Take this island like a dose of medicine. To heal your centuries of wandering. Find yourself here. As if in a dream. Emerging from the mists of afternoon thunder storms.
The earth smells new, there is already a place for your footprint in the soft ground. In your ears the sound of freely flowing water.
It is easy to overdose here. It is easy to prescribe yourself too much of this healing. Be careful not to poison yourself with this island medicine.
He emerged fully grown and dripping. Old already. He had formed himself in the depths of the blackest part of the pitch lake’s womb.
Pick this, it is a plant whose name you do not know. Its leaves are pungent enough to make your mouth wet with desire.
It smells of lost childhood. When you ate mangoes by the bucket and licked the tiny rivers of juice that ran down your arms.
And then you danced and washed yourself in the rain and disemboweled a thousand rain flies to see how their insides looked.
Put it in your mouth and wince. It is much more bitter than you expected.
Weep now for your lost childhood. Weep now for children disemboweled like a thousand rain flies. Step over their broken bodies. The smell of rain and earth and blood is everywhere.
The bitumen smell follows him. Silent as falling Poui flowers he walks in the forest picking leaves and pulling roots.
Drink this. Taste this island on your tongue, cool and wet. You have not ever known sweetness like this. Feel it in your throat. Feel it spreading through your body. Feel this island under your skin. Feel yourself expand and explode with understanding. Let this island medicine intoxicate you. Let the liquor dance a spirit dance in your veins.
He carries a staff and a bag made of the skin of animals. He thanks the spirits of these animals for their sacrifice.
Eat this. It is the texture of dawn. The strings wedge themselves in your teeth.
Let them stay there for the rest of the day as joyous reminders of the moment when your hunger was sated. Nourish yourself on fruits and plants that spring out of fecund earth with a startling greenness. The landscape was edible once, but these days the only plants they want to grow are industrial. This place on your tongue is a thousand lacerations of fruit eaten before it is ripe.
Only the most powerful of priests dare enter the forest in search of his healing medicines.
Take this island at face value. It is so beautiful sometimes you have to shield your eyes from the glare. Imagine that no anger simmers behind those eyes.
No resentment ever got between those lovers in their strangling embrace. The people are in love with this here and this now. Obsessed with its youth and beauty. Expect that everything is alright. The sun shines and people smile and shake their beautiful backsides to festival music. It is the happiest sad place you have ever seen.
He is calling you into the bush. You have nothing to fear.
This is the bush bath you have been looking for. Sap your skin with leaves.
Waterfalls pound your head into shape. Let the sea beat your longing out of you.
Let your confusion pour from your nose. Cough up your inhibitions. Spit them into the waves. Tumble and let the water kiss your shoulders. Sit in the sand and watch the horizon for your returning joy. The sea is wide and loud here. And rocks jut out at strange angles from the sand. The sea roars in your ears and all you want to do is sleep.
His eyes see much more than his mouth says. Walking by himself in the moonlight.
See this place, but not with your eyes. See things that may or may not be there.
Let it delude you into thinking that everything is alright. But you sense spirits here. Angry spirits and playful ones. Restless spirits to whom no priest or pundit bid farewell. Silent ones who appear to you in dreams. You do not know their names. They demand recognition. You have forgotten them. Like the names of your ancestors. Strange names of disparate tongues, from far-flung places.
Sometimes, when the moon is full and the Poui is bright you can see him dancing in the places where electric lights have no power.
Call this island’s name. Like it is the name of your God and you are a most willing devotee. See God in everything. And when you pray, ask for understanding.
And when you can tell the difference between shadow and spirit, when your eyes get used to the darkness, you will find that this island is your greatest fear and your last chance for salvation.
Can you see him moving there in the shadows?
Can you distinguish his skin from the bark of those trees?
Walk this island. Feel it shudder under the weight of all the stories. It bucks and splutters and spits too. It vomits oil and pitch and volcanic mud. Feel the heat suck at your toes and understand why sometimes the people themselves, every twenty or so years, need to explode and purge themselves of their rotted politicians. Don’t ever stop moving. The hot pitch might absorb you. Swallow your feet. Solidify around your ankles and leave you rooted there, stagnating your progress. This island is the medicine and the sickness too.
Meanwhile in the shadows of their skyscrapers, the children of forgotten gods confuse progress with trinkets.
Take this island as high science. Draw up equations to solve the mystery of how an island can make you love its ugliness so. How do these Gods walk past you in the market? Shiva opens a coconut and the universe spills its water at your feet. Jesus begs you to buy his king fish. Oshun sells you honey in a recycled rum bottle. They have forgotten that they are Gods because they too have fallen hopelessly in love with this place.
He dances for his children. For the children he has lost to other Gods. Gods who do not know the healing powers of plants. Gods who do not walk in the bush and speak the language of poisonous snakes.
Dance in the clearing where you saw them dance in your dreams. They watch you from the shadows, like they watch a young democracy on this old island.
They watch and smile at how their dances are remembered in the Carnival. This freedom dance of death and loss and rebirth. Dance like devils and sailors and kings and ten thousand feathered bird women who have not yet learned to fly.
When you find him, will you know him?
Will you weep when you look into his eyes?
Take this island as a sacrifice. There are many Gods to appease with the blood that flows freely. The roads are hungry for blood. Pray that it is not yours that will be spilt. The molten pitch has a taste for the flesh of young men. The young men have a taste for the blood of their women.
It is paradise lost. A paradise of loss. This is where you come to find yourself.
This is where much has disappeared. Into the forest. Into canefields. Into drains choked with the carcasses of decimated trees. Where douens are now gangsters and the blood sucking soucouyant is your Member of Parliament.
If you call his name he may not answer. He appears only when you need him most.
Take this island now and put it in your pocket.
Like a tiny, bizarre trinket that you find on some North Coast beach. You wonder briefly where it has come from. How it reached this particular shore. What trials and tribulations have rubbed against it to give it this shape and this smooth shiny beauty. Hold it in your fingers, up to the sunlight. Keep it safe. Everything here is so very precious.
You will find him when you least expect it. Walking next to you. Dark and silent.
Among the lost things of this island find yourself whole again.
In paradise. New. In an old man’s bag of medicine. In ancient words that you cannot understand. In moonlit bush kissed by the lips of rain swollen clouds. You are healed now. No money can pay for this medicine. No thanks can be said for a pain that slips quietly into the night. You wake sweating from your dreams. If that is what this place is. A dream of what could be. Of what is possible when Gods forget their way home. When they choose the market instead of heaven.
When spirits dance like this piece of earth is a newborn star and the hills echo with the sounds of their drums and their laughter and the places in the earth already prepared for their footprints.
