#Dagara #Healing 🌍🇧🇫 The Indigenous Dagara Medicine Wheel cosmology and five element rituals of the Dagara. The five elements are Fire (red, south), Water (blue, north), Earth (yellow, centre), Mineral (white, west) and Nature (green, east).
Fire 🔥 the original element is seen as a most potent connection to the spirit world. It is puts us back on our spiritual track by consuming that which stands between us and our purpose.
Water 🌊 brings cleansing, reconciliation, purification and peace-making.
Earth 🌍 the central element, is the mother who is inviting us to come home to community and the earth, our true home.
Mineral 🪨 is the elemental energy that invites us to remember, through ritual, who we are and why we are here.
Nature 🌳 asks us to open to transformation in order to realise our true and authentic selves.
About the ArchiveThis is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.
Monster The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member By Sanyika Shakur, a k a Monster Kody Scott 383 pages. The Atlantic Monthly Press. $22.
Eldridge Cleaver once described the fierce, liberating power that comes from penetrating “one’s own little world” with language, the power that comes from “combining the alphabet with the volatile elements” of one’s soul. It’s a power possessed by his own 1968 book, “Soul on Ice,” and it’s also a power radiated with dangerous aplomb by Sanyika Shakur’s disturbing new book, “Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.”
Like Mr. Cleaver, Mr. Shakur, named Kody Scott when he was born in 1963, went to school in jail, teaching himself literature, history and philosophy. His memoir too aspires to tell the story of one man’s painful spiritual journey from violence toward transcendence. It is also a shockingly raw, frightening portrait of gang life in South-Central Los Angeles today, a book that sheds harsh new light on the violence that erupted a year ago after the Rodney G. King verdict.
Mr. Shakur, who was profiled in “Do or Die,” Leon Bing’s 1991 book on gangs, was known on the streets of South-Central as Monster, and as his account here chillingly demonstrates, the moniker was well deserved. Mr. Shakur was initiated into the Eight Trays, a “set” of the Crip gang based in his neighborhood, at the age of 11. His initiation rite included shooting several members of the rival Blood gang. At 13, he says, he robbed a man and stomped his face so badly that the police told bystanders the person responsible for the crime was a “monster.”
At 15 he was arrested for car-jacking and assault. At 16 he was ambushed by rival gang members and shot six times. In the ensuing years, he was convicted of armed robbery, mayhem and possession of an AK-47 assault rifle. He is now serving a seven-year sentence in Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California for beating a crack dealer.
“In a perverted sort of way I enjoyed being Monster Kody,” he writes. “I lived for the power surge of playing God, having the power of life and death in my hands. Nothing I knew of could compare with riding in a car with three other homeboys with guns, knowing that they were as deadly and courageous as I was. To me, at that time in my life, this was power.”
As Mr. Shakur tells it, the war in South-Central is not only between the two major gangs, the Crips and the Bloods (who agreed to a cease-fire after the Rodney King riots), but between different neighborhood “sets” within each gang. Indeed, the No. 1 enemy of Mr. Shakur’s set, the Eight Trays, was another Crip set, the Rollin’ Sixties. During the 80’s, Mr. Shakur recalls, terrible atrocities were committed by both sets. When the Rollin’ Sixties kidnapped, raped and stabbed the sister of an Eight Tray member, the Eight Trays retaliated by ambushing a rising Sixties member. After beating him into submission, Mr. Shakur reports, they chopped off both his arms with machetes, leaving him as “a walking reminder” of their commitment to revenge.
In fact, disfigurement and early death are givens in the gang world of South-Central. This is a world in which you can get killed crossing the street into another set’s territory, a world in which a small infraction, like stepping on someone’s shoes, is regarded as a capital offense. “Regardless of the condition of the shoes,” Mr. Shakur writes, “the underlying factor that usually got you killed was the principle. The principle is respect, a linchpin critical to relations between all people but magnified by 30 in the ghettos and slums across America.”
For youths from fractured homes, like Mr. Shakur’s, one’s set becomes one’s family, one’s religion, one’s profession. Joining a gang in South-Central Los Angeles, Mr. Shakur says, is “the equivalent of growing up in Grosse Pointe, Mich., and going to college: everyone does it.”
To Mr. Shakur, who left school after the sixth grade, gangbanging (engaging in gang activities) was a career that promised the chance for advancement, distinction and glory, and as a teen-ager, he says, he served his set with all the ardor and dedication of an ambitious young “corporate executive planning a hostile takeover.” Eager to achieve the esteemed title O.G. (Original Gangster), he put in long hours on the streets, trying to at least get off a few shots at an enemy gang member, before going home to watch “The Benny Hill Show” on television.
“Only when I had put work in could I feel good that day, otherwise I couldn’t sleep,” he writes. “Work does not always constitute shooting someone, though this is the ultimate. Anything from wallbangin’ (writing your set name on a wall, advertising) to spitting on someone to fighting — it’s all work. And I was a hard worker.”
Gangbanging, of course, is an occupation with two predictable destinations: death and prison, and Mr. Shakur says he knew “prison loomed in my future like wisdom teeth: if you lived long enough you got them.” Like many others, he says, he regarded the months in San Quentin and Folsom as yet another stepping stone toward manhood, another test of nerve and street smarts and will. His years there would galvanize his legend on the streets as a “ghetto star,” but they would also eventually propel him toward a renunciation of gang life, a realization that “to continue banging would be a betrayal first of my children.” He married his longtime girlfriend Tamu, broke with his old set, joined a black nationalist group called the New Afrikan Independence Movement, pledged himself to the eradication of the causes of gangsterism and traded in his old name Monster for Sanyika, an African name that means unifier, gatherer of his people.
No doubt “Monster” will be denounced for its sensationalism. Its cover features a menacing photo of Mr. Shakur in his gang days wielding a semi-automatic gun. And it will doubtless be read by some for its graphic, gut-wrenching descriptions of gang violence.
Such matters, however, should not deter serious readers interested in trying to understand the endemic social conditions underlying last year’s Los Angeles riots. Set down in quick, matter-of-fact prose, “Monster” provides a shockingly intimate picture of gang life in South-Central. Although the book is inconsistently edited and its tone is strangely uneven, the volume attests not only to Mr. Shakur’s journalistic eye for observation, but also to his novelistic skills as a story-teller, an ear for street language that’s as perfectly pitched as Richard Price’s, a feeling for character and status potentially as rich as Tom Wolfe’s. This is a startling and galvanic book.