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Remembering Our Purpose
 An Interview with Malidoma Somé 

By Sarah van Gilder

Malidoma: Growth itself makes one forget about who one is. So initiation is something that is designed to help one remember one’s origin and the very purpose of one’s occurrence on this side of reality — that is to say, why one was born. This is why initiation is especially magical.

So a person who is not initiated is considered a child, no matter how old that person is, because that person will not be able to recall his or her purpose. Without initiation, the bridge between youth and adulthood can never be crossed, and a person’s heart is open to anything to being shot down by any kind of energy going around. In the village to not be initiated is to be a non-person.

Sarah: Can you say more about the sense of interconnectedness that exists in your village?

Malidoma: When you live as one family for a long time, you come to feel that there is a kind of connection between individuals that is not just physical or parental or relational, but is a connection at the level of soul.

When I go home, things get pointed out to me about myself that I thought were totally hidden. But the elders, through their divinational process, can point to things I did that require me to go through a cleansing ritual. And this tells me that when people are linked together at that level, geography is no longer an issue.

What’s good about this is that the individual never feels isolated from the rest of the community. And nobody is higher than anybody else, so there is no class.

There is something very interesting about a classless society; it’s one that allows itself to be lead by the spirit. There is a greater tendency to assist those who are older and slower, and it prevents people from feeling cut off or left out or off track.

One of the things I have been able to communicate to my elders that has lead to a great deal of disgust on their part, is the fact that there are homeless people in this country. To them it is impossible that somebody could be homeless. They’re surprised and appalled because they don’t understand what happens when the meaning of community is not carried out.

Sarah: What do you think the West can learn from the kind of community you’ve been describing?

Malidoma: In the West, what I’ve noticed is that what is called a community is more a conglomeration of individuals who are so self-centered and isolated that there is a kind of suspicion of the other, simply because there isn’t enough knowledge of the other to remove that suspicion. So trust then becomes the challenge to actual community.

It is a very tricky thing, because I think that capitalism encourages this kind of isolation as a good environment for consumerism. And there is a relationship between a consumer society and these individuals who are defined by isolation from one another, and private space as well as private ownership.

The community I am talking about is one in which respect for the person is based upon that person’s irreplaceable position in the world. To live with the knowledge that an approved project was the reason for one’s birth commands respect for the sacred. In the absence of initiation as a remembering and transforming experience, the modern world has created career counseling.