after the photography project, Sissi Barra (“Smoke Work”) by Joana Choumali

In the morning, you are white as mercy, brown as a bittern’s wing, gray as goats’ breath after rain. In the dusk, you are crimson as a coxcomb, blue as a whetstone, black as a shovel at day’s end. You knuckle me like a right hook; each eye a lozenge, weeping ash. You scissor my appetite. My heart is a shard getting darker and darker.

//

I was born in the Bardot dust, not far from the barking sea. I played in sawdust squalls, and on scabbed logs crisscrossing the sewage. When I was eight, my mother took me to the sawmill dump. The men sat in the warehouse while we picked through the dregs — trashwood, treebarks, coconut shells. We hitched a ride home and rigged the charcoal oven. A whip of smoke curled like an agouti’s tail. The fire bucked, a darkling mare, its mane a hammerfall of flames. The oven bawled, its tears blessing the blueing wood. A day later, its slow and beaten scent smouldered to prayer. Together, we broke the oven open and collected its ebony trinkets with grateful palms.

//

Ashes hail a frail parchment. I shove through smoke’s first lather, the fields shrieking its stench. Charcoal stubs poke through dunes like blunt snouts. I skitter across cinders. The heat a lit wick hitting me again and again. Sweat caramelizes my neck. A cough corkscrews my chest, my lungs sardined of air. The rain welts my body as my mother watches from the eaves. At night, I sink like an anvil into the mud.

//

A colony of bones unfurls, your clawed hands brushing my ribs. But I keep working. Because all my potential lives within your darkness.

//

Charcoal is a crop like any other. I stockpile patience. I work for a pittance. My tithe measured in the drenched hours, in San Pédro starlight. 

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I gather you in my arms, skin stippled white, sprigs of hair still damp. I clean your body with seawater, chant psalms into the seashell curl of your ear, bury you under the bana tree. I offer fresh water, kola nuts, millet flour and saliva so you may ascend to your ancestors. My half-winged daughter, I invoke the smoke to accompany you.

//

How do I dispel the night’s viscera? By naming the invisible. Her name was Lolo: star.

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We billow in the ovens’ afterglow, in that breach between darkness and deed. Our shadows, supple as spiders, swim through the air. As we breathe, we are eaten by smoke. A slow cleaving of soul from body, so we may vanish one day into a light taller than trees.

//

Widowed by smoke, we must find our own way. We sow wings of ash upon our backs.