At Night All Blood is Black

To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.

To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple.

To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the

“I AM THE SHADOW THAT DEVOURS ROCKS,

Nothing could enter into the insides of my head. I know, I understand that the memory of my mother had calcified the entire surface of my mind so it was hard like a tortoise’s shell. I know, I understand that there was nothing beneath this shell but the void of waiting. God’s truth, the space where knowledge would have gone was already occupied. So I preferred to work in the field, to dance and wrestle to prove the extent of my powers, to not think about the impossible return of my mother, Penndo Ba

I didn’t know how to chase my mother from my mind except by exhausting my body.

Then my mother looked at me intensely one last time to cement my image in her memory

What brings a drawing on a piece of paper to life is the play of shadow and light.

Maybe my mind began to doubt the voice of duty, too well heeled, too well dressed to be honest. Maybe my mind was already preparing to say “no” to the inhuman laws that pass for humane.

The seven hands that I have left are like my smile, they show and hide simultaneously the destomaching of enemies that makes me explode with secret laughter.