(Extremely) Close Encounters With the Saints

On Wednesday I was invited to a private ceremony in Haina, on the outskirts of the city, to hear a truly awesome palos group called Yogo Yogo. They are a boutique drumming group of sorts, with matching uniforms, tight arrangements, vocal harmonies, and a much higher price tag for playing ceremonies. I was surprised to find myself rolling up to a big fancy yellow house to hear palos, as up till now I’ve found that middle and upper-class people hereabouts are not so down with Afro-Dominican spirituality, to say the least.

Anyway, this was a different kind of event than I have become accustomed to, a closed ceremony in a private house, with a hired spirit medium - an older bald woman with a crazy voice. Once the musicians started playing, her eyes opened wide in the way people do when they enter trance, and she proceeded to go around to people in the room, dancing with them, hugging them, giving advice, and generally directing people in how to please the saints.

I, as normal, was hugging the walls and keeping very still hoping that nobody, especially her, would notice the random fair-featured gringo in the room. This seemed to be working just fine, when all of a sudden she came up to me with those wide-spirit eyes. She looked at me for a while, and then poured a bottled of something on my face and then gave me a rough smack on the head. The unknown liquid burned in my eyes, and there I was a public-spectacle, cringing in pain.

Besides the pain, I felt really bad about this because I thought that I had somehow angered her, or the misterios, or someone, but apparently not. I asked the guy who threw the ceremony and he just shrugged and said, “no, there’s no problem, the spirits just do that sometimes.”

I told this story to Duluc and he told me his interpretation: That this was an invitation to the community, a reminder that I couldn’t come here to learn about this music without being involved in the connected spirituality. He said that if the spirits didn’t like you, they would ignore you, and that they usually don’t interact with outsiders. Who knows. Duluc likes me and thinks that I have come here with an especially open heart and mind, but I still don’t know what was really going on.

In other news, I have less than a month in this country, which makes me extremely sad. Its been so easy to get connected to amazing people, get opportunities to listen and play music, and create a little life for myself here. I know my way around Santo Domingo almost as well as New York, learned how to properly select and cook platanos, and finally figured out how to pepper my Spanish with Dominican slang. It’ll be like leaving home, but I may as well get used to it, as the rhythm of getting somewhere, being confused, getting comfortable, and leaving is going to repeat itself… four more times before I make my merry way back to the good old USA.

Tonight I’m splurging and going to the Cultura Profetica concert, who if you don’t know is the all time greatest Latino reggae band, incredibly dope, and the idols of hippies all over Latin America. I expect to be hit in the face by flying dreadlocks, many, many times.