Invoking ancestral blessings

Were the bush simply a threat—filled with sorcerers, a roaring fire, or devouring animals—one could always counterattack. One might stay home. But the rivers and fields hold water and food, the plains harbor game and yield delicious greens and grubs. Even wild animals—a boar or an antelope—might be a deceased presence, a guardian spirit. Learning the wisdom to see, to distinguish between life-giving or life-devouring creatures, seems an interminable task.

Yet it is those who see who have the power to survive in the wilderness and to be nourished by its abundance. They can trust their senses to discern the circumstances and the relationship appropriate to the moment. They at least intuit, if not assuredly recognize, the quality of the beings they encounter. And thus they act wisely—escaping alive, nurtured, enlivened.

Such wisdom, only in part learned through experience, must be invoked through yishima. Thus, when ending a story, each storyteller signs off with a closing formula. Calling for an ancestral blessing and the clarity of wisdom, the Chokwe most frequently recite these lines: “In telling a story, you must make it clear; otherwise, the elders will be offended, right now by this fire.” Even late in the evening—with the embers barely glowing, the last gourd of palm wine drunk, the children all sleeping in their mothers’ arms and the old people nodding—the final storyteller closes thus and seals that round of stories. People murmur good-night and wander off to sleep. Remembered and dreamed, the lingering images shape the wilderness landscape and all those beings seen.

Rachel I. Fretz is a folklorist and lecturer in UCLA Writing Programs. Drawing on her ethnographic work in Zaire, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and UCLA grants, she has written about African women’s friendships, ritual-mask figures, and storytelling aesthetics. She is finishing a book about the Chokwe people: Storytelling Vision: Performances in Chokwe Villages of Zaire.