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6. Guides for the Perplexed
- University of Virginia Press
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i was in matanzas, cuba, in an urban neighborhood of cement row-houses nearly ?ush against the narrow street. We had been through this part of the city several times, racing in Lied’s wired-together East German Lada, but I knew I would never be able to >nd my way in—or out—on my own. There were so many turns down streets solidly lined with identical one-story buildings , and my eyes could not pick out the distinctions that residents would recognize instantly. There were resorts a dozen miles outside the city—“sun, sand, blue-green water and everything that goes with it,” the Lonely Planet guidebook proclaimed—but Matanzas itself was, as the guide also pronounced, barely worth a visit. We got out of the car: Joe Murphy, an American expert in Santeria, the Afro-Cuban religion (and a professor at my university ); Maria Galban, a respected elder in the religion; Elton, an • 143 S I X Guides for the Perplexed English teacher who was translating for us; and Lied, our driver and guide and the glue of this group. Two hours later, we were in a room >lled with chanting santeras and the complex rhythms of the bata drums. A man was writhing as a spirit, an orisha, took possession of him, as though divinity were much too large for a human. It was a scene that William Butler Yeats might have described in “Leda and the Swan,” as the god Zeus overpowers Leda, mother of Helen. Yeats’s vision is not our schoolbook Greek romance. No, when divinity and a human meet, the woman is “so caught up, / So mastered by the brute blood of the air.” The man in the small room in Matanzas was in the process of being mastered. The spirit danced with the community for forty->ve minutes or so, playing tricks (giving children some of the money that had been collected and throwing other coins out into the street), greeting various santeros, whispering messages, and even mocking the two North Americans who stood and observed, shoving his cigar into the mouth of one before dancing o=. When Joseph Murphy writes of a bembe such as this one in his in?uential study Santeria: African Spirits in America, he describes it as “the heart of the religion . . . a harmony of the human and the divine in dance and joy.”1 How did we get to this “heart” when we were in Cuba? How does one travel to the “inside”? Of course, the only way to get “there” is with guides: Maria, above all, and also Lied, and Elton, and Murphy. Our usual view is that guides can get us inside, that they’re the way to avoid being mere visitors and tourists. As our ship or plane arrives, we engage a guide and then we can get not only to what is genuine but we can get past the dangers, past the discomforts, past the confusions. My view is that, in fact, it’s the guides that lead us to the confusions, dangers, and discomforts. If we manage to get to anything like the “heart” (an overrated organ, it’s been said), it’s not “large and light” but “doorless, crudely lighted” and “darkly, unimaginably tenanted,” as poet James Merrill noted.2 What, then, is a guide that he or she can bring us to such an “inside ”? I believe that we can’t simply go to what is strange, we can 144 • bewildered travel [54.152.77.92] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:18 GMT) only be brought. It takes another (in some form) to lead us to the tenants who we cannot yet imagine. These others are our guides. What are their qualities? The guides that are to lead us past the dangers come in many forms, and we can learn about the guides who lead us into dangers by looking at those more idyllic types. Guides are, >rst, people, locals who walk ahead of us. They speak our language, know what our desires are, and are skilled in getting us to just what is most beautiful and most genuine, while helping us avoid the traps of what is banal or second-rate or risky: the pickpockets, the dangerous sections of town, the cons. The good guide leads, clari>es, enables—or so we think. Our guides are also books, guidebooks. The eighteenth century proliferated books about travels in the Grand Tour that then became a means of...