19 OKAPI I know the field of grass is green, but my eyes know different knowings. To them green burns black and white sun splinters blades like bad memory or the legs of the okapi the students work to draw from inside their hut. The teacher carries on her head a basket of stones, and gives each student one. Your own stone, she says, has all you’ll ever need to draw the great animal. Feel its shapes in your hands. See its shadows on the paper. Trace its ridges as a compass. Press it hard and it will give itself until it is no longer. I see students tap pencils. Hear them groan at the task. But cast in the air’s canvas is the gang-raped teacher 20 who tells me only that it was “by more than ten” last week. Who tells me the choice: stay home and starve or leave to fields for food and be raped. Something about the silence of a place where wails were. Something about how violence seals itself silently within us and we sometimes carry on. [44.202.128.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:38 GMT) 21 “The war against infectious disease has been won.” — U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart, 1969 ...