Blackbody as library
In West African countries, they have the griots, individuals who are storytellers, oral historians, musicians and praise singers for the communities. These individuals would often wield the kora, an instrument with twenty-one strings, and sing entire histories into the air, as they were the ones tasked with retaining such information. Griots were more common before colonisation, before the written word was so forcibly imposed upon Africa.
These individuals are sometimes called ‘human libraries’.
I look at the body of my father and see a history kept within his skull, rarely letting loose the pages, held tightly behind his teeth. One griot would bestow the stories of a community to the next. A way of keeping the people alive; as if story were the primordial pulse of the people. I look at the body of my father and speculate stories recorded with his eyes and ears, but never told with the tongue; stories woven into his melanin poured into mine; stories lying dormant in the blackbody making a library of bone and flesh.
When I look at my blackbody, I see a story told to me by my father in a language unspoken.
Blackbody as language unspoken
I feel somewhat dishonest when calling myself bilingual. While I did grow up learning two languages — English from my mother, Swahili from my father — the Swahili I learnt was something of a modified tongue, a biased speech. The way I carried the language in my mouth was almost always with the sole intention of releasing the words to my father. The specific words I had learnt were always within the context of interactions between the two of us. This kind of Swahili felt like a bonsai tree, standing contorted, branches clipped off, to present a specific shape.
When I went to Swahili gatherings, I listened to the men chatter and laugh, speaking a language I didn’t understand, but one I knew. I caught a word or sentence but lost the line of context. These men spoke the Swahili of friends, whilst I only knew the Swahili of sons; a half language which only survives if the bridge between the two parties holds.
When that bridge collapsed, I thought language was something held only on the tongue — a part of the body only seen when one speaks. Yet recently, I heard Miriam Makeba sing her rendition of Malaika — a word I didn’t recognise but one my body did. As she sang words I hadn’t heard in years, the hairs on my arms rose, as if responding to a call to come home. I looked at this blackbody drink in the drops of a language I’d thought lost, as if the words had been lying dormant all this time, waiting to reconstruct the bridge.
Blackbody as other
You try to detach yourself from Blackbody, to look at it the way others do. You watch the way their eyes swallow it, digest it, and describe what they tasted. You shift your gaze from their bodies to Blackbody, watching the response it gives. You watch how it makes slight contortions, rearranges its very fabric, so that it may match the taste. It will not be defective.
You read about Blackbody, about what others say about their Blackbody. One must study a subject, devour all possible information, if one is to master it. But there are more blackbodies than you could ever read about, each one an other to you, born under a different gaze, twisting into a different taste. All you can gather from these readings is that Blackbody will always be looked at, will always be drunk, and will always be tasted. You learn that Blackbody will not know whether it tastes sweet or bitter until the face of the drinker grins or frowns.
James Baldwin said something about this uncertainty, about a constant state of being on edge.
As Blackbody learns to be drunk, it learns to become wine. It cannot become water, since for the drinkers, it isn’t a necessity, a requirement for survival. You watch it slowly intoxicate the drinkers, creating an environment of conditional kinship, and notice Blackbody begins to weave its own language. This is a language of disarmament. It becomes both the ornate glass and the exotic wine, the menu and the waiter. All in an instant — a way to take the edge off. You watch Blackbody, contained in glass, displayed to others, yourself included, for you don’t quite recognise it as your own. It is watched under the everlasting gaze in swarms of stares, each claiming a piece as their own. How could it have ever been yours to begin with?
Blackbody as nothing
When Okonkwo hangs himself at the end of Things Fall Apart, his story is stolen from the tree which holds his body. Chinua Achebe speaks to the reader with a story of an African man, his struggles and triumphs, his culture and community, and his battle against colonisation. In the end, Achebe shows us that Okonkwo’s despair consumed him, seeped into his body, and drove him to take his own life, since the life ahead of him was one where his body would not be his. Yet after the reader has breathed in the story of this man, Achebe writes of the District Commissioner, a man who enters Okonkwo’s village, and sees the man hanging from the tree. He orders an enslaved person to remove Okonkwo from the tree, and begins to think about the book he plans to write about the current colonial project. The District Commissioner ponders how to include Okonkwo in his book, saying:
One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details
In just one paragraph, the District Commissioner reduced Okonkwo’s life, one which was the subject of the novel, to a mere paragraph. Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo’s death, yet he also shows the death of the story, a detail which is to be cut. In the District Commissioner’s new world, Blackbody is not part of everything, therefore it is nothing.
Blackbody as everything
You recall in your reading something Maya Angelou said about the distinction between bitterness and anger.
She spoke of bitterness as a cancer, eating upon the host, turning them to stone. It does nothing to the object of its displeasure.
Now anger, she said, is something to write, to paint, to dance, to march, to vote; it is something you do everything about.
You look at Blackbody through the glass and see that the wine has turned to stone. When you see it become something static and cold, a sculpture for display, what choice do you have but to reclaim the piece in a language that is your own?
Blackbody as an unfinished body of work.
When I first met my little sister, I galloped through the expanse of things older brothers do. The first word I spoke in our language was Zizi, a nickname only I call her. I repeated the word again and again, as if I was going to forget it the moment I left her and went back home. I changed her nappy. I bathed her with the faded green bucket my parents used to introduce me to water. I held her in my arms in a way I’ve never held another blackbody. I sang Bob Marley and the Wailers to her until she fell asleep, the way my mother used to, so that years later, her eyelids may grow heavy at the sound of his lyrics, like a spell one casts to shelter the mind and body from the world.
This language came easier to me than Swahili. My blackbody seemed to understand this tongue. Perhaps it was because I had practiced these words and phrases as soon as I could yearn for a sibling.
My father was the one who taught me how to form a sentence with these words. He showed me how to change a nappy, how to use baby powder to avoid Zizi getting a rash, how to hold her in a way where she could fall asleep on my shoulder if she wanted to. As he spoke this language, I could see a story in his body, one which I had never seen leave the confines of the library behind his murky brown eyes. Is this how griots passed down stories?
I look at us, our blackbodies unfinished, because we are learning a language that we must create in the moment. A language which exists under no gaze but our own shared in private, invisible moments.
My Blackbody is unfinished
because English is still my first language.
Jamil Badi is a writer particularly interested in myths, legends, folktales, and parables. He wishes we lived in a world where animals talked, towns spoke in riddles, and gods delivered cryptic messages. He currently writes prose fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction essays, and memoir. His writing can be found in Baby Teeth Journal.