african bliss for bohemian mermaids

no(w)here

africalis — Thu, 7 Jun 2007 02:09:00 GMT

i can see my fingerprints still blowing about on weathered grains of sand the pressure of my feet continuing to echo through centuries of solid rock pressing undiscovered fossils further into forgetting i can see my eyes still boucing off the memories of black children a foreign shade of blue, blinding the familiar continuing to ask such simple questions that exponentially answer themselves with more mystery i can see my dreams still dangling from the starkly skybound branches of a baobab tree wandering into too many worlds that have yet to create a language other than sleep waiting for my lucid return so that i may teach them how to interpret their own dual nature we are made of gravity and goats of the accidents of our own intuition and the unaccustomed tradition to dig through the physics and the psychics and the mystic of our own roots and i am still tapping the untasteable syrup from that forest of arid ancestry where the only thing absent is my senses

suffering from pleasure

africalis — Mon, 21 May 2007 12:22:00 GMT

i saw my little sisters today-my sweet brilliant siblings who are so blessed with the joys of their childhood. they are showing me their twenty seven stuffed puppies who all have their own email adresses and online doghouses, and i am thinking about how unreal this is. how so many children have no stuffed puppies and this one has twenty seven. how most adults in burkina faso have never seen a computer and this goddammed stuffed dog has its own virtual shopping mall for accessories. this world does not make sense. my littlest sister sleeps under a mosquito net. it matches her tinkerbell bedroom set and serves as a princess canopy for capturing sweet dreams and fairy tales. there are no mosquitoes in the house-and certainly no deadly insects. children all over west africa are dying of malaria or dengue fever because they don’t have mosquito nets to sleep under, and here is this precious life saving item being used as decoration for a little pixie princess. this world: does not make sense. my family, sitting in a house with such a clean roof over their heads, sitting around a finished wood table and eating so much food that after dinner they can feed leftover grilled salmon at twelve-ninety-nine a pound to their dog. and then the dog gets special doggy ice cream in a little disposable plastic cup every time she sits or rolls over or jumps three feet in the air. the _dog_. what is this imbalance, this world of people feeding their dogs caviar with a detached awareness of the bloated bellies of malnourished children in mali? this disconnection is so massive, the awareness so incomplete that its ineffectiveness is more vast and devastating than the problem itself. here i am, trying to bridge these two worlds with a shaky construction of pictures and memories, trying to explain the realities of poverty and _actual_ suffering that are so far from anything they will ever know; trying to inspire gratitude and compassion and maybe, action. but this world:: does not make sense. i am showing them my pictures from west africa. pictures of schoolchildren sitting on the mud floor of their schoolhouse with no books or desks or pens or playgrounds, telling them about how children in africa don’t have recess when they’re at school, and how most of them don’t have toys. and for my sisters, its not even close to their realm of consciousness to be able to fathom this. i feel like one of those moms who yells at their children to finish their bowl of cereal because “there’s starving children in africa.” exept most moms who say that have never _seen_ a starving child in africa, so when they say it they don’t feel like putting down their own fork and packing up the leftovers and shipping the contents of their cupboards to some village in northern ghana. and that is what i want to do. every thing i touch is felt with this awareness. everything i eat feels like too much. everything i do is filtered through my disturbed consciousness and infused with a contradictory sense of devastating gratitude.surrounded by such sparkling abundance-this world : does not make sense

worlds confused

africalis — Wed, 16 May 2007 11:20:00 GMT

worlds confused: i am waiting out here for the fung wah bus:triple culture shock-from new york’s underground to chinatown to east coast traffic-all with african soil still stuck to my feet. i am feeling the unnerving quiet of america. there are no colorfully clad women with babies tied to their backs carrying giant baskets of fried plantain on their heads and selling them through the open windows of a still moving bus. there are no black people pressed up against me and squishing me against the hot metal walls of a tro tro. there are no people on the front of the bus preaching the good word: of jesus christ our lord and saviour hallelujah! no one is praying out loud and singing gospel music while we sit in traffic. there’s no hip-life or reggae blasting through improperly wired speakers. there are not crowds of people walking the streets, throwing unfamiliar hand jestures at each other and shouting in an untranslatable language. there are no people sitting outside occupying the shade beneath every tree and just, sitting. i am noticing the empty: the people hiding in their big four wheeled machines and four door houses and not even aware of how fortunate they are. so i close my eyes, feeling too blessed to comprehend. now i am taking small bites of this salad that my mother made me. the first raw thing, the first green vegetable, the first vitamin rich bit of nourishment i have tasted in six months. and i am thinking about the millions of people who eat mashed cassava three times a day and have never known a vegetable other than onions. i am thinking about the naked children with their bulging malnourished bellies and their skinny legs and how people sleep when they are hungry so that the hunger goes unnoticed and i always saw people sleeping in the middle of the day. i am looking at the diversity and lushness of the abundance in the refridgerator, the basket of million colored fruits on the counter and the drawer full of whole grain sprouted bread and i have tears in my eyes, because my memory is looking at the bland yellow mush i have been eating with my hands and i am thinking about how starvation seems so normal in the context of where i just was. it is okay to eat nothing but yams and bananas for breakfast lunch and dinner all week long. there were no calcium rich broccoli trees, no sprouted garbanzo bean pates and no root chakra nourishing beets. no one is talking about anorexia or health food or being vegan or living an energetically abundant raw food lifestyle. they are just hungry and don’t even know it. they are missing minerals unaware and lacking optimal nourishment without the consciousness that there could be anything more than what they have. so i put my fork down, my stomach full of gratitude and guilt, my mind full of awareness of this abundance and inbalance. now i am taking this hot shower, the first in six months. feeling the freely running water beat down and dissolve the desert off my skin. i am thinking about the volta river drying up and the power going out in ghana every twelve hours because the rainy season forgot to arrive and there is so much water missing from africa. i am thinking about the children who pour buckets of cold water over their heads and lather up with lemony soap while strattling the open sewer and how you can watch the dirt run off their bodies and mix back in with the earth. and i am thinking about the subsaharan women who spend all morning carrying gallons of water on their heads from the village wells and how straight their spines are. and so i turn off the faucet and drip dry with these composite feelings of gratitude and guilt. i am brushing my teeth with this clear water, thinking about the people in mali who chew on licorice sticks and don’t know how to use a toothbrush and most of their teeth are missing but their smiles are still pure and shining. i am thinking about how this water will not give me guinea worm or giardia or anyother unwanted parasite and how incredibly lucky i am to have money to buy toothpaste and what a precious item that is. and when i am home and clean and fed and i step outside at dawn, the smell of spring:strikes me with a catapult of sweet-the most delicious scent of green earth and damp soil and precious pollen and life, earth breathing her renewal and exhaling perfection. i cry at these smells, at the way they touch my nose and trigger my memory and intoxicate my sentient being. i cry at the feeling of cool crisp morning air, of dew on my bare feet and the sound of new england birds. this beauty is so full, so rich: and i am too fortunate - so incredibly blessed, to be back in this bliss, with africa infusing all my perspective.

fufu voodoo juju

africalis — Tue, 1 May 2007 15:56:00 GMT

well, what could be more amazing than squatting in a momentarily abandoned guesthouse with a dozen african drummers and dancers on the coast of ghana? nothing, i tell you. nothing. i am here with them, and i can hear the ocean through my left ear and the whispering graveyard through my right, the constant drums through my feet and all the nights of gospel music echoing from the sketches of churches scattered amongst the fetish forests.

there is no running water at the house, and so i spend a happy portion of the morning lugging buckets up the path from the nearby pump. i would carry them on my head, like a genuine ghanain mama, but then i could only carry one bucket and not two. and there is no electricty either, and so when the sun goes down we sit by the kerosene lantern and eat globs of fufu or banku and we talk about all the difficulties of life in ghana and how terrible it is to see small children selling sunglasses in the winding walls of traffic that fill the streets; or we talk about religion and they preach to me about how everything belongs to god, and then i have to answer their peculiar questions about meditation. they want to know if i am chanelling evil spirits or communicating with the devil, when i am sitting on the porch with my legs crossed and my eyes closed for long periods of time. really, i think they rumor me to be a witch...but they're curious and terrified to admit it..

someone is always sweeping the dancefloor at sunrise, and shortly after that i am on it..stomping like the earth will not turn unless i push it with my feet. by 10:00am the day is too hot- and then, i am sitting in the palm-thatched shade amongs the potentially percussive logs, working on carving a soon-to-be-beautiful djembe. wow. now i have blisters on my hands from chipping away at this musical wood and they match the blisters on my feet from jumping jumping jumping and it is all amazing, my last two weeks here resonating with the tribal lives of this afrikin family.

written reincarnation

africalis — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 12:21:00 GMT

they sell water here in little plastic sachets, branded with names labeled as "the truth pure water" or "the lord for drinking" or "heaven's thirst". today, when the heavyset ghanain mama handed me the sachet, it was wrapped in a wilting piece of paper. this paper, i realized upon attentive inspection, was a page torn out of someone's journal. maybe written yesterday or yellowed with the tropical time of an experience years ago. maybe it was a journal page of someone you knew who journeyed to ghana as an NGO director seven months ago, maybe i met this person in a bus in burkina faso and they dropped their precious book in a hasty decent from the tro-tro.

paper lives many lives here. it is sometimes used to serve up greasy skewers of grilled canine chunks, or hot handfulls of boiled peanuts and yams. people burn it to start their little tin-can cookstoves, or to descreetly wipe the e.coli off their well maintained asses.

i am thinking about the unfathomable life being birthed into the pages of my stolen journal. perhaps my dozen haikus on mango trees are transformed to ashes in the flames beneath a roasting rat. the story recalling the time my married dance teacher pinned me up against a wall and tried to kiss me beneath the blue light filtering through the leafless baobab tree-the story is wrapped around a steaming piece of goat meat. the pages of the traditional symbols and ceremonies of the fulani women in mali are covered in urine and decaying in an open sewer.

these words, living some unpredictable destiny, being recycled for a myriad of unfit uses, unknowingly soaking into people's skin, being digested as they dissolve in the goat fat, are inhaled in the kitchen flames and leaving unseen ink prints on children's damp behinds.

dear journal-you are stolen and dispersed and alive. best wishes on your reincarnation.

lis

modern myths, urban legends, and the yinyang of night

africalis — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:27:00 GMT

you could spend eternity in the hollowed out entrails of a wooden unicorn, or sleep away forever in the back seat of a four by four fashioned out of mohogany. its funeral fashion, and its a ghanain obsession. death is the biggest party you'll ever have, and you best be arriving in the barrel of an AK47 larger than His magesty. or perhaps you'd prefer to be interred in a seventeen footlong coke bottle? whatever your dying wish, the craftsmen here in ghana can carve your coffin to your withering heart's desire. ghanains spend more money on their final resting places than this country's GNP can account for.

but otherwise, the curious kin here have been asking some odd questions of me lately, pulling laughter and compassion from what is left of me. a young girl today asked me: do you bathe with regular water, like black people? yes, of course! i answered. well then, what is it that you wash with that makes your skin white?

how perfect and innocent!! as though i used to be black and i scrubbed it all off with some expensive american bodywash! the next question was: is it true, that white people think africans live high up in the trees and eat eachother for breakfast? well, i answered, i certainly don't think that is true. i mean, i've never been served humans and eggs on white bread before, and there really aren't that many trees here..

and then-one question asked of a landlocked burkinabe: is it true that there are people who go out into the ocean in big ships, dumping salt in the water so that when you swim you can taste it and it tastes like salted fish? oh my, the salt was there long before the boats were..my sweet, we do not put salt in the ocean. (how does it get there? and, they want to know, how do i get such fine hair extensions sewn into my arms?)

bless such divinely innocent questions, coming from the sweetest people who have never journeyed more than 10km from their village, where the population is maybe two hundred; where there is no electricity, no literacy and the people cannot count to ten. it is so amazing. if only i could wonder such magical possibilities in this world, with the inexperienced mind of a newborn and the curiousity of a wide eyed kitten.

exchanging words for ever

africalis — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 11:32:00 GMT

please, tell me if you've been here. i want to know, if you've travelled through my wor(l)ds or journeyed on your own. i hardly know who you are, if you have visited this site regularly or avoided it until now. share. exchange bits of your mind with mine. share. tell me if you are inspired or terrified or beautified, or maybe you are totally unmoved by my retellings. tellme. tell me that i am not imaginary, that this life is not some divinely invented dream. tell me that you know i exist, that you remember me, that you know me or want to know me or wish we'd never met. tell me what you love to hear or criticise the way i write. how can a chef go on cooking if there are no mouths to feed? tell me, are you out there and are you hungry? how can an artist create in the dark, if the eyes of the beholder are invisible or closed? tell me, can you see me from over there?

jesus lives

africalis — Mon, 9 Apr 2007 12:23:00 GMT

here in ghana. he's being reborn every couple of feet in the form of forever church services, signs that proclaim his immortal presence and missionaries that perpetuate this preaching epidemic. all the businesses her reflect that: how about 'jesus is my rock capret enterprises' or 'god is love forever supermarket.' then there is 'jesus prince of peace parts store', 'glory be to his grace auto mechanic'..the list goes on..

the good-gift bye to burkina

africalis — Sun, 8 Apr 2007 12:57:00 GMT

its been so long since i've posted anything, even though i write pages and pages everyday. so-here's the last story of the previous chapter of that other lifetime when i was in burkina faso... i was ready to go, after a month of never speaking english, eating ground cassava and onions everyday and forgetting how to interact with a flushing toilet and a metal eating utensil because i haven't used either of those two things for so long. though bobo was the first place i'd been that had become like a home, seeing the same people in the streets everyday, riding my bicycle down the same dirt paths and dancing everyday to the now too familiar rythms. it all came to a celebratory full circle on the last day, when my adopted burkinabe family decided to throw a bit of a going away party for me, inviting all our transient friends and curious neighbors and fellow dancers - and it was all so beautiful and delicious. all the sisters and i spent all morning in the market, buying barrels of tomatoes and onions and pasta and fish, then all afternoon cooking in the smoky kitchen hut over the rocket stove (yes, rocket stove!!) and then spending all evening eating the feast with our hands and laughing and drumming and exchanging gifts-i couldn't have felt more loved in such a faraway place. the following day, the path flowed forward in perfect syncronicity, yet again, and i got an easy ride to ougadougou with a burkinabe friend, stayed with another extended family who lent me their motorbike while i was there-got my ghanain visa and jumped on another uncertain bus with another uncertain destination, slept on another patch of muddy ground between two parked buses at four in the morning because i had no choice, crossed another border and for the first time in many months-saw rain!!!

through the chocolate forest

africalis — Sun, 8 Apr 2007 12:57:00 GMT

ghana is one of the worlds largest producers of, yes, CHOCOLATE. and my goddess, what could be more amazing than hiking through eighteen kilometers of chocolate forest?!! beans glistening on the trunks in all their rich expensive exportable glory. and i ate the fruit. the flesh of a cacao bean- it is pale and soft and almost tart, protecting the potent purple seed of perfection that is its desired product. mmmm. straight from the trunk and in the element of yum, sucking on the raw cacao and thinking about smuggling some seedlings back home in my already dirt-filled backpack.

from the chocolate forest i wondered into the jungle canopy, then from the tree tops to the rock shrine, from this solid altered ashanti altar to the forest stream where you can feel the flow of hippo feet and crocodile teeth, flowing further back to the ocean, building shrines of shells to honor ourselves and onward, to waterfalls and confusing cities and unfinished ecovillages and back to accra. there is electricity only sometimes, and i am lucky in this moment to be writing to you.