trample the alfombras’ gorgeous, ornate floral patterns into chance clumps of sawdust and seeds— degrading the exquisite into chaos. Watching from windows or adjacent sidewalks, community members cannot help but mourn in silence the brute passage of these processions for destroying the sublime creation of human hands. Paradoxically, the destruction performed in the streets is an emblem of rebirth. The liminal experience of Semana Santa cyclically reinforces the sacred mystery' that the yearly' celebration itself partakes of the eternal—the immortality' promised all adherents of the faith.
Emblematic of the simultaneity of death and rebirth, of human and divine, these public rites roughly' replicate the consecration of ephemerality that is inherent in dance as the most fleeting of all art forms. No one joining in Antigua’s procesiones has to identify and verbalize the cosmological battle between death and everlasting vitality' that is implicitly represented for it to yield a shared sense of hope and well-being: Communal healing is its reliable outcome for the faithful year after year.
Pluralism’s Procession
In the Kailahun District, efforts spearheaded by our psychosocial counseling team in the town of Buedu culminated in a 2006 event that was at once a stirring, large-scale funeral rite and an anniversary commemoration in the form of a traditional procession. Emerging from a year-long community dialog—largely, a choreographic process—facilitated by the Buedu counselors under my supervision, this event bore profound implications for the community’s post-conflict reconciliation and healing.
Around the globe, each June 26 since 1998, torture treatment programs have commemorated the date in 1987 when the Convention Against Torture entered into force (United Nations, 2019). Buedu’s 2005 World Day Against Torture, as we called it, had brought together Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of traditional animism for a somber remembrance of the losses that torture and organized violence had imposed on the still divided community. In a town torn apart by religious intolerance, this meeting had been the first postwar occasion within memory when members of these three divided sectors had come together collaboratively to advance social cohesion.
As in many sites across Sierra Leone during the war, when the Revolutionary United Front held sway over Buedu, the corpses of countless civilian victims were unceremoniously dumped—without benefit of any of the obligatory rites for the dead. Such strategically deployed brutality amplified the impact of the slaughter itself by dispiriting the surviving populace to the point of paralysis. Accordingly, when planning the 2006 Day Against Torture observance as an occasion for honoring the dead and re-empowering the living, the three religious factions agreed that it take place at the site of one of three known mass graves within the Buedu town limits: an empty lot used for parking lorries in the years since demilitarization.
On the day itself, at the close of Muslim midday prayers, some 300 celebrants joined in processing to the abandoned gravesite. My team and I joined scores of participants moving through town as a way of marking—in the incongruously transient way that movement is invariably limited to—what could never be undone. Processing together, seeking as it were to still history’s rampaging forgetfulness by honoring the fallen, we could not but feel the weight of the occasion’s palpable grief.
Upon reaching the empty lorry park, the processional assumed a circular formation. No doubt, many of the survivors treading this circle did so in solemn remembrance of loved ones slaughtered and tossed into unmarked graves there years before. As a newcomer to this place, it was sobering for me to contemplate that somewhere deep in the rust-hued soil beneath our feet lay decomposing corpses of persons summarily executed during the war, and for no crime other than what the butchers had deemed wrongful allegiances: belonging to the wrong sect, the wrong family, or cultivating the wrong tract of land. In response, our collective, sharing a heightened state inclusive of both grief and defiance, pressed steadily onward, together sustaining the circle that had been the ageless soul of dances across the African continent and beyond for centuries. It was surely not incidental that our spectacle revived the unending form that since time immemorial has afforded entire peoples a chance to partake almost at once of catharsis and reflection.
At the procession’s conclusion, religious observances completed the mass grave site’s consecration, beginning with the acknowledgment that the very building in whose shade we stood had held a torture chamber. With this knowledge, the observant Muslims and Christians present paid close heed as the animist chief—a man known as Buedu’s oldest living resident—poured libations to the ancestors for the innocent blood spilled on this spot. Before soaking the ruddy ground with the wine of purification and forgiveness, he shared his own eyewitness account of horror at seeing people who had been tortured and then killed thrown into a deep hole that had been dug here. Following his pivotal rite, Buedu’s World Day Against Torture commemoration concluded with Muslim and Christian sermons. .An imam condemned torture as wickedness perpetrated against innocent people and, praying for the victims, underscored the need to hold fast to the peace achieved in Sierra Leone. Christian parishioners lit candles around the gravesite in a large ring, and after a scripture reading, a Protestant pastor called for an end to stigma against persons who lacked benefit of proper burial following torture. Like the imam, the pastor emphasized nurturing the peace and urged all those wronged in war to continue to foreswear vengeance.
Had cultural anthropologist Victor Turner joined the choreographed Buedu spectacle that day, he would doubtless have deemed it exemplary of both a “metasocial” rite of passage for the dead and “a crisis rite,” inhabiting the zone between the time of ruthless slaughter and the time of survival and reconciliation. “.All performances require framed spaces set off from the routine world,” he wrote. “But metasocial rites use quotidian spaces as their stage; they merely hallow them for a liminal time” (Turner, 1977a, p. 34). It is perhaps not unusual for a traditional rite to sacralize a space in the way that Buedu hallowed its lorry park. The ecumenism inherent in the Buedu procession, however, distinguished it from most traditional journeys into liminahty. In the aftermath of terrible destruction and death, bringing together the community’s three faith sectors through one pluralist commemoration of life’s sacredness produced a unity perhaps feasible only within liminal space/time. Maybe only in the liminal realm are alliances formed that so effectively promote a people’s safety and healing; only at ritual’s threshold does the dance circle’s communal harmony stay forever unbroken, an embodied vision of eternal oneness.
