The ritual we practice in this space is not our own work. It is a variation on a practice that has been passed down through a number of facilitators and groups, in a lineage that traces back to the work of Sobonfu Somé and Malidoma Patrice Somé, and the culture of the Dagara people to which they both belonged. The Dagara are an Afro-Indigenous community living at the convergence of Burkina Faso, Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire.
When a group of mostly European folks living in Berlin are offering a practice that originates in an Afro-indigenous community, it’s natural and important to ask questions about why. Our scenes are filled with examples of cultural appropriation: white and/or European people offering distorted versions of indigenous rituals, traditional medicines and other cultural practices, without the knowledge or consent of the people who created them—stolen. These practices are often abused for profit (money, cultural capital, social status) by the people who have taken them. We don’t pretend that this work is ours, and we don’t do it for money.
So, how did this ritual come to us? Malidoma Patrice Somé and Sobonfu Somé were assigned by their ancestors the task of teaching the people of colonising countries (aka. ‘the West’) about Dagara culture—and especially Dagara ritual practice—in order to correct what they viewed as huge deficiencies in the way that Western culture deals with intimacy, grief, community and spirituality. Both wrote multiple excellent books and taught workshops & seminars throughout their lives, mostly on Turtle Island (or so-called US). You can read more about this assignment of theirs in Malidoma’s autobiography, Of Water and Spirit.
We learned about this ritual when hugo/huga x tibiriçá offered it in Berlin in 2023. hugo/huga had received it from Parneet Chopan at the Myzelium Projekt in Brandenburg, and was moved and inspired to pay it forward (as we were in turn). We don’t know all the steps between Parneet and the Somés, but we’re confident that it was a student of theirs in the US who brought a version of this ritual to Europe.
Through reading the many rituals described in Sobunfu and Malidoma’s books, we’re sure that our ritual is not in any sense a copy or an attempt to replicate something that exists (or did exist) in the Dagara context. The ritual we offer emerged organically from an interaction between these teachings and various partitioners who have passed them on, each of which made changes to fit the needs of their communities. And this makes sense: Sobonfu apparently said to a German student of hers, ‘you mustn’t do this exactly the way I did it... you have to adapt it to your context.’
We are naturally very wary of cultural appropriation. At the same time, it would seem disrespectful of Malidoma, Sobunfu and their ancestors to disregard the stated ambition to influence and change the lives of people outside of Dagara community by increasing their participation in communal and ritual practices.
We also believe that if folks living in our context increase our capacity to feel and share powerful emotions like grief in collective setting, we may over time reduce the propensity towards control, domination and violence that was and is integral to the process of colonisation.
If you have any questions about the practice, about us, or anything else that would help you to decide if you’d like to attend the ritual, you can email us at: grief-ritual-collective@googlegroups.com. We’re always open to reflections, questions and feedback from outside the collective. We’re also open to you getting involved in the collective, if you want to influence or shape what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it.