An image came to my mind. Not an
image I constructed on my own, but that which gradually builds after an
expanded moment of silence. It's the image of a path, not really a straight
path, but a set of dots that I'm trying to link, one to another.
It
was two generations before my father's, that began a series of amnesia, in
which I have inherited and now struggling to remember. Willingly or not, I can
do nothing else. When I dance I get flashes and I remember, but this
remembering escapes me as soon as I stop dancing...
But
I have to remember, though I don't know why I have to, what will be the object
of this remembering? Perhaps to see if, in answer to the question 'who are you
in the world?' with my great grand father – that
Owu warrior – in mind, I'd say without qualification, ‘I’m a descendant of
warriors'? Or to determine if, to such question I could reply that I was
someone else's property, the matter on which someone else exercised right of
arrogation, the object that in the hands and mind of another once received the
form of a thing.
...Then, what is this thing,
and why must this thing remember?
An anxious flight from boredom? A
desire to be free from oneself and from one's pitiful existence? What is this
theatre other than that of a long finger that stops, looks around, points and
pokes at somebody – anybody blameworthy – pours out its feelings, and returning
to contact, presses, wounds, crouches and chews up, swallows, digests and...
Excretes?
Yes! Excretes, this filthy excrement
is what remains of this long probing finger, loaded with our blood line,
through this excrement we know what have murdered us, it is the compressed sum
of our evidence, the age old seal of that arduous process of digestion, without
which, all would remain hidden forever.
