MASK

I am the grandfather of ancestors.

I am before memory.

I am before history.

I am before furrows, fields, fodder, farms. I am before bronze, iron, swords, armies.

I am before anthropology maximized my minutia, minimized my magnitude.

I am before coffee-table books lavished across their pages the breasts of my women but not the children they fed. Parceled me, packaged me, page designed me, focus grouped me, market niched me, remaindered me, delisted me.

I saw my patterns in weave and clay begaud fashion models and decorator designs, who understood nothing of my life made of textures, the fragrance of clay, raffia’s feel on the skin, or how the souls in the loom and the wheel never make the same piece twice. I am before art dealers and collectors came with certificates of sale I could not read, as thumbprint by thumbprint and X by Y and Y by Z, what remained of my spirit vanished into museums, foyers, executive suites, art galleries, mansions, magazines, luxury shops, none of which would I be permitted to enter.

While face by face, mask by mask, textile by textile, I watched our destiny desiccate in the wind now withering our villages.

In hushed auction rooms

I am described as “African Mask: traces of polychrome, cowrie eyes, ebony nose, zigzag scars, remnants of charcoal dating the piece within the missionary era which demanded impious icons be thrown into the fire”. Lost are the faces, sons, wives, daughters, cows, pigs, drummers, dancers. farmer, tiller, house-sweeper, young bride, old mother, chattering child, the quavering voices

Upanishad in Asian Pale in the fireside huddles with a dark storm flashing beyond the sky, the sounds under the moon of child making’s hopes, my feasting, starving, dust-blown, child-filled, fly-laden, charcoal-making, night-dancing village, all suddenly extinct as the auction gavel claps and the soul behind my African mask, the weather, the wind, the annual rains, the life of forest and desert and death, all days past bearing all days destined, vanish, forever.

Thus, me.

I emerge now only at night.

Bits of bead and grass and skin and shell, under the moon, when what’s left of my village flickers into shadows beyond the fire, voices and drums and chant and dance, bewondering children and squalling babies, smouldering embers and cooking food, dogs racing through the dust, faces of friends now mythical beings, bodies now spirits, secular now sacred, as all future hope lifts into the safety of the imaginary and all uncertainties vanish into the great whispering roar with which I in the end shall prevail.