Disciplines:
How many voices
How many songs, how many stories under starry nights
How many were happy or willing,
How many glances, caresses and kisses
How many, to create the shape of me?
How many blessings, ceremonies, how many feasts did it take?
How many foreheads touching, giggles and outbursts of joy
How many wrongs never made right, fits of rage, and curses carried by the wind
How many opinions, rumours, whispers and secrets, nightmares and dreams
How many roads, crossroads, road trips did it take
How many rivers, shores and horizons
How many arrivals and departures,
For each one of them to meet
How many memories, lies, disasters, miracles
How many fevers, aches and pains
How many forest, jungles, fields,
fed them, healed them, sheltered them
How many hands and how much blood did it take to create me
How many hunters, farmers, and killers
We can’t all come from queens and chiefs,
If I claim the peasants, the thief, the orphan
How many live vicariously through me
How many tears, fears, screams
In the night, Or under the scorching sun…
How many crossings of the Atlantic
How many transactions
How many plantations
How much loss
How many held machetes, started fires, killed a master
How many battles, did it take
How many steps took me here…
Am I my ancestors first snowflakes
I must be… for most of them…
How far removed of a relative are you to me
Which ancestor do you and I have in common
How many ancestors did it take to make me?
Trying to understand how to live together, work together. How to lead and be lead. How to see others and be seen.
To work together, we must see each other, see ourselves.
To see all the shoulders (and everything those shoulders carried) we stand on, to better understand all the shoulders our collaborators also stand on…
Each question is a search, a journey that keeps my awareness alive.
