I gave my writer friend Foluke Taylor a picture and she responded with a story.
In this instance we are taken to the Southbank in London, to wander amongst the divinity of Yoruba Gods, water that flies upwards, ageing and skateboarding. All of life is here.
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DANCE
Saturday evening, riverside. A short-handled axe with a double head forged in the shape of eagle wings. The wielding hand invisible so that the axe bobs through the multitude of unseeing heads like a crowd-surfer sprinkling malevolence in its wake. Levi alerts his mother by tugging at her clothes. Look at that man, he says
Levi’s mother looks up from her thoughts. She sees several men – teens, twenty somethings – dotted in groups along the riverbank path, doing largely unremarkable things; rolling fingers in the necks of their t-shirts to make room for the air and adjusting the angles of their caps to shield their eyes from the glare of the sun or perhaps from the scrutiny of other young men doing equally unremarkable things.
What man?
He’s got red trousers on
Well I don’t see him, she says, with a snippiness that comes from having essays to mark and lecture notes to prepare and wearing closed toe shoes when it’s thirty degrees and forgetting that the person you’re with is six years old. Remembering this, she suggests that they get ice cream.
Elegba, divine keeper of the roads, has hitched a lift on a cart. The cart belongs to the man whose job it is to sweep the streets whose name is Joseph. Joseph can’t see Elegba because Elegba is a small god, also because Joseph’s business is discarded things he rarely lifts his eyes from the pavement. He has a collection of discarded things – fallen rings, lost banknotes, hastily ditched bags of weed – in the pockets of his blue overalls. Elegba’s eyes are not on Joseph, but on Oshun who is taking her time to come up from the riverbank. She has barely arrived when he starts to speak.
Have you seen that Shango? he says, storming around with his tempers like that? Not caring where he flings them or what he’s stirring up?
Oshun coughs and wrings out her hair. Yes, she says, the trousers are a bit much, and then she coughs some more.
Likely there’ll be a fight, says Elegba
You look a bit gleeful, says Oshun, you need to work on your disapproving face. She draws a well of phlegm to the back of her throat. When she spits, it narrowly misses the front of the cart and Elegba’s dangling feet. His disapproving face improves.
A bit trashy, for the Goddess of the river don’t you think?
Oshun, who has lived in the river for thousands of years has seen a lot of trash. She is hard to offend.
It’s the raw sewage, she says, and the cigarettes.
Levi is sitting on a scarf that his mother has laid out picnic blanket style on the grass. He’s failing to keep pace with his ice cream and is wearing it across his face and shirt.
That woman’s been swimming, he says and the thrust of his pointing tips the last of the ice cream from the cone and into his lap.
People don’t swim here, says Levi’s mother, the water’s too dirty. She doesn’t see Oshun because she is hunting in her bag. I think I forgot the wet wipes, she says.
Ogun, the God of metals, who has failed, over millennia, to persuade Shango to cool down his temper, has decided to keep his distance. He is watching from a fifth-floor roof terrace café where he has laid down his own weapon – a square headed hammer – so as to get a better grip on the iron railings, which taste pretty good. The narcotic effect of the rust has him dreaming of his ex, Oya, Goddess of the winds.
I’ve changed my ways, he says, to the dream.
Liar, it answers.
Ogun exits this reverie to find Oya hovering overhead. It’s the actual as opposed to the dream version. Today she has two mouths on each of her three faces, and a whole gathering of furrowed brows. She’s exuding the kind of air bending, breeze kicking mood that he’s seen many times before.
You best go and talk to your friend, she says and the word friend is a lemon in her mouth, sour and unwelcome. The sourness is for Shango, who she has never liked and who is still down on the ground, stomping and wielding his axe, whipping up, for no good reason at all as far as she can see, a surfeit of testosterone and ill feeling where not long ago there was simply idling and unremarkable activity. Her train of thought is broken by the sound of Ogun weeping, which causes her to sigh, which in turn causes every tree along the river to lean and sway, and random strands of hair to fly up into faces, and a man roll of a litany of curses as he loses his hat to the river. Ogun, fired up on grief, heartbreak and a leaning toward dramatic gestures, grabs his hammer and throws himself off of the roof.
Levi is holding his mother’s hand and trying to keep pace with her as she searches for somewhere to get cleaned up. His sense of balance is compromised because he is pointing upwards.
Yes, says his mother, it’s the London Eye.
But they’re flying, says Levi
Thank goodness, says his mother because she’s seen a toilet sign which is, in this particular moment, what she most wants to see.
Elegba has turned his attentions to a young woman with piercings dotted in a constellation across her face. As she adjusts the height of her microphone stand Elegba copies her stance – pelvis forward, legs wide – and when she bends to connect guitar to amp, he bends too. The woman, whose name is Malawi, is in her final year of music college and has made this exact connection hundreds of times. This why the thunderclap of feedback that hits the air, making people yelp and screw up their faces and cover their ears, lights a fire of shame in her cheeks. What Malawi sees is her own mistake, not the red trousers or the man wearing them or the sparks of red fire dust shooting out from the heels of his gold Huaraches and whispering; fight, fight, fight. Neither does she see, as she throws out apologies to her scattered audience, the axe – a particular shade of murderous intent passing within a hair of the industrial piercing on her right ear. Levi, face glistening fresh from the bathroom facilities, sees it all.
Ogun and his hammer plunge to earth within a metre of each other both narrowly missing the head of a skateboarder named Carlos. It’s a long time since Carlos has seen a basic heel flip end like this, his body skidding concrete graceless as a bowled skittle. His skateboard races ahead for some tricks of its own – banging shins and scuffing shoes, especially the shoes of strangers who are already rattled by the heat and the whispers of the red fire dust and the sudden need to be seen and heard, and rated, and respected or else. Shoulders square themselves, while lips mutter and agitated eyes bug and look for other eyes to lock with. In their busyness they don’t see the skateboard, or the quiet foot, strategically placed, that brings it to rest, not even Carlos himself, who is looking in the right direction but seeing only that one of his trucks is bent and will need money to fix. The quiet foot is one of a pair, both of which have high arches and are wearing turquoise jelly sandals sewn with cowrie shells. They smell of the ocean. Levi thinks they are quite lovely.
As a general rule, Yemaja doesn’t get involved. Age upon age of minding the oceans, examining shipwrecks and tolerating the wailing of sirens has left her both sage and hard of hearing. She is at peace with the sagging of things, personal and historical – the slump of her own belly and breasts as much as the gutter bound trajectory of world affairs in general. She’s long ago ceased to harangue the wrinkles on her face, and now tends each one like a child, thanking them for the work they have done. It’s all very quiet in Yemaja’s world, no matter the weather or time of day, even in a hullaballoo such as this, bursting with high chins and fiery words and fists at the ready and ‘let’s go then, let’s go?’ Yemaja has her finger on her lips, which Levi has learned at school means no talking, so he doesn’t talk, but watches instead, the movement of her other arm. As movements go it is barely perceptible, slow as an hour hand on a clock, the tiniest friction of wind on water, miles out to sea as it forms the start of a wave.
Riverside; a darkness slips in and all eyes are up, looking for rain, puzzling over the cloudless sky. When the water comes, not down, but up –great arcs of it, sprayed from the ground – it makes them jump, literally and, for a long enough second, forget themselves. The mechanics, the magic – all invisible. To have water on a hot day is to be heedless of who might be flicking the switch – a person inside a building doing a job, a Yoruba Goddess hushing the world. Levi’s mother, whose name is Veronique, has let her bag slide from her shoulder to catch the shot. Her son, shirtless, shoeless, artless, oblivion, in the mists of the fountains, taking a bow as the water blesses his naked back. The other shadows dance too but remain nameless; mortal and immortal side by side; the living indistinguishable from the dead.
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Foluke Taylor is a London based writer. You can find more of her writing here.
