Eclipse

At a slave port in Dahomey, old Benin Republic

All night, they had waited for the Captain's blast—an initiation into a ritual, piercing as a dark prophecy—so that the ship would sail away from the piersinto a future unfolding in fetters.There seemed to be an urgency on the sea,a rhythm of narrowness,and it was unlike the tune they had learnt:To be wide and free like this water.Ripples too, the sheer liturgy of liquid bodies.Held within the crevices of each ripplewere tossed dreams, rehearsed scenesand unheard songs, the lexicon of memory and wisdom told in Bariba, Fon and Fula,unwinding, reeling into that Dahomeyan pallorand the soft pockets of the sea. And for once,they knew their dreams too would ebbinto a patina speaking only in whispers,the language of a body speaking to itself.                                *Bariba, Fon and Fula are dialects in Benin Republic