I don't remember exactly where we were going, but we were in a bus when Shuli, an artist friend also looking for workspace, told me about this one place I might consider. A basement, again, but it happened to be in the middle of Soho. Soho! I never even knew Soho when it belonged to the artists; that was before my time. The only Soho I knew was of galleries, of trendiness, the very commercial, very expensive Soho. Shuli also mentioned something about having to pass though a very strange space. The strange space fumed out to be a cigar factory! It looked like something out of the 19th century, the exploitation of the workers in the most miserable circumstances. And that worker was a woman; in fact, only women worked in this factory. At the entrance one of the workers was beating the tobacco leaves with great anger in her movements.

Daily I passed through, observing these women, Hispanic women, illegal for sure, smoking as they worked! It was quite a sight, and the smell÷your eyes would water after only a few moments. There is no way to describe that smell; it is so strong, it hurts.

I was drawn to this factory, to the women. It was becoming an obsession. I wanted to do something with it, but I had no idea what. A documentary? Definitely not. But I had to start somewhere, so I decided to simply videotape the scene. I became familiar with the workers and the owner of the factory, and when I asked him if it was okay he didn't seem to mind. So I booked a day for camera and crew.

Two days before the shoot, I was taken to dinner at 21÷the famous 21, where the very famous and very rich meet. Being the obsessive person that I am, throughout the dinner I discussed only the cigar factory, how amazing it was to see those women smoking and rolling tobacco. The image one usually has in mind is of a man smoking a cigar, a fat boss ordering people around... not women, never women. Why is it o.k. for a man to suck on a phallic symbol in public?

On our way out we stopped at the restaurant's cigar stand. All this talk about cigars made my date want to light one up. And there was this beautiful Latin girl, Emilia Cleopas, the cigar sales girl. We started talking, and she spoke with such knowledge and passion about cigars, I immediately invited her to the video shoot for an interview.

When we arrived at the factory for the shoot, everything seemed fine. We set up the camera and lights and started to videotape. The next moment there was a rising tension in the air; we began to feel uncomfortable. The women started protesting, hiding their faces. Finally, the factory owner came out and said: "Victoria, I'm sorry. Next thing you know, they'll ask for a raise in pay and all kinds of bullshit."

I felt like an aggressor; the camera had become like a gun being pointed at them, the lights as if for interrogation. They were clearly frightened; frightened and angry. Angry because somebody had told them that across the street there is a man who makes a lot of money with video÷Nam June Paik. They felt I was manipulating them, and I felt that they were manipulated enough, so we retreated to the basement. We waited for the cigar sales girl from 21.

When Emilia finally showed up, she was all geared up to start her talk. I had only one request, to paint her lips Red. She sat down and calmly gave a startlingly beautiful monologue about her experience of the cigar. She opened up a whole now dimension about this most male symbol in Western society÷the phallic symbol itself. At 21, where she worked, successful, rich men met and made deals. She felt that when they smoked the cigar, they were practicing magic. Were they aware of that? Back in her neighborhood, the people who smoke cigars are very religious people, and more often than not, women. She smoked a cigar while she talked. It was very sensual the way she sucked on it÷slowly, like a good lover, taking her time.

Emilia personified the modern age Carmen to me, especially in this setting. In the cigar factory she looked as if she belonged, and as if she came from another planet. She said that Santeristas would puff cigar smoke into a bowl of water and see your past, your future. Tobacco smoke is a very powerful medium.

According to Emilia, loving to smoke a cigar has nothing to do with penis envy. Women in South America smoke cigars, and not much is thought of that. This is their way of reclaiming the power, through the magic powers of smoke. At 21, men smoke a cigar after a multi-million dollar deal, but she smoked to come closer to God. She said that there are two Gods, the spiritual and the material÷the Eastern and the Western. How she views these men at 21 is particularly interesting. They smoke a cigar while they are making a business deal because it allows them to see through the person they are negotiating with. Is it possible that modern businessmen are tapping into the archaic magic practices?

Bizet's Carmen worked in a cigar factory. The thought of all those women together in the tropical heat, half-dressed, rolling the cigars on their thighs must have inspired the opera. The smoke, she sings, is elusive, like love, you cannot hang onto it.... Women are almost always the workers in the factories; we are reminded that they are the creators of the phallus.

Emilia thinks that men are intimidated by women who smoke cigars. We are all so unaccustomed to this sensual sight. I asked her to tell more about the religious aspect of smoking. Every Monday morning when she woke up she smoked a cigar, to start her week.

And the ritual went like this: "I light all my candles, and at the end of my prayer, I light the cigar. Instead of inhaling it, I put it in my mouth and I blow out; that's the way you communicate with the saints, 'cause the saliva is on it and all your thoughts are on it, too. When I'm in deep thought, I smoke a cigar. When you die, your body leaves in a puff of smoke. I guess it's like smoking a cigar." The Buddha come pared rebirth to the lighting of a new candle from the flame of a dying one. The flame goes on, but the candle or the body is consumed. In the "Voice of Silence," a Tibetan Buddhist text, it is said: "Out of the furnace of man's life and its black smoke, winged flames arise, flames purified, that weave in the end the fabric glorified of the... vestures of the Path." The cigar is never put out, but the glowing spark is left to die. Emilia continued: "The cigar is very sacred in Santerismo. It is the only way really to talk to the saints. Anything you want to ask them, you ask through the cigar. All the women smoke cigars, all the disciples. Santerismo is the oldest religion on earth. It comes from Africa. Smoking a cigar is pure; it is a sign of power."

I had no knowledge of Santeria and asked her to elaborate. I understood her saying that its roots were in Africa, in Uruba. She didn't know the spelling or much else about it. But she was certain that it was the oldest religion on earth. "Anytime I want to know anything abut a person and their life, I smoke a cigar, and I'm able to see through them like glass. Maybe that's why when I walked in here [the factory] all the women smiled at me. I guess they knew deep down who I was."

Who was she? She came as an answer to the undefined question I had about the women in the factory, the feelings I got. She opened the door I was looking at; not the history of cigars, or the different names and makes. I wasn't interested in the accepted facts; I wanted the woman's point of view, the deeper truth, the ritual.

Right after this I was invited to do a performance at a gallery in Soho. A few friends and I smoked cigars, including Emilia, whose video was projected in the background on a large screen. The images and the smoke offended the owners and we were kicked out.

My then future husband Bogdan and I went to California to conduct an interview with his colleague, Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate and the discoverer of quarks. I asked him if he knew where Urubas were and he corrected me: Yoruba, in Nigeria. In fact, his interview began with him pointing to a Yoruba divination bowl, which he jokingly said physicists need in order to make discovcries.

The Yoruba culture was quite advanced when the white man started taking them captive in the 17th century to be their slaves, they were organized in a series of kingdoms and had a complex social structure. THe most important kingdom was Benin. Their most important city to this day is lle-lfe, which according to their legend was created by Orisha Obatala and is the origin of all that exists. From this powerful culture, they left behind a rich legacy of art. Almost every piece of African art that I found exe traordinary came from Nigeria, from the Yoruba tribe. The most fascinating part of their culture is the mythological aspect, the religious beliefs and practices. But that I found out later, definitely not from the books in the library. The material I found there was dry, studious and lacking in explanations of the rituals and magic.

In the beginning of the 17th century, the Ewe tribes invaded Yorubaland, forcing the Yorubas to migrate to the Nigerian coast, where many of them were captured by slave traders and brought to the New World. Their white masters felt threatened by their strange worship of deities, and forbade them to practice their religion. They were forced to accept Catholicism, and accept they did. Except that instead of the Catholic religion absorbing the African, it happened the other way around. The African religion was much stronger, because it is rooted in Mother Earth, in Nature. So the slaves outsmarted their white masters by hiding their Orishas behind the ""front" of Catholic saints. They appropriated with time many customs from their new home, but their roots were never lost. And just as the religion would become less African, a new boat of slaves would come in and refresh their memory.

There are also theories about the connection of the Yoruba to Egypt. Some Egyptians migrated to Nigeria looking for fertile land next to water. They taught the natives there their religion and showed them how to craft sculptures and pottery. Over time Yoruba evolved to the form it has now, reaching its peak in the thirteenth century.

There are some 4,000 Orishas (deities) in the Yoruba pantheon; it resembles the complex pantheon of the Egyptian Gods. In their human portrayal we are reminded of the Greek Gods. It is all connected--after all, Africa and Mediterranean Europe aren't that far away. Western historians arrogantly assume that Africans didn't mix much with the Classical cultures, and appropriate the glories of Egypt's past as if a completely different race were in question.

While immersed in images of Africa, with a map of the continent above my kitchen table, I got an editing job for a woman who was working on an educational video about AIDS in Africa. After this session, a dancer booked time with me in another editing room. When we walked in, the room was still occupied. At the monitors was a girl dressed all in white, and on the screens was... Africa. She excused herself for running overtime. I asked where the footage was from. "Nigeria," she said. Nigeria! Then I asked her if she knew anything about the Yorubas. She responded: "These are Yoruban rituals that I videotaped." We started talking, much to the dismay of the dancer waiting for me, but this was what I was searching for. I told her about Emilia. She asked if she was a priestess. I had no idea; the thought had never occurred to me. I asked her to write down her telephone number and next to the number she wrote "Basha Alpern, Yoruba priestess."

It wasn't easy getting a hold of Basha. I tried calling many times; she lived in a hotel uptown on Broadway. I was never sure if she got the messages. Finally one day I got a booking for editing and it fumed out to be with her. She required titles over her Nigerian footage. So I learned in the process the names of different dances, rituals, cities.... Basha lived part time in Nigeria and worked for the king(! ), videotaping his family and social affairs. Occasionally she herself would appear in the video, and it was guise a sight. A white woman (of Jewish background) dressed all in white, in the middle of Africa, a Yoruba priestess. I wondered how she got there. Through the drum, she said. She played the conga drum, started following the history of the drum. "When you follow the history of the drum, you find the history of the people."

The tape I was helping her with turned out robe for a panel discussion she was organizing, on the Yoruba culture. When she asked me to videotape the event, I knew that I was coming closer to the real story. The guests were Baba Afolabi Epega, a Nigerian babalawo (high priest of Yoruba), Adeyemi Bob Thomson, an African-American practitioner, and

Beatrice Morales Cozier, an anthropologist from Cuba. Throughout the discussion, Bob Thomson thoughtfully smoked a cigar. Earlier I had approached him and asked about the connection, but he quickly dismissed me. ("You silly girl.")

I started asking myself how all this connected with the cigar factory, with those women. I was wondering if I was losing sight. Towards the end my frustration grew apparent and there ensued a long dialogue between the panelists and myself at the camera. My first question referred to the book I was reading connecting the Yorubas to Egypt. The response was that it was the other way around; that Egypt assimilated the Yoruba culture; that lle-lfe is the beginning of mankind. I dared to ask what the importance of women in the rituals is and also about the fact that in Nigeria polygamy is commonplace. This seemed to really create some disturbance in the room. The babalawo was especially perturbed. He asked me if I knew where my husband was, trying to point out that when a man has more women they know exactly who he's with. I was unhappy with the direction all this was taking and finally directed a question to Beatrice Morales about women and cigars. Bob Thomson made a joke: "Please help her; she's been asking this question all day." I knew she was the one who could help me out of this impasse. And she was. She didn't act as if it were a far-fetched question, didn't avoid the subject, but proceeded to talk about women in the 16th and 17th centuries who were merchants of tobacco. She had to cut the answer short because it was going away from the subject that they had met there for, but in Beatrice I knew I had found the right person and was determined to continue our discussion. Immediately after the panel meeting I asked her for an interview. It wasn't easy, since the people running the place were anxious to get us out. So I climbed out onto the terrace with the camera person and set up lights. We shot a ten minute interview, until they kicked us out of there, too. It didn't look like I was going to be able to continue at another time because she lived in New Orleans and was very busy finishing her dissertation in Cuban anthropology. Here are a few things she said at our first encounter:

At that point we were rudely interrupted by the person in charge and ordered to stop and get out. I begged for only five minutes more and he agreed "Five minutes!" "Thank you," I said and turned to Beatrice to go on.

She concluded hastily as the man once again appeared, this time determined to get us out.