They are able to go through walls, including very thick ones. Usually, they live in places uninhabited by humans: the foundations of abandoned houses, garbage dumps, water pipes, fallow fields, treetops, the bush… In Mali, not far from Bamako, I once met an elderly Bambara healer who lived in a small hamlet of a few houses in the middle of the bush. He claimed that he was the only person who could live there because the place was owned by spirits. Each time a family had tried to settle there, fires and other such catastrophic events had plagued the settlers forcing them to leave. It was an obvious fact that he only had been accepted by the true owners of the place. These beings are part of the “natural” world, so to speak, and their existence is confirmed by innumerable stories, testimonies, texts, memories. Their ecology is pretty well known and organizes the behavior of humans. Thus, it is advisable not to go out at noon. It is also best to avoid letting blood drop to the ground, or to step over or into a pool of blood. One must also be careful when pouring boiling oil down the drain, lest one should scorch the jnun who might be in the pipes. Hence the phrase Destoor ya s’hab el ard (“Pardon me, owners of the ground!”) uttered before pouring out the oil used for frying[9]… Such is the context in which it may happen that non-human beings cross paths with humans. The Malian healer with whom I got into a rather technical discussion on the ways of healing illnesses caused by the jnun, asked me how I managed with them in Paris, given the fact that, in his opinion “those big cities where people from all over live together, one on top of the other, they must be full of devils!” Thinking back on his remark, many years later, I’m now convinced he was right!

Hadra is a twenty-three-year-old student with a pretty face and an open smile. She wears an elegant wool suit. An alumnus of the University of Rabat where she successfully completed a Masters in History, she is currently enrolled in a Masters program in Political Science in Paris. She looks frightened: she is recovering from yet another episode followed by a month-long stay in hospital. She describes how she collapsed: she was at the University, talking with friends when she suddenly felt a tingling feeling in her fingertips and a warm feeling spread throughout her body, an unpleasant warmth first in her head while her feet felt frozen. No, she couldn’t remember what they had been talking about, except that it wasn’t anything special, “the kind of things you talk about with girlfriends”… Hadra isn’t married. For some time now, people in her family have been wondering about the fact that she is still single, especially given the fact that her younger sister is already the mother of a charming two-year-old little girl. Hadra has consistently rejected the young men she has met at the university as well as the prospective spouses introduced to her by her parents. Before considering marriage, Hadra wants to finish school. This isn’t the first time Hadra has collapsed in this way. When she was fourteen, she suffered from “episodes”, almost on a monthly basis, a kind of convulsive episode from which she would awaken with no memory of what had happened. Epilepsy had been suspected. Later, the episodes stopped, as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared. At the time, the doctors had attributed her episodes to puberty. At age 18, Hadra had collapsed once again. It was during a birthday party for one of her friends. She had been dancing, spinning, singing at the top of her lungs… whirling around with delight. But then she collapsed and remained unconscious for hours. This time, her parents blamed their daughter’s episode on exertion. She had just finished taking final exams for her high school diploma and had studied unreasonably. Six months ago, in Paris, in the courtyard of the University, she didn’t know what to make of it, but the episodes had started again… repeatedly, to the point where the last one took place when she was alone, in the room she rented on the top floor of her building. She had subsequently traveled back to Morocco. This time, her mother took her to see Leila A’isha, the healer. The dark-skinned old woman, originally from the Southern part of the country, interrogated her shells. Then, directing a suspicious gaze towards Hadra, she asked:

- Didn’t you dream about a man?
- Yes, admitted Hadra, I dreamt about a black man!

He had approached her and smelled her. Like a kind of animal… a bit like a dog… In the healer’s mind, there was no doubt: a therapeutic intervention was urgently needed. The old woman set out to organize a Lila for Hadra, a therapeutic “night”. On the designated afternoon, the men had all convened in the courtyard of the rich-looking house located in a posh neighborhood in Casablanca: tall, black men with musical instruments, three-cord violins, tambourines and rattles. They sacrificed a good-sized sheep outside the house. At that moment, Hadra had not felt well, especially when the sacrificer had put some of the sacrificial animal’s blood on her forehead. When night fell, the entire Gnawa troop had arrived: black musicians, mluk masters, psalmists, dancers, seers… The drums had begun their litany, endlessly repeating the same three-beat rhythm. Around midnight, members of the congregation, the healer’s assistants, started to collapse into trance states (tah bel hadra). And when the musicians started their fifth series of rhythms, when they struck up the song of a certain dark-skinned djinn by the name of Sidi Mimoun, it was Hadra’s turn to collapse into a trance. But this time, it was not just an “episode”. She collapsed, how should we say… in an orderly way, miming in her suffering the gestures everyone recognized as those of the djinn, Sidi Mimoun, precisely. She spoke during her ritual episode, with a voice unlike her own. She sang also, melodies and words she had never known before. The old woman and her assistants immediately surrounded her, stroking and supporting her. There was no need for words: the ritual had diagnosed her. Hadra had been taken by a djinn, a melk, in other words, and literally, “an owner”. Afterwards, things had gone back to normal, she had come back to Paris, and now the episodes had started again… The fact was her master needed care; her owner needed to be fed!

Now, let us step back a little. If someone (say a journalist or a researcher for example…) had questioned Hadra before her Lila, had questioned the young woman studying in Paris, sharing the same interests as her fellow students, she most likely would have answered:

Thus we are led to conclude that Hadra’s “identity” — Moroccan certainly, but more precisely member of an ethnic group, of a tribe, and now of a congregation of possessed people —, was revealed solely through the manifestation of phenomena which we must admit as pathological in nature. Here, it is therefore an illness and its treatment that reveals the person’s identity.
But the identity which is most interesting to the people around Hadra is much more that of the dark-skinned djinn than the young woman’s. And this is one of the most surprising paradoxes of identity: Hadra’s most intimate concern, troubling her almost to the point of obsession, is in fact the identity of another, of a demon, a spirit, recognizable only amidst a collective.

We live in a world that has, in a very short time — say in the course of the past twenty years —, both considerably opened up and extraordinarily shrunk. The loss of sovereignty of nation-states, their impossibility to act alone on the international scene, but also the gradual erosion of the status of the very notion of nation-state (who today can seriously claim to be a nationalist?) has led to the… appearance? or should I say the reappearance? or simply the revelation? I’m not sure which is the right term to use here… of solidarities based on identity that have taken everyone by surprise: journalists, politicians, and researchers. These transformations have come about thanks to very perceptible vectors, namely the considerable development of means of communication and information. It has become easy to travel and to communicate, often almost in real time. So much so, that emigration is no longer quite the same as it was some time ago.

It is no longer possible to simply “assimilate” or “integrate”… new arrivals considered severed from their group of origin. Indeed today’s immigrants stay in touch with their nucleus, thanks to the telephone which is now almost free, thanks to the web; they exchange videotapes, photographs, instant messages and webcam conversations with their relatives; they watch their national television channels thanks to satellite TV (I met several people who managed not to learn a word of French after 20 years living in France). Obviously, such opportunities to maintain and preserve family and cultural ties spectacularly reinforce the awareness of belonging to a same people, despite physical distance. It is as though the world were establishing this vision of identity as a project.

Needless to say, such closeness now makes it possible to generalize to the entire world that which up until recently had been the exclusive specialty of certain peoples, diaspora experts, such as the Jews, the Chinese, the Yoruba of Benin and Nigeria or the Armenians. Let me remind you of the extraordinary story of the Man clan, studied by James Woody Watson, whose members claim to be descendants of one single ancestor who lived near Canton six centuries ago. Thousands among them have spread out across the planet, in England, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany. Many no longer speak Chinese and have married spouses from the host country. Yet they are nonetheless carrying out a clan-type family “plan” or “project” (in the sense I mentioned earlier). Within this group, certain marriages are organized according to tradition and economic relations are constantly maintained beyond national borders. Some have returned to the original villages in China, where they are restoring cemeteries and building new temples to their ancestors in order to organize traditional rituals [11]. Other similar examples are the well-documented gatherings around Yoruba and Ibo kings in Nigeria bringing together immigrants, sometimes millionaires, from Western countries of immigration.
Present-day sociologists and political scientists, aware of these phenomena, now speak of the existence of “transnations” or of “long distance nationalism”. And we are in effect witnessing political lobbying of international institutions in favor of group identities that are independent from given states.

Inspired by such terminology, I have described what I termed “long distance attachments” that dynamically reveal their existence through complex psychological processes observable only in the very specialized context of pathology and therapy. Such specific expertise has allowed me to describe in detail the mechanisms around which those identities resistant to distance in time and space are organized. Indeed, it is often illness — especially mental illness — that reminds the individual of his or her attachment to his or her nucleus. Because, when a man from West Africa, for example, presents with symptoms of mental illness in Paris, it often happens that at the end of his treatment, he comes to the realization that he has been captured by the village ancestor who is forcing him, through his illness, to return to his home village in order to perform certain rituals. Thus, the internal compulsion that guarantees identity often results from the action of invisible, non-human, beings: such as spirits, ancestors, or gods… Hence, at the close of this discussion on diasporas, I have come to think that the interesting question isn’t “who am I?” but rather “to whom do I belong”, “to whom”, meaning “to which invisible non human being?”