last night i slept in a village of trucks, buses constructed from a melange of tired taxi engines and the carcasses of retired train cars. everything is in the dirt, the bitter rinds of unfinished oranges, the bleating desperate goats, the fly covered babies and trash bags trying to decay in the dust, and then: my own elated self.
people are eating pail porridge with purple ladels; they wait on their mats and pray while patience permeates the hot air of sunset. i fall asleep on the exposed limbs of a boabab tree, and wake to this:
the sound of the village, rising in the morning- its starts with the pleading gasping yelp of donkeys, their awful calls orchestrating the dissonant bleating of goat kids and then, a constant rooster. for one moment, they all pause to inhale, and the monotonous drone of flies ascending to the skies grows louder and closer and then dissipates, until one pair of wings is buzzing clearly in your ear. high hawks echo off the cliff walls as the avian orchestra calls: soft light into the new day. all the sounds bounce back and forth between the buses, between the baobab trees and the ostrich egg on top of the mosque and the doors to the dogon caves.
donkey calls continue, escalating roosters and all the goats are crying until the children rise, then sigh. low tones of conversation in an untranslatable language begin on the ground beside me. the shuffling of feet the pouring of water the lighting of matches the fire starts to crackle it is morning. human sounds now-the straw broom sweeping the dirt floor the opening of a sack of baguettes the distant pounding of a mortar and pestel crushing millet. and somewhere far away, the hypnotic harmonic sounds of schoolboys chanting the koran, reading their scripts in the dust; voices quavering in a monotonous cacophony of conversations channelling allah. all together and at once, it sounds like the goddess yawning: she opens her eyes to a day that has repeated itself for ten thousand years.
now it is market day. after hours of trading fish on foot, weighing out acacia berries and plantains, donkey carts stomping squash seeds into the ground and everyone kicking up dust the air is thick: it sits on my skin and eyes and lungs. everyone is coughing and the sunset is illuminating the particulate air, turning the whole town a perfect hue of pinkish orange, fading out to the tops of the temples where blue begins.
and the people: they do very little. and when they are done doing very little they sleep. they talk to animal spirits in lucid dreams, spend all afternoon stirring millet porridge and tending to the cooking fire. crushing baobab leaves with a mortar and pestal the size of a bathtub and baseball bat and after that, they rest. they walk slowly with their water, washing children and dishes and laundry in the same tepid filth, transferring dust and grease between hair and teeth.
oh the animists- are alcoholics. they drink until they see double and then nothing-disillusioned hallucinations of kola nut nonsense. they sit in their dark huts at midday with no future no consequences no concept of space and pray, minds erased by millet fermentation, a contagious ennebriation diluting the rational and invoking: inner animal celebration.
