The Light That Was Taken
A discovery in Nigeria — and a spiritual rebirth
Dibia
noun
noun: dibia; plural noun: ndi dibia
Master of knowledge and wisdom
Anglicized: Obeah, herbalist, shaman.
Opposite: Ofeke.
This is what my mother told me
There were two people at the dining table that night: I was sitting, the other standing, watching. My mother thought she should tell the stander to go to bed and leave me to my writing. But the stander was bodiless, a mere silhouette. My mother rubbed her eyes because, her goodness, she must be dreaming! Her steps became air on air. The form remained oblivious to her advancing. It stayed as engrossed in my work as I was. But it vanished when my mother howled my name. She sounded like an unrhythmic symphony of carillons. Her growl was thick like a nimbostratus cloud with veins of lightning. Her vision coals were rounder and redder. The color that should have been on her skin pooled beside her feet. Her incanting stings ran through me, searching for what-I-don’t-know. She staggered over, silently, and left.
This is what I did
May 2022, I returned to Nigeria, ducked into Igboland, and visited the best dibia alive, Prof. Emeritus J. A. Umeh Ogbuefi Eze-Ekwueme. I was dumbstruck when, while reading his book, After God is Dibia, I recognized some aspects of Igbo spirituality that I thought I had invented in my own book, All Shades of Iberibe. For instance, “This Man” is a fictional story told from a ghost’s point of view as he watched his funeral. I wrote it in 2020. I read Umeh’s books in 2021. And I met Lili, my sister’s friend, in 2022. Lili recounted how she watched her bleeding body, her crying husband begging God not to take his wife, her crying infant, and the nurses screaming at her not to close her eyes. Lili then saw her late mother who ordered her to go back. Lili fell into a tornado and twirled into her bleeding body. Lili’s near-death experience mirrors “This Man.”
It’s unthinkable that I knew esoteric details about Igbo spirituality or any spirituality before. I was baptized Roman Catholic. I never stepped foot in any shrine. I bound and cast ọgbanje and Mami Wota spirits, witches, and wizards. I covered myself in the blood of Jesus. Yet, I undoubtedly came upon some truths of the occult in my writings.
This is what the colonizers did
They came into Igboland, like the devil, to kill, steal, and destroy. I don’t know when they arrived, and I don’t care. Colonization starts with the missionaries for a reason. Religion connects a human body to its spirit, its source of light. Once that light is put out, the body is flung into darkness. In that darkness, we scrambled for the dangling light. Bodies bumped into bodies while we caught and lost this slippery shine. We bled, naked, cold, and tired from reaching for light. Then the colonizers stepped in to “enlighten” us, dropping untruths on our sore wounds. Untruths too charming to refuse despite how glaringly false they were. Untruths that stung our scraped raw skins. They said A is for Apple. We said, Yes, Lord and Master, A is for Apple, never mind that we had never seen an apple.
The colonizer destroyed everything my people held as truth. They stripped our senses to skinless pulsating things and dressed them in rags. They told us that our gods were evil and theirs was good. That Idemmili, the daughter of God, is pure evil, but Jesus, the son of God, is pure good. Their quest to dominate blinded them from seeing the similarities between Igbo Spirituality and Christianity. We make the sign of the cross the same way. We both keep carvings of the holy ones. We venerate our ancestors; they venerate their saints. We entreat deities; they entreat archangels. Our Dibia and their Jesus are alike: both are masters of knowledge and wisdom, both are miracle workers, both are teachers, both speak in parables. The colonizers saw the potency of our “diabolic” Ikenga, and that is why they seized them. Where they kept our Ikenga no one can tell. And, no, please, they are not in museums.
Life is sacred in Igboland. Even our deities eat fowls, goats at most, never humans. Igbos did not understand this new religion whose salvation involved the heinous killing of a man, this religion that seemed to glory in this man’s hanging corpse! But, in accordance with Igbo live-and-let-live nature, Igbos, ndi dibia included, welcomed Christians. Igbos, ndi dibia included, sent their children to school. During Christian harvest and bazaar, Igbos, ndi dibia included, sent okproko, dry fish, yam, cocoyam, etc. to the missionaries. But during Dibia’s ita atụ, a public celebration of the gift of their divination, the missionaries closed their doors and windows. And in their hot huts, they encouraged their converts not to attend that “fetish festival.” Soon, even Igbo religion became “fetish.”
The colonizers left in 1960, leaving their mouths in my country but taking their digestive tract to theirs. We were hollowed out like pumpkins, walking unenlightened, not knowing who we were or where we should head. Up until today, Igbos suffer mental enslavement. Igbos despise Igbo spirituality. They burn shrines. They ostracize ndi dibia and their followers. In Nollywood, in this age of enlightenment, when a pastor shoves the Bible at a dibia, the dibia falls and foams in the mouth. Ha! They should crawl out of those screens and try it in real life.
This is who I am
I am the decisions of my past lives. (We all are.) I am a spirit experiencing humanness again. (We all are.) In this life, I am Kasimma; daughter of the Most-High God; hardcore placard-carrying feminist; writer; mother; dibia. I dangled between delight and dread when Prof. Umeh, in May, cast his ugili divination strings, and Afa declared me Dibia. Delight because wuuuat! Dread because this news found me recuperating from trauma. Therefore, every leftover resentment chained on my wet, broken heart was to be vomited at once. During my initiation to dibia(hood), I was given the physical ọfọ, the symbol of justice and fairness. This physical ọfọ is an outward sign of an inward divine endowment and favour. It is a reminder to ndi dibia to be sparkling monoliths of integrity and compassion in this life and subsequent others, to keep their hands clean for their own good.
I am not alone. I am surrounded by good spirits. (We all are.) These spirits scooped me from the waters of post-traumatic stress disorder in which I lay breathless after my violent marriage. How could I face myself, let alone face somebody else? I stank as if my body and spirit were wrapped in whorls and whorls of yellow excreta just as an anaconda wraps its prey. But these spirits soaked me in our mother, Idemmili: the cleanser, the purifier. They washed from me the shame, weakness, and fear that misogynists insisted were mine. They towelled me, these spirits. And, like storks, They flew me to the United States where They isolated me. They healed and bandaged every scar, every single blow, every bone my ex-husband broke. They shaved the insides of my skull and pumped in a sensible brain empowered for this phase of my life: this me, who can voice my victimhood, who has forgiven, who is no longer resentful. I am nothing without Them, these spirits. E jirọ anya eji afụ mmụọ afụ mmadụ. But sometimes, I hear Them, feel Them, smell Them. I aspire to physically touch and see Them someday.
I am ọkala mmụọ, ọkala mmadụ: half-spirit, half-human. (We all are.) I do not set alarms. I tell Them when to wake me and They do. Should I ignore Them, as we sometimes reset our alarms and return to sleep, They will holler into my physical ears. I flap out of my bed like a fleeing hen. I will be alone in my room, but sure (as sure as I am that my eyes are brown) that someone else screamed.
Dibia
I was a dibia before I swirled, spun, and sliced into the growing thing swimming in my mother’s womb. The colonizers did a grave injustice to Igbos and Igbo spirituality. But ndi dibia uphold strictly that nwa mmụọ egbukwana nwa mmadụ; nwa mmadụ egbuna nwa mmụọ. The spirit child should not kill the human child, the human child should not kill the spirit child. Therefore, I am not out to give it back to the colonizers. Slander is an abuse to the ọfọ in my hand. The colonizers have already gotten their reward anyway.
Stories malign and stories align. I seek to realign Igbos to the light that colonization took from them; to tell the stories of who we are (A is for akpụ), not who they say we are (A is for apple); to affirm that we (colonizer and colonized) all come from the same God in whom we live and move and have our being.
My mother did see a spirit that night. It might have been me, watching the possessing spirit use my body, or it might have been the spirit dictating to me. My best friend has seen Them, too, also in the dead of night. I was sitting on a couch a few feet behind her chair. The ratatatatap from my keyboard confirmed that I was writing, not reading. She turned to ask me something. But she saw a headless person dressed in my brown cotton nightgown, seated on my chair, tapping on my laptop. No matter how many times she blinked, it was still me, headless. She told me this some months later, after I shared what my mother saw. She told me how shaken she was that night and how she controlled herself from screaming, assuring herself that her eyes were playing tricks on her. But they were not. When I write, I am unaware of what happens in the physical realm because I am not there. I am always with my character. Were it not for these sightings, I would not know what happens to my body when the
spirit takes charge. This particular spirit is called mmụọ uzi: the etymology of the word “muse”. They are responsible for my writing about esoteric Igbo rituals with spotless accuracy. They are responsible for every work of art and science produced in this plane of duality.
There are three things that last. Faith (the utmost belief that God knows what She is doing), hope (that tomorrow is sweeter than today’s unfunny ice, as sharp as knives), love (that despite people’s flaws or beliefs, they are children of God just as I). This is what the spirits taught me during my isolation. This is a scintilla of what being a dibia entails.
The only difference between Dibia (master of knowledge and wisdom) and Ofeke (everyone else) is “master.” Ofeke have God’s knowledge and wisdom ingrained in them before they took flesh and dwelt amongst us. It is called instincts. We are droplets of God. A droplet of blood has the same properties as the entire blood in its host body. The All is in All. Should we realize exactly how powerful we are as human beings, exactly how close we are to the creator, we’d be ashamed of how we have conducted ourselves so far.
This is what I know
I know that there is only one God and different ways of worshiping Her. We are all subject to the laws of the universe. It is folly to think of yourself or your religion as better than another. Onweghi onye fụrụ Chukwu anya di ndụ. Nobody who has seen God is alive. How then can we tell if God is black or white or male or female? It is outright madness to fight and kill because of whose version of God is better.
I know that there is a difference between religion and spirituality. And the world will be better if we lean more toward the latter than the former.
I know that Ostracism is unjust. It does not matter what grade of clothes hang in that closet; closeting is suffocating. Even unaired clothes mildew.
This is what I ask
That we stop religious prejudice. Mind your own salvation! I chọrọ ima ihe di n’ọzọ, i je chie ọzọ. (Hosea 4: 6.6). If you know not and choose to keep knowing not, fine. But do not demonize others. Do not let ignorance stack negative karma in this life and in your next life. Onye ajụjụ adighi efu uzọ. (Ask and you shall receive…). I ask that we stop prejudice. Period.
Now…
This stuffy closet is behind me. I am no longer ashamed of my journey from domestic violence. My scars are proof that I made it out, stronger. I am no longer ashamed to say I am no longer a Christian. I no longer bind and cast ọgbanje, for how can one bind and cast oneself? I no longer bind and cast Mami Wota spirits, witches, and wizards, because, what’s my own with them? I still visit Church occasionally. I still read the Bible. I am still a dibia, a daughter of the Most-High God, a writer, a hardcore placard-carrying feminist, a mother.
Kasimma means most beautiful. Every religion is kasimma. There is no contest in being, in being a being. Humans are beings before any other label. All humans are kasimma. Everything under Ms. Sun, Sun, Ms. Golden Sun, is kasimma.
I am Kasimma. ▩