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The Open Boat

by Lamin Fofana

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about

« And returning myself to the West Indies in 1962, I became aware that the islands themselves were as much geographical extensions of Africa as they were Atlantic outriders and off-shoots of the American continent. There was, in fact, a remarkable physical and meteorological link with West Africa largely ignored by or invisible to geographers and totally missing from our common consciousness. It was this: in December to about February every year, a drought visits the islands. The green canefields take the golden deciduous crispness of scorched parchment. The blue sky burns muted. The dry air rivets the star nights with metallic cold. It is our tropical winter. This dryness, unexplained, is put down to “lack of rain.”
But living in St. Lucia at this time, I watched this drought drift in towards the island, moving in across the ocean from the east, obscuring Martinique, obscuring sails beating towards Castries. And I suddenly realized that what I was witnessing - that milky haze, that sense of dryness - was something I had seen and felt before in Ghana. It was the seasonal dust-cloud, drifting out of the great ocean of Sahara - the harmattan. By an obscure miracle of connection, this Arab’s nomad wind, cracker of Fante wood a thousand miles beyond, did not die on the seashore of West Africa, its continental limit; it drifted on, reaching the New World archipelago to create our drought, imposing an African season on the Caribbean sea. And it was these winds too, and in this season, that the slave ships came from Guinea, bearing my ancestors to this other land.
And so the poem grew… »

- Kamau Brathwaite, Rights of Passage, Volume I, liner notes (Argo KPLPC 1110)

credits

released August 26, 2022

Written & Produced: Lamin Fofana
Artwork: Jim C. Nedd
Design: Simone Trabucchi
Recorded in 2021 during an Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in Stuttgart with support from Haus der Kunst, Munich and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York.

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