The Executioner

She came to me late one night in a long and angry dream. She came determined to protect me from attacks that only she could see.

I did not recognize her at first. I thought I had charmed the generals and diplomats whose company I sought with my own hard-won confidence and poise. I was too arrogant to see her at work, throwing herself over the eyes of the ministers, softening the edges of my face and the hoarseness of my voice, adding a glide to my clumsy walk. Seeing me through the veil of her,my audience relaxed. They shook their heads and smiled and laughed at the things I said.

She knew that I wanted to be seen as whole, as someone who had made sense of herself and yet not lost the vitality of her raw and unformed years. Someone who had arranged all the parts of her self into a coherent and appealing whole.

Looking back, I suspect that it was when I first began to speak that she shaped herself into a mask.

The language that filled my ears was muscular and throaty, and the infant that I was giggled in its cot, its tongue unfocused. As I slept, another voice invaded my dreams. It was her. She planted that voice, eager to protect me from the shame of my birth.And so arrived a split in the bed of my childhood, like a crack in a precious stone that can only be seen when the stone is held at a certain angle, against a certain light. A rift began to open between the throaty words I imagined I would soon be speaking and the angular speech that has since become my voice.

Even today, I am not sure how it happened. How it was that, surrounded by five languages, there was only one I learned. The angular one, the one in which I did not exist, the one in which I was only fit for mockery.

There are many people who, surrounded by the same voices,would have learned all five, or who would at least have learned the one that flowed into their bodies on the cream of their mother's milk, or who would have mastered

Ousmane Sow. Untitled. Photograph by Philippe Bordas. Courtesy of the artist and Editions Revue Noire

Ousmane Sow, Zulu: Shaka Woman. Photograph by Jean-Marc Tingaud. Courtesy of the artist and Editions Revue Noire

the mocking language and turned it into a dust storm that would wipe away the mockers. But she decided otherwise. She—my dissimulation. She wanted to hear me choke over the angular words until I came to crave them.

As I learned to talk,my dissimulation was busy. She threw herself over the confusion of my first words. They, too,were charmed by me, charmed by their child, charmed by the idea that my language would be clean and alien.

Despite the best intentions of countless experts,my mother's milk still tasted of the soap that had washed the words of her mother's language out of her mouth. I grew sick on this milk.My stomach became tight and angry. My dissimulation, sorcerer that she was, reappeared in the kitchen carrying a powdery yellow drink to soothe the aching in my belly. And so my mother's breasts clotted heavy and painful, then dried up barren and unused.

I grew fat on this new food. My skin became smooth and silky. My dissimulation laughed and disappeared into the forests that surrounded the compound. At night you could hear her talking to the colobus and the chimpanzee. She was jealous of the sleek black-and-white fur of the colobus, but she loved the cheeky insolence of the chimp. The nights were long and tiring, endless gossiping and cackling, but I slept through it all, absorbing the food my mother fed me, growing me into a strong and healthy child.

Ousmane Sow, Peulh: Family Scene, Baby. Photograph...