Yaya as buyei or Shaman Part 4

Chapter Four – Yaya as buyei

 

By Wendy Griffin

 

In addition to being a massage therapist, a midwife and a healer with plants, Clara is a buyei, a Garifuna shaman.  People look for a buyei when they get sick and they think the cause of the illness are the spirits of the ancestors called “gubida” in Garifuna.  Sometimes the “gubida” speak in dreams or reveal themselves by day, such as a woman who said, “I saw my mother clearly.”  For these illnesses caused by gubida, Western medicine prescribed by doctors does not work.  “Gubida” do not like hospitals and if a person thinks they have an illness caused by gubida they will leave the hospital.

 

There is not a single illness that is “gubida sickness”.  It can manifest itself through different illnesses.  For example one Garifuna woman in Trujillo went to New York and became blind suddenly.  She promised to do the ceremony dugu for the gubida after visiting a buyei to diagnose her problem, and she was cured. A dugu, the highest ceremony of the Garifunas can take up to three years to do all the steps and can cost up to $10,000. She did the ceremony with all her family and people from the community to ensure the illness would not return.  It is not possible to do this ceremony overseas. It can only be done in Garifuna communities in Central America.

 

Another woman had a swollen leg.  After the woman did the ceremony of chugu, a banquet of traditional Garifuna foods for the ancestors, and special dances for gubida accompanied by drums and maracas held on one day, she was cured.

 

A good buyei will tell you if the illness you has is a hospital type illness or a gubida illness.  Sometimes people do a chugu a one day ceremony with gubida dances and drums, and food for the ancestors when they have a mortal illness like a brain tumor or bone cancer.  Then the person does not get well and dies.

 

Sometimes the Garifunas refuse to do ceremonies for the ancestors.  Mi Garifuna friend Beto Reyes said many Garifunas have died because they did not want to do the ceremonies.

 

Yaya comments to families that are reluctant to have the ceremonies. “We can give to the dead.  We will always have something to eat.  God will give us more.  The dead need us to give to them.  But if someone is stingy, and does not want to give to the dead, the earth will not give to him either.  That person could plant plantains, but will not harvest much, because he is stingy (mezquino).”

 

I asked Clara how she became a buyei.  A buyei is chosen by the spirits.  Before accepting to be buyei, the person dreams of the spirits who are going to help her.  These spirits say their name and ask the person to be a buyei for them.  The spirits that help Yaya are Melchor, Yolanda and Josefa.  They were Garifunas.  Many times in the beginning the person does not want to be a buyei.  They tell the spirits no.  Then the spirits appear to other people in dreams asking that person to intercede for him or her to ask the person to be a buyei for him or her.  The spirits can be Garifunas or other ethnic groups like Black English speakers.  When Clara told the spirits, “No,” the spirits told her, “We are going to take you with us.”  “Me go with dead people, No.”  Finally she had to accept.  Another buyei also said that the spirits made her sick, almost to death, until she accepted to be a buyei for them.

 

Before accepting to be buyei, she dreamed of many things, for example that she was on a mountain where she had never gone.  In the dreams there are difficulties such as having to cross a raging river.  The spirit who will help her, tells her how to get out of these things.  She also dreamed of dead people she did not know.  They lived in houses of pure cohune palm thatch.  Even the walls and the door were made of palm leaves like a dugu house. In Trujillo, the Garifunas used to use cohune palm thatch for their roofs, but in other Garifuna communities like Barranco and Tournabe, the whole house where people lived was made of palm leaf thatch.

 

The spirits possess the person who is going to be buyei.  This possession is called “obeimaha” in Garifuna.  They made Clara walk to different places with her eyes closed, for example beside a river at night or to her grandmother's house. Sometimes the person walks up on the roof beams.  When she comes back to herself, people are watching her, to see if she is hurt, but no she is fine.

 

Until one accepts to be buyei, these spirits bothered her a lot.  For example, Clara said she prepared to go to a wake.  She took a bath, got dressed, left her house, but she had to return home.  The gubida do not like “vaho” the fetid vapor put off by dead people.  They told her when you accept, you will be free to go anywhere.  Now she can go to wakes without being bothered,

 

When one accepts to be a buyei, they ask for a mass in the Catholic church for these people, to call their name during the mass. Then in the house they cook food for the spirits.  There are drums and special gubida songs.  They invite other people to the ceremony.  Other people do the initiation of a buyei during the maximum ceremony of the Garifuna, a dugu.

 

After becoming a buyei, she always has to have a sanctuary for them in her house, called a guli.  There are maracas crossed in the form of the cross, something to drink, usually guaro, a saint's picture, candles, sand, rocks, a piece of cloth dyed with anetto seed (achiote)called a healing cloth and special stick. The orange yellow color of achote is so sacred that only buyeis can have it in their house.  Other people dye clothes achote color for a dugu, but after the dugu they have to bleach the clothes white again, said Doña  Alisa, a Garifuna of Trujillo.

 

To call down the spirits to the guli, she lights two candles. She uses one maraca to call them down.  If they do not come right way, she fills her mouth with guaro and sprays the guaro above the guli.  You can know when the spirit s have appeared because they make the candle flame waver. This technique of spraying liquor in a ceremony has been documented among shaman in West Africa also.

 

Clara says she knows that the family is coming to ask her about a ceremony before they come.  The spirits tell her.  To find out what type of ceremony they want, she asks a series of questions to the candles.  Do you want a mass?  Do you want food?  Do you want Garifuna drums?  When the spirits want to say Yes, they make the candle flame move.  She begins from the cheaper ceremony—a Garifuna mass, and then asks about other ceremonies a chugu (a one day banquet for the ancestors) and a dugu ( a three day ceremony that can cost $10,000 to put on).

 

In addition to telling what ceremony they want, sometimes the gubida ask for special things.  For example for a chugu, the one day ceremony, traditionally they cook a chicken and place it on the table.  But one woman's mother never ate chicken in life.  Yaya told her. Do not get a chicken.  Your mother never ate chicken in life.  The woman got a chicken any way.  The day of the ceremony the chicken ran off and did not come back until after the ceremony.  Yaya took the chicken as part of her pay.

 

Another time when she left her house to go to a chugu, she smelled tobacco.  She asked the hosts of the chugu who smoked?  But she did not smoke during the day only at night before going to bed.  The woman said my mother smoked like that.  Another time, she felt the gubida ask for tobacco, but said the person did not smoke the cigar, just kept it in his mouth.  The woman hosting the chugu said yes my father did that.

 

Sometimes the spirits teach her songs for ceremonies.  Once a relative who had been a buyei appeared in a dream and taught her how to play the maracas to call down the ancestors during a ceremony. Sometimes the spirit helpers of buyeis help people find things that are lost or stolen. 

 

Yaya's children were about 10 or 13 when she was called as a buyei.  In La Ceiba she had a man, but when she came back to Trujillo the spirits chased him away.  They made life impossible for her.  After she came back from La Ceiba she built her own house with 4 bedrooms behind her mother's house.  Her mother said that she wanted Rudy, Clara's oldest son to build his house on the land where Clara's mother's house was.  At first her son built a two story house in front of Yaya's house.  Her sister Zoyla lived there, and Juana Julia and Errol one of her sister's sons. Yaya lived with Mantua in a clay house.  Then her son wanted to make his house bigger.  He wanted to tear down Yaya's clay house.  She said she would accept if he built a house for Mantua and her seven children who until then lived with Yaya.  He did this and she lived in her son's home.

 

She stopped planting.  She made enough from being a midwife and a buyei and selling oranges or food and being a healer.  People paid her for all this.  But now she can not see and has no force in her hands except for very little babies to be a massage therapist.  Now she depends on the money her son Ruddy sends from New York and what Juana Julia earns washing clothes and selling oranges.

 

All the characteristics of a shaman as described in Wikipedia's article on Shamanism are reflected in Yaya's life and work.