The Boiling Cauldron (an extract from Ask for the Road: A Memoir)

Summary The very nature of fieldwork constructs the conditions for “exceptional experience.” Learning to inhabit an unfamiliar world and operate outside one’s normal frame of reference makes one vulnerable. The “participant observer” is inevitably changed. This may be especially true when the effort to bridge perspectives involves experimentation of a kind that not only engages the researcher in intense and intimate inquiry but also entangles her as an inextricable part of it. My investigation of the cryptic practice of divination in West Africa was such an entanglement. My memoir, Ask for the Road, is about my fieldwork on divination in Côte d'Ivoire—an investigation that, through the seers’ uncannily accurate readings, quickly turned into an exploration of my haunting past in that country. The diviners’ readings forced me to revisit the demise of my former marriage to an Ivoirian man and its continued hold on me. “The Boiling Cauldron,” a chapter from the memoir, is about a meeting with one of those diviners and a disturbing encounter that helped me decide to take leave of the past once and for all, and claim a new direction.