Moko Jumbi Incantation
Things scribbled in margins. The spilled fruit-seed of gardeners, linguists, carvers, in their crossings, hauntings, meridian measurings; a constant shifting of the phantom cargo of memory, interweavings, trailings, pathways. I pause at the crossroads, as Eshu arrives:
Hear me now: ecoutez bon, digame lo que pasaba– stories from the perfumeries of Sevilla, of los negreros del rio Guadalquivir, los conquistadores buscando el oro, los barcos dolorosas,the stenching folly of the Oyibo – tell me everything.
From under this hash and hex, by the throwing off of murk, mud, pushing through jetsam, in this way, newness shakes its holy dusted head and leaps into the world: hybridizing, creolizing, conjuring from the sprawl and depth of the Carib, from African hinterlands, from the debt bond courts of India… Yes, newness comes swirling into the sweep of archipelago, sliding across the chopping stilts of moko jumbie: Eshu is alive:
Digame. Stirring. Dicing. Confusing memory. Invoking the global apocalypse of rising waters, set to cast under the port of London, the port of New York, the West’s ruins-to-come to be as ancient and fascinating in this future as the Roman relics of now.
Ecoutez bon.The modulations, mutations, hallucinogens. Watch the stilt dancers, measuring the moments from the overwhelm with the arc of their stilts. The swivel of their compasses. Destiny made manifest.
Nemesis nemesis nemesis an unravelling, a doubled display of fear doubled consciousness tripled, flung into a trillion synapses carrying the old voltages, channeling heat to light new fires. Horned, gored, grooved, the mutating voices disappearing into valleys to be transmogrified, becoming tin, pan, the quake-rattle kish-boom that leaps from island to island, hopping from continent to continent declaring renewal, newness, in a syncopated, shimmering burst of brilliance
Don’t ask me. Qu’est ce qu’il dit, lo que creen, lo que piensan, pues hay cosas que no podemos entender, no podemos (sobre)vivir
Never still. They rock constantly, They leap back in time, shaken by the tunneling, the pathways, conduits, viaducts, the signallings of the Orishas. High and far-seeing. Dancing futures, stomping the dust-beat of future trials, future visions, hailing the rendez-vouz of future victories. They tower over us. We can only crane our necks, behold them, read the scattered bones of their divinations.
Song For Eshu and Moko
Eshu, trickster of the first order
You, who can leap across borders
Eshu, you linger at the cross roads
Smoke, mirrors, confusion, your mute codes
Moko who can stare into the horizon sun
See all the trials that have been and that may come
Eshu, God of a thousand faces
Moko, stepped from a thousand places
Eshu, how many crossroads will we step and face?
Moko, how many rant-raves-riddles will we needs must hunt and chase?