Why the Art Museums Are Closed
A dialogue with Africa
about the ancestral images
that the West looted
from the continent is inevitable.
Without this dialogue,
all the museums in the world,
all the art galleries,
all the exhibition spaces,
are uninhabitable spaces
One day, one day!
Soja go come.
Soja go do.
Soja go catch Don’t Climb.
Walahi, Talahi
O: THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
To pronounce this sound,
turn your lips into a circle.
Then push the air
through your lips,
gently,
then forcefully.
The sound comes out in a continuous flow
until you are out of breath:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
That is the sound
Is it merely a coincidence that the news of the abduction and assassination by suspected Fulani invaders of Oba Israel Adeusi, the Olufon of Ifon, happened the very same day that the United States is celebrating the annual Thanksgiving event?
There is no coincidence in history.
Nature times things with organic orchestration.
VISUAL PROVERBS: ABO
Let’s play with words.
Let’s play with images.
Let’s construct figures of speech.
Let’s do òwé, and ride it down the lane of memory.
Let’s break things all down; then pack them all back together.
Let’s see what will fall out, what will fall in.
Let us now begin to speak in proverbs.
In 2016, I looked into the middle of the Opon Ifa and what did I see?
I saw women, simple, rural, agrarian women carrying automatic weapons on their way to their farmlands.
Some of them were pregnant, some carrying loads on their heads, some with their children, some walking alone, some hiking in groups, all moving from one point to another.
I sat up abruptly. What was this I was seeing?
I drove to my favorite drive-in coffee shop and stopped at the window to collect my standard order of “Banana bread with nuts, warmed, and a small cup of coffee, black.”
She was waiting for me. She smiled broadly. Her name tag read Jazmine.
“You always have your coffee black,” Jazmine observed. “I like mine with some cream and sugar.”
“Your shirt is cool, Jazmine,” I said. I stretched out my hand from the window of the car as she leaned out from the window of the coffee house to hand me my order.
The Covid 19 era will usher in the fourth stage of the colonization of Africa.
It will be the stigmatization stage.
Pfizer just announced the discovery of a vaccine for the pandemic.
Other pharmaceutical companies will soon follow suit.
They will distribute these vaccines throughout the world.
But you already know the continent they will forget to send the vaccine to.
AFRICA.
The third stage of colonization is now in progress. This is part of a ten-stage program of total obliteration.
At the onset of the first stage, the colonizer attacked us violently and mercilessly, killing our leaders and taking our land.
At this first stage, they directly rule us and live on our land, openly displaying their weapons of destruction to threaten us and remind us that they are capable of obliterating us and willing to wipe us off the face of the earth at the slightest provocation.
In the United States, the Zoom classroom is becoming the norm in an abnormal world.
It’s unbelievable that the death toll in the United States is nearing the 250,000 number.
That sort of figure is beyond imagination—one-quarter of a million people dead.
How does one wrap one’s mind around that sort of number, in terms of fallen heroes in a single war that has not yet even lasted one year?.
Whereas in Africa, hardly anyone is dying.
When last week the press reported the fall of Jerry Rawlings to the pandemic, it was so shocking, because in Nigeria, everybody is wining, dining, partying, and marketing as if nothing is going on, and everything is honky-dory.
I’m building an art gallery in Austin TX.
The gallery is now nearing completion—hopefully, it will be ready in January 2021.
It’s only a modest gallery, just to satisfy the need for an African art gallery in Texas, such a great state, yet without such a gallery devoted to the art of Africa.
The architect is Beau Frail, from Florida.
The Engineer is R.D. Hammond, from Texas.
Fat turds float on top
of the water well
in 9ja social waters
dressed to look like fishes:
they are not
the ones you seek,
Far below the layers of turds
you will find spring waters