The Kibuki film began as an experiment. I was on a language study in Zanzibar, when I met Asha, a spirit healer and the leader of a ring of dancers who use trance and hypnosis to let go of their bodies, to move with inhuman rhythms. The Kibuki spirits are a pantheon of mystical creatures who enter these dancers, climb into their heads, and possess them.
I was so fascinated with the Kibuki that I began hanging around Asha’s compound during the slow hours between ritual dances. On a tropical afternoon, while a lazy fan barely swayed the mosquito netting in the children’s bedroom where I was napping, Asha offered to do a treatment on me. She brought her assistants into the room, and they gathered around me in a circle. They began chanting and clapping and someone lit incense with strangest scent I’ve ever smelled. Asha took hold of the top of my head and moved my body in a circle. I choked and gasped and I started to tremble. The blood rushed to my head and I screamed. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground. Someone splashed water on me. I was still shaking and I had the warmest feeling, like some dream syrup drug had pumped through all my veins.
Asha told me that I was possessed with a spirit, and that I should return to Zanzibar for a full Kibuki treatment. Once I was trained in the trance, I could join the other dancers in the ring. My interest in the Kibuki was personal. I have a history of depression and anxiety, and I was attracted to the idea of a mood as a possessing demon.
I spent sixteen months in Zanzibar, from December of 2010 to April of 2012. I became fluent in Swahili and worked with a local crew to collect interviews and film ritual treatments. Though I spent time with the Kibuki group, I was hesitant to go through the initiation. I was afraid to lose control.
I filmed my own process of learning a different culture, the sense of disorientation that comes when you move from one way of thinking to another. I was always an outsider in Zanzibar. Some beliefs and practices remain opaque.
Our small crew was led by my filming partner and fixer, a young man whom I knew from previous visits to Zanzibar. Six months into the project, he was killed, suddenly, in a motorcycle accident. Because the crew had been filming secret rituals, some vocal members of the community blamed his death on angry spirits. The project was caught in the controversy. Asha and her healing ring came forward in support of the project, and so did a community leader named Lutfiya, who helped our crew to rebuild networks and to restructure the film to include the story of the tragedy and the surrounding gossip.
I became deeply involved in the Kibuki practice through this event, eventually using the ritualistic and meditative qualities of the trance to mediate my own grieving process. This story makes the narrative structure of the film and presents the viewer with an entry point into the practice, a lens through which to cross the boundary between our cultures.
The presence of the camera and the power dynamic between a Western filmmaker and an indigenous community comprise a vital thread in this narrative. The camera appears in the film, as does other technology that undermines a stereotype that the Kibuki is a “traditional”, “native”, and thereby un-empowered space. In the film’s footage, the Kibuki healers comment on the business prospects of engaging white clients, and lend other insights that express their views on cross-cultural interaction within the scope of the film and in the larger context of international tourism.
The Kibuki film treats possession as a many-sided object. You can only see part of it at one time; its shape and meaning shift with changes of light and shadow. After learning the practice and participating in it, I still cannot understand the meaning of possession. I both believe in the Kibuki spirits and I don’t. The film is about that ambivalence. It is a lyrical poem that circles around the invisible creatures, spins the audience into a web, but it doesn’t offer any answers. It is for the beauty of the mystery.
