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7 When I watched the Dogoduman bird dance, the artistic force of it played me like a piano. Afterward, whenever I tried to imagine why, I always concluded that it only just began with spectacularly articulated form, at least as I was conceptualizing form. To be sure, there was ample beauty and astonishment, elegance and poetry, in the ways performers looked, drummers played, and singers sang. But there was more. In my mind the look and sound of the performance was somehow being instantaneously and constantly augmented. It was not just that content kept getting stuck to sound and appearance, although that certainly was happening. It was also that content and form did not really seem to be separate things. This fusion of elements and the larger phenomena it engendered was affect , a kind of aura that could engulf audience members with impact and inspiration , a sense of significance, a desire to contemplate and explore ideas, and even an easy inclination to let the artwork become a valuable part of one’s ongoing experience as a person in the world. This aura of affect is an often ineffable yet also tangible and sometimes nearly visceral atmosphere that seems almost to radiate from artworks and other elements of expressive culture. It can reach into the deepest ranges of our being with the same kind of powerful, even awesome presence that people frequently associate with the grandest of events or the grandeurs of nature. It is built, to be sure, from the intelligent and FORM RECONSIDERED IN MANDE LIGHT skillful union of form and content. And individual viewers contribute to it significantly, so that there is a perpetual dialogue at work among artists and audiences. But ultimately, this phenomenon of affect is a vaster thing than its components, a thick, rich, and frequently complicated amalgamation of contributions not easily dissected. It is, in a very real way, an important part of the power of art. The red of the carved bird’s head is an example of affect’s synergy. It was not just color painted over an object. It penetrated to the core of the sculpture ’s character and contributed to your impression the very instant eyes met it, making the bird more punchy and punctuated, edgy in an aggressive way that possessed just a touch of disquiet and even playful threat. All that was compounded simultaneously by Sidi Ballo’s manipulations inside the masquerade and by his high-speed movement around the arena, the lurching and the leaning sideways, and the stopping or brushing by you with ominous proximity. Later, as I learned more about the praise name Kulanjan and the rich spectrum of power and prowess it invoked, I could not think about or see pictures of that red head without simultaneously responding to a measure of additional power. It took material form, a kind of added weight, a sense of enhanced potency . The head was no longer the same thing for me as when I first saw it. More than that, because part of what the praise name Kulanjan invokes is the legendary leader Fakoli, seeing Sidi Ballo’s intensely red bird’s head instantaneously sent flashing waves of fleeting thought through me—little pinpricks of bright light about the legendary Fakoli abandoning Sumanguru, aligning with Sunjata, helping create the Mali Empire, and promoting the expansion of the powerful Kòmò secret spiritual association. This was not deliberate thinking, though I could start with just the seeing and then head in the direction of focused thought if I wanted to. But the shaping of the bird’s head through perception was freighted with much faster sensations . Thoughts and values transmuted into a visceral presence, and this transmutation was not the result of mere knowledge. By the time I went to Dogoduman, I had been steeped in Mande ideas about blacksmiths for years, had spent every day with the blacksmith Sedu Traore for nearly a year, and had experienced smiths as an outsider on the inside. I was not just very familiar with the Sunjata epic and its tales of Sumanguru, the supernatural knowledge and powers at play, and the travels and treaties and deployment of military expertise; I loved the epic and saw in the protagonist Sumanguru Kante a hero in his own right, as many Mande do. Being an honorary smith myself, my last name was Kante. In other words, my interior life was littered with personal contemplation and feeling about these heroes and West African history...

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