Malidoma (the name means "Be friends with the stranger or enemy" )- a 4 year old who was snatched by the French colonialists from the comfort of his tribe, to be converted to a "civilized christian", spends 16 years of his life in a Catholic Missionary school in an almost imprisoned state. Slowly losing touch with his Dagara culture and acquiring French language skills while forgetting his native tongue and his native ways, there comes a point when he can't take it anymore and so he escapes from the school and traces his way back to his village. But, now that he has learned the white man ways, he is treated with suspicion by the village elders and he himself is caught between two worlds with no ability to communicate his inner feelings. At this point, it is determined that he should undergo the initiation rites of an adolescent boy to see if he can re-integrate with his tribe. How he comes through these rites and goes on to act as a bridge between the White Man and the Black Man forms the rest of the story.
Firstly, the book is written under the premise that the Western civilization has lost its soul and needs to look at traditional and indigenous societies to better understand them and come up with new ways of communicating! Even if you disagree with the first part of the sentence, I bet you can't disagree with the latter half. Despite living in a globalized world, people often exhibit very poor understanding of other cultures or groups of people who are not like them and so the role of people like Malidoma gains importance.
Secondly, the book manages to capture the sense of homelessness many of us feel these days as we get uprooted from our native cultures and are forced to become citizens of a completely different kinds of society. This issue is center stage right now with culture wars cropping up everywhere, from banning the burkha in France to questioning what it means to be British in the UK or the anti-gay rights bill in Uganda!
The third theme of the book is around native wisdom, the role of elders in society, the need for initiation rites for the adolescence, and there are some very valuable insights into these topics from Indigenous societies which modern societies can pick up from. This is also something that Joseph Campbell used to talk about.
But a major part of the book is the description of the shamanistic rituals and the magic and wisdom of the Dagara. It took me sometime to go from suspending my rational mind to following along with wonderment the mystical rituals of the Dagara. The beautiful relationship that Malidoma shared with his grandfather and the scary rituals associated with death, the perplexing initiation rituals like staring at a tree, jumping through fire hole, swimming under the currents, finding your cave with the help of your animal of choice and being buried alive for a day were all grippingly narrated. Here my little reading of Joseph Campbell and listening to his lectures helped tremendously as I started looking for allegorical meanings for the rituals instead of their literal ones.
Just a minor complaint - What was missing completely from the book was any details on the women in the Dagara society. Other than a few pages about his relationship with his mom, the entire book was about the transformation of boy into manhood and that might very well be the theme of the book. Given that the book is emphasizing the role of communication between different kinds of people, it would've been nice to understand a bit more about the significant other of the Dagara society :)
The book is not an easy read at all, there is lot of pain and agony and perplexing rites which require one to delve into their deeper meaning, but at the end it is well worth one's time as it offers a window into a society which is quite alien to people in the West. Malidoma who is now teaching both in the USA and France is a great example of a "homeless" but not rootless man who is also a bridge between two worlds
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