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January 6, 2006
Interstellar Limbs
Once in Africa I bore a cramped bus ride for over an hour just to visit a garden. A botanical green caps a mountain in Aburi, outside Ghana’s capital, Accra.
For a full hot summer, our group of thirty artists from America worked in studios in Kumasi, painting or making drums or doing batik. Each day we had the same breakfast, lunch and dinner, but we learned to like fried plantains and jollof rice. We figured out how to get about on jitneys and tro tros. And when we reached Accra a few days before jetting home, we weren't new anymore. We didn't need guides.
That's why I knew I could find my way to Aburi Botanical Gardens. Some of my colleagues spent their last day sunbathing, others bought small wooden trinkets with names like "unity." The morning I took my leave of them, setting out with a camera and comfortable shoes, I felt sure I was seeing Africa raw.
Alone, I found that children didn't clamor for t-shirts, ball point pens, or my home address. They're used to Indians living among them. I was not one of what the locals unabashedly called some of my peers; "black Americans" are the more common tourists. All of us visit the old slave castle at Elmina, where at the water's edge, children field soccer balls beneath palms.
Going to Aburi, I began to relax. Close your eyes, I'll tell you how it went.
Our driver maneuvers a steep slope expertly, stopping the odd time when a wheel needs mending or another vehicle needs to pass. No hurry. The sun is bright, the sky a tantalizing azure.
The baobab trees rise from a base of elephant toes, giant and resplendent. Gnarled roots ensnare patches of earth. A grey, unruly casing engulfs a stupefying trunk, which flies up, up up into the sparkling sun. Tilt your head to follow the line, feel the stretch of the muscles in your neck. The topmost limbs, far above the playground of kites and eagles, float and cry. They flutter, interstellar.
Yet here, where you and I stand closer to the earth's core, gravity contains us. We are breathless before the broad hulk of the baobab tree base. Not even the butterflies stir.
Posted by Dipika at January 6, 2006 9:42 AM
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