Approaching the spiritual side of the people is very difficult, because it's like asking to look inside, to something intimate, reserved for those who live and feel that belief every day. Animism is just a word, trying to give a sort of container, for a great number of spiritual realities, rituals, traditions and above all, ways of living the everyday life. My approach to such a complex reality was not the kind of a scholar studying a different culture, but rather, of a genuinely curious person. In the two trips in Togo that led me to meet the Vodu, which literally stands for “the sign of the deep”, I was amazed to find the magic, not hidden behind secret rituals, but instead hidden in all evidence, behind every simple gesture, of daily life. I began to call it African magical realism, thinking about those strange and shifting atmospheres found in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's books, where the realism of everyday life suddenly mixes with the mystical. Shifting moments, fascinating enchanted conjunctions, kept repeating in those days, involving me more and more and at the same time increasing my deep respect and subjection, for this ancestral spiritual world. I lived situations of this kind often and each time I experienced this feeling of "displacement".