attending a zar party
The idea of possession by spirits is the basis of a strange and dramatic set of rituals known as zar, a ceremony in which women who feel themselves to be distressed in some way by spiritual forces are relieved of their symptoms. These symptoms can be physical - usually psychosomatic - or emotional.
Unlike Christian exorcism ceremonies, the spirits are not induced to leave the person possessed. They are accepted as being more or less permanently attached to the person and need only to be appeased in order to stop their mischief-making. This is done by acting out a set of procedures involving wild music, dancing and histrionic behaviour.
Zar parties have been officially forbidden by the Sudanese government since 1992 but are unofficially tolerated. A Dutch friend who took an interest in these things introduced me to a Sudanese woman who hosted these parties regularly. I arranged to attend one with another friend, Vicki.
Houses in Sudan don’t have addresses; streets rarely have names and houses have no numbers. Even when they do, they’re likely to be semi-obliterated. Nagla, the hostess, gave me directions over the phone: a list of reference points and lefts and rights and distances. Armed with these we took a taxi and after a few false turns managed to end up at what seemed to be the right place. But something wasn’t quite right. As we entered the hosh I realised that there was no noise, not a sound, none of the clattering or skirling we had been led to expect of the musical instruments used in a zar, not even the chatter of women preparing for the ceremony. We penetrated further and discovered, in one of the warren of rooms surrounding the hosh, Nagla and her husband Mustapha, placidly scooping up mouthfuls of mulah with handfuls of asida.
The zar had been postponed until the following day, Nagla told us, and invited us to have some of their lunch. In the usual lackadaisical Sudanese way they hadn’t bothered to let us know, but this was a blessing in disguise as it gave us an opportunity to talk with them and get a better understanding of what the zar was all about.
The house was a large one, in traditional single storey style with six units of Nagla’s extended family living in it, each unit having two rooms and a bit of courtyard. The house was very basic with primitive bathroom and kitchen arrangements. Mustapha, who had a law degree, had some lowly administrative job in a commercial organisation and earned just 20,000 dinars a month (about £42). Yet (in another of these financial contradictions which I came across so often in Sudan) their two children attended a private school.
Nagla told us that her grandmother, who also lived in the house, was a sheikha, the name given to a woman with special powers who leads the zar ceremony. Her job is to control the proceedings in such a way that the possessing spirits are identified and pacified.
There are a number of different categories of zar spirit, Nagla explained. Each type has a different set of songs associated with it; each has its own special clothes and other personal items which the possessed person puts on while the spirit is being pacified. As the song of the possessing spirit is played by the sheikha and her band, the affected woman writhes and swoons and acts out her negative feelings, sometimes becoming hysterical in which case the sheikha steps in and calms her down.
The spirits are oddly assorted. There are dervishes, Ethiopians and khawajaat (foreigners). The group of sittat (women), includes Mary the mother of Jesus. The pashawat group is for officials from the Turco-Egyptian period.
After we had eaten, Nagla and Mustapha took us to an outhouse where the paraphernalia used for the zar was stored. There was an assortment of drums, tambourines and maracas, and a set of gourds, used for producing music by putting them in water and tapping them. Sets of clothes hung from nails on the walls: red gowns for the Ethiopian spirit, a white doctor’s cloak for the khawaja, a leopard skin patterned shirt for the leopard, an animal skin for the ox. There were spears for warrior spirits and an umbrella for some kind of dervish spirit. There was also a set of whips which some of the spirits liked to use. “This whip,” said Mustapha picking one up, “I was playing with it one day and a spirit snatched it out of my hand. He was jealous because the whip belonged to him. He didn’t want me to use it. It disappeared, just like that. We didn’t see it for three months. Then one night, we were in bed, and the whip came flying in through the window.”
The next day we went out again and found the zar in full swing in a larger room tucked discreetly away at the back of the compound. The sheikha, swathed in a plain red tobe, sat in a corner with her group of musicians. We went over to greet her. She had a square face, sharp features and a rather steely look in her eyes. As new arrivals we were each covered with a piece of red cloth. A woman in a mauve tobe, cheeks furrowed with three vertical tribal weals, waved an incense brazier under our skirts.
We sat down on the floor with about thirty other women, leaning against peppermint green walls covered with framed Koranic verses written in elaborate Arabic script. Among them a picture of a rose and a candle with the words God loves you underneath stood out incongruously. Under it sat a very fat woman wearing diaphanous green trousers, a tee shirt stretched tightly across large breasts and a long green flimsy tunic. She sat with her legs apart, elbows on thighs, smoking a sheesha pipe and staring fixedly with hooded eyes. Despite her ample curves and see-through clothing she radiated masculinity. Popcorn and sweets were passed round. Someone’s mobile phone rang to the tune of I Wish you a Merry Christmas.
The sheep destined for the zar dinner was brought in for a ceremony before being slaughtered. The terrified animal struggled with its handlers, kicked over the incense brazier and defecated on the floor. Someone covered it with the red material and waved the incense brazier around underneath its belly. A group of women walked round it chanting, each carrying a tumbler with a candle and a bunch of leaves in it. One of the women seized its hind legs, lifted them up and marched it out of the room as if pushing a wheelbarrow. The other women followed in conga formation, swaying and chanting and brandishing their tumblers.
The woman for whom the zar was being held wore a jellabiya of pillar box red for the Ethiopian spirit. She shimmied around the centre of the room as the sheikha rattled her tambourine, singing a harsh, unmelodic song accompanied by three women on drums and another shaking maracas. The woman in red upped the tempo while a woman sitting leaning against the wall started to tremble and cry as if having a fit. The trembling intensified. As she shook and juddered her tobe fell off revealing a body-hugging black dress underneath.
A bowl of blood from the slaughtered sheep was brought in and handed to the woman in red. She continued to dance, holding the bowl of blood with arms outstretched. The bowl was then taken from her and passed round the room. As it passed from hand to hand the women dipped their fingers in it and smeared the blood on their faces, on the musical instruments and on their clothes.
More women from the audience were now joining in the dancing. The woman in the tight black dress was alternately hysterical and quiescent. Beside her a woman looking like an Indian squaw in a tan top with leather patches and bits of long woolly fringe was shaking her trunk and her head. A small thin woman crawled on all fours into the centre of the room, thumping the floor rhythmically with her forearms. The women in red pirouetted faster and faster, arms held above her head, and then fell to the ground in convulsions. The sheikha stopped singing and crouched down beside her, holding her hand and controlling her movements. The woman in black, now in a kneeling position, was wailing and making frenzied dancing motions with the upper part of her body. The sheikha took a handful of salt from a bowl and scattered it over the participants. Throughout it all the faces of three young children outside filled the window frame.
Suddenly the music stopped and all the weird behaviour along with it. People started chatting and passing drinks round as at any normal social gathering.
Vicki and I went out to the courtyard with Nagla where some of the women were preparing the main meal which would be eaten later. One of them had several strings of intestinal tubes in her hands which she was plaiting deftly into a long pigtail. As she did so she squeezed at regular intervals to expel the little brown pellets of excrement still inside. The plaited intestines were to be cooked with the sheep’s head - a traditional dish prepared whenever a sheep is slaughtered for a special feast, Nagla told us. Another woman was blowing into something resembling a set of bagpipes. With a tube pressed up against her lips she huffed and puffed. A slithery, crumpled, greyish-pink bag at the other end of the tube gradually inflated. “This is a special delicacy,” said Nagla. “The Sudanese like raw lung very much. It will be sliced up and served with liver and stomach. It’s easier to slice if you blow it up and it looks nicer.” The woman gave a final puff, grasped the slimy windpipe in her fist to stop the air escaping and started slicing.
Ten minutes later the women in the band picked up their instruments again. The woman previously dressed in red stepped out into the centre of the floor, this time dressed in the clinical white coat of the khawaja spirit and smoking a cigarette. She started to dance to a slower rhythm, inhaling deeply on the cigarette, in a trance-like state. The woman in black writhed on the floor like a heap of shuddering black blubber. Nagla joined in. She was dressed like a princess with a bead tiara running through her long black hair, a long magenta skirt and a gauzy silver-edged magenta shawl. As she tossed her head to the rhythm of the band her hair broke loose, flying wild. An old woman, short, skinny and stiff as a ramrod, took to the floor, strutting aggressively. She held two cigarettes between her lips and puffed on them in time to the music. The women at the side made ululating sounds from time to time. The incense was passed round constantly and wafted over all the onlookers.
The body language of the women, especially those who were smoking, was becoming increasingly masculine. They lengthened their stride and swaggered and leered suggestively, though at no one in particular. Samia, the butch-looking woman who had been smoking the sheesha, got up to take part in the ox dance, stamping heavily and hurling herself backwards against the wall. A woman wearing white trousers with gold gaiters strapped round her calves did likewise.
The music stopped for a second time and everything returned abruptly to normal. A big plastic pail of date juice appeared. It was poured into mugs and handed round. Plates of the raw offal we had seen being prepared followed, garnished with lemon and shatta and salt. Vicki and I went with Nagla to her private quarters where Mustapha was lolling on an angaraib watching television. Samia, the woman in green, joined us. She seemed to have undergone a personality change, with no trace left of the previous masculine characteristics.
I asked Nagla about the masculine behaviour of the participants. Were they lesbians?
“No,” she said. “Most of the zar spirits are male and the women are acting like the spirit that possesses them. It’s his behaviour.”
“And what was wrong with the woman in red?”
“She had a sickness caused by the zar spirits. She was sick for a year. She went to many doctors but they couldn’t cure her. She went to some sheikhs and they couldn’t cure her either. So one of the sheikhs told her to make a zar party.”
“What kind of illness? What were the symptoms?”
“Her heart beating very fast, shivering, fainting. And she was always feeling that she was going to die. But now after the zar she will be better.”
“What about the salt that the sheikha kept scattering around?” asked Vicki. “What was that for?”
“It’s to calm the Ethiopian spirit,” said Nagla. “He likes salt. We have to give the spirits the kind of food and drink that they like, and cigarettes if they want.”
I asked about the sheikha, how she had become a sheikha.
“She had a zar spirit when she was very young, she had it many times, so she was selected to be a sheikha. She was able to treat people, she has the power to control spirits.”
The zar still had another few hours to go but Vicki and I had to move on. In any case we wanted to avoid the main meal as we were feeling squeamish about the sheep which we had seen being led to the slaughter. We thanked the sheikha and said goodbye to the women. They all begged us to come again.
Unlike Christian exorcism ceremonies, the spirits are not induced to leave the person possessed. They are accepted as being more or less permanently attached to the person and need only to be appeased in order to stop their mischief-making. This is done by acting out a set of procedures involving wild music, dancing and histrionic behaviour.
Zar parties have been officially forbidden by the Sudanese government since 1992 but are unofficially tolerated. A Dutch friend who took an interest in these things introduced me to a Sudanese woman who hosted these parties regularly. I arranged to attend one with another friend, Vicki.
Houses in Sudan don’t have addresses; streets rarely have names and houses have no numbers. Even when they do, they’re likely to be semi-obliterated. Nagla, the hostess, gave me directions over the phone: a list of reference points and lefts and rights and distances. Armed with these we took a taxi and after a few false turns managed to end up at what seemed to be the right place. But something wasn’t quite right. As we entered the hosh I realised that there was no noise, not a sound, none of the clattering or skirling we had been led to expect of the musical instruments used in a zar, not even the chatter of women preparing for the ceremony. We penetrated further and discovered, in one of the warren of rooms surrounding the hosh, Nagla and her husband Mustapha, placidly scooping up mouthfuls of mulah with handfuls of asida.
The zar had been postponed until the following day, Nagla told us, and invited us to have some of their lunch. In the usual lackadaisical Sudanese way they hadn’t bothered to let us know, but this was a blessing in disguise as it gave us an opportunity to talk with them and get a better understanding of what the zar was all about.
The house was a large one, in traditional single storey style with six units of Nagla’s extended family living in it, each unit having two rooms and a bit of courtyard. The house was very basic with primitive bathroom and kitchen arrangements. Mustapha, who had a law degree, had some lowly administrative job in a commercial organisation and earned just 20,000 dinars a month (about £42). Yet (in another of these financial contradictions which I came across so often in Sudan) their two children attended a private school.
Nagla told us that her grandmother, who also lived in the house, was a sheikha, the name given to a woman with special powers who leads the zar ceremony. Her job is to control the proceedings in such a way that the possessing spirits are identified and pacified.
There are a number of different categories of zar spirit, Nagla explained. Each type has a different set of songs associated with it; each has its own special clothes and other personal items which the possessed person puts on while the spirit is being pacified. As the song of the possessing spirit is played by the sheikha and her band, the affected woman writhes and swoons and acts out her negative feelings, sometimes becoming hysterical in which case the sheikha steps in and calms her down.
The spirits are oddly assorted. There are dervishes, Ethiopians and khawajaat (foreigners). The group of sittat (women), includes Mary the mother of Jesus. The pashawat group is for officials from the Turco-Egyptian period.
After we had eaten, Nagla and Mustapha took us to an outhouse where the paraphernalia used for the zar was stored. There was an assortment of drums, tambourines and maracas, and a set of gourds, used for producing music by putting them in water and tapping them. Sets of clothes hung from nails on the walls: red gowns for the Ethiopian spirit, a white doctor’s cloak for the khawaja, a leopard skin patterned shirt for the leopard, an animal skin for the ox. There were spears for warrior spirits and an umbrella for some kind of dervish spirit. There was also a set of whips which some of the spirits liked to use. “This whip,” said Mustapha picking one up, “I was playing with it one day and a spirit snatched it out of my hand. He was jealous because the whip belonged to him. He didn’t want me to use it. It disappeared, just like that. We didn’t see it for three months. Then one night, we were in bed, and the whip came flying in through the window.”
The next day we went out again and found the zar in full swing in a larger room tucked discreetly away at the back of the compound. The sheikha, swathed in a plain red tobe, sat in a corner with her group of musicians. We went over to greet her. She had a square face, sharp features and a rather steely look in her eyes. As new arrivals we were each covered with a piece of red cloth. A woman in a mauve tobe, cheeks furrowed with three vertical tribal weals, waved an incense brazier under our skirts.
We sat down on the floor with about thirty other women, leaning against peppermint green walls covered with framed Koranic verses written in elaborate Arabic script. Among them a picture of a rose and a candle with the words God loves you underneath stood out incongruously. Under it sat a very fat woman wearing diaphanous green trousers, a tee shirt stretched tightly across large breasts and a long green flimsy tunic. She sat with her legs apart, elbows on thighs, smoking a sheesha pipe and staring fixedly with hooded eyes. Despite her ample curves and see-through clothing she radiated masculinity. Popcorn and sweets were passed round. Someone’s mobile phone rang to the tune of I Wish you a Merry Christmas.
The sheep destined for the zar dinner was brought in for a ceremony before being slaughtered. The terrified animal struggled with its handlers, kicked over the incense brazier and defecated on the floor. Someone covered it with the red material and waved the incense brazier around underneath its belly. A group of women walked round it chanting, each carrying a tumbler with a candle and a bunch of leaves in it. One of the women seized its hind legs, lifted them up and marched it out of the room as if pushing a wheelbarrow. The other women followed in conga formation, swaying and chanting and brandishing their tumblers.
The woman for whom the zar was being held wore a jellabiya of pillar box red for the Ethiopian spirit. She shimmied around the centre of the room as the sheikha rattled her tambourine, singing a harsh, unmelodic song accompanied by three women on drums and another shaking maracas. The woman in red upped the tempo while a woman sitting leaning against the wall started to tremble and cry as if having a fit. The trembling intensified. As she shook and juddered her tobe fell off revealing a body-hugging black dress underneath.
A bowl of blood from the slaughtered sheep was brought in and handed to the woman in red. She continued to dance, holding the bowl of blood with arms outstretched. The bowl was then taken from her and passed round the room. As it passed from hand to hand the women dipped their fingers in it and smeared the blood on their faces, on the musical instruments and on their clothes.
More women from the audience were now joining in the dancing. The woman in the tight black dress was alternately hysterical and quiescent. Beside her a woman looking like an Indian squaw in a tan top with leather patches and bits of long woolly fringe was shaking her trunk and her head. A small thin woman crawled on all fours into the centre of the room, thumping the floor rhythmically with her forearms. The women in red pirouetted faster and faster, arms held above her head, and then fell to the ground in convulsions. The sheikha stopped singing and crouched down beside her, holding her hand and controlling her movements. The woman in black, now in a kneeling position, was wailing and making frenzied dancing motions with the upper part of her body. The sheikha took a handful of salt from a bowl and scattered it over the participants. Throughout it all the faces of three young children outside filled the window frame.
Suddenly the music stopped and all the weird behaviour along with it. People started chatting and passing drinks round as at any normal social gathering.
Vicki and I went out to the courtyard with Nagla where some of the women were preparing the main meal which would be eaten later. One of them had several strings of intestinal tubes in her hands which she was plaiting deftly into a long pigtail. As she did so she squeezed at regular intervals to expel the little brown pellets of excrement still inside. The plaited intestines were to be cooked with the sheep’s head - a traditional dish prepared whenever a sheep is slaughtered for a special feast, Nagla told us. Another woman was blowing into something resembling a set of bagpipes. With a tube pressed up against her lips she huffed and puffed. A slithery, crumpled, greyish-pink bag at the other end of the tube gradually inflated. “This is a special delicacy,” said Nagla. “The Sudanese like raw lung very much. It will be sliced up and served with liver and stomach. It’s easier to slice if you blow it up and it looks nicer.” The woman gave a final puff, grasped the slimy windpipe in her fist to stop the air escaping and started slicing.
Ten minutes later the women in the band picked up their instruments again. The woman previously dressed in red stepped out into the centre of the floor, this time dressed in the clinical white coat of the khawaja spirit and smoking a cigarette. She started to dance to a slower rhythm, inhaling deeply on the cigarette, in a trance-like state. The woman in black writhed on the floor like a heap of shuddering black blubber. Nagla joined in. She was dressed like a princess with a bead tiara running through her long black hair, a long magenta skirt and a gauzy silver-edged magenta shawl. As she tossed her head to the rhythm of the band her hair broke loose, flying wild. An old woman, short, skinny and stiff as a ramrod, took to the floor, strutting aggressively. She held two cigarettes between her lips and puffed on them in time to the music. The women at the side made ululating sounds from time to time. The incense was passed round constantly and wafted over all the onlookers.
The body language of the women, especially those who were smoking, was becoming increasingly masculine. They lengthened their stride and swaggered and leered suggestively, though at no one in particular. Samia, the butch-looking woman who had been smoking the sheesha, got up to take part in the ox dance, stamping heavily and hurling herself backwards against the wall. A woman wearing white trousers with gold gaiters strapped round her calves did likewise.
The music stopped for a second time and everything returned abruptly to normal. A big plastic pail of date juice appeared. It was poured into mugs and handed round. Plates of the raw offal we had seen being prepared followed, garnished with lemon and shatta and salt. Vicki and I went with Nagla to her private quarters where Mustapha was lolling on an angaraib watching television. Samia, the woman in green, joined us. She seemed to have undergone a personality change, with no trace left of the previous masculine characteristics.
I asked Nagla about the masculine behaviour of the participants. Were they lesbians?
“No,” she said. “Most of the zar spirits are male and the women are acting like the spirit that possesses them. It’s his behaviour.”
“And what was wrong with the woman in red?”
“She had a sickness caused by the zar spirits. She was sick for a year. She went to many doctors but they couldn’t cure her. She went to some sheikhs and they couldn’t cure her either. So one of the sheikhs told her to make a zar party.”
“What kind of illness? What were the symptoms?”
“Her heart beating very fast, shivering, fainting. And she was always feeling that she was going to die. But now after the zar she will be better.”
“What about the salt that the sheikha kept scattering around?” asked Vicki. “What was that for?”
“It’s to calm the Ethiopian spirit,” said Nagla. “He likes salt. We have to give the spirits the kind of food and drink that they like, and cigarettes if they want.”
I asked about the sheikha, how she had become a sheikha.
“She had a zar spirit when she was very young, she had it many times, so she was selected to be a sheikha. She was able to treat people, she has the power to control spirits.”
The zar still had another few hours to go but Vicki and I had to move on. In any case we wanted to avoid the main meal as we were feeling squeamish about the sheep which we had seen being led to the slaughter. We thanked the sheikha and said goodbye to the women. They all begged us to come again.
