Aboubakar’s father, a diamond dealer, died when he was young, and his mother, a merchant who traded through West and Central Africa, sent him to live with an uncle in Paris when he was eleven. His uncle was a TV actor who had married a French woman, and in his house Aboubakar suffered the pains of exile, French racism, and his uncle’s neglect and violence and forced domestic work. He eventually ran away from his uncle’s house and lived on the streets for several years, until a friend of his uncle’s wife, a French woman who had always been kind to him, insisted he come to her house.
The woman provided him with safety, and something opened, he explained. He needed to express something inside of him.
“I started to think about art when I was fifteen years old. My father always said, ‘Man must make an education.’ I was the only boy in my family. In Mali I had been very spoiled, but I knew I had to make my own way now.” He began to draw and went to night school to study ceramics and sketching. “I began learning calligraphy then. I really needed a discipline,” he said, because the vagaries and dangers of Paris were taking over.
With calligraphy, he became fascinated with the idea of “putting one’s life inside the strokes.” It became the same thing with indigo: “Your being is in that vat.” Aboubakar studied indigo in books, remembering what he’d learned as a child about the bush. He became “obsessed with the impossibility of things. How did blue come from these leaves?” Calligraphy had taught him that language was an art and not an exact science. When he read formulas of indigo, none were the same. He took from them the idea that the dye vat held living organisms requiring care and understanding.
“It was not intellectual, not a science. At that age, I was a big baby who missed love. This suggested something deeper, something of the spirit, and I became more obsessed with it.”
When he returned to Mali after seven years, he traveled around the country and to Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and to Guinea, where he encountered indigo. “I took a trip to Dogon. Dogon is the site of the earliest identified woven African textile—a hat with indigo-dyed threads from the eleventh century worn by the Tellem peoples, the original inhabitants of what is now Dogonland. The women there were using chemical dyes and balls of indigo in the same vat. I had tried growing a vat by then—you literally grow organisms to get indigo dye—but it did not work.” The mystery and seeming impossibility and his awareness of the erosion of Mali’s environment and ancient cultures drove him even harder.
He returned to France and began working as a freelance graphic designer for large advertising companies. He married and had children, but he continued to be drawn back to Dogon country. “I returned there many times, and I would argue with the women about using a chemical process. Twenty years ago you could find many dye pots, but they were already using caustic soda and synthetic powders. Today you can hardly find a dye pot. It’s too hard to get dark colors without synthetic agents, they would argue. Many of the women didn’t know how to use the vat correctly. They were more interested in making cloths quickly so that they could get profits for each five-day market. They thought I was stupid. Some of them, at the end of all my talking, would ask me to bring a barrel of synthetic dye to make money.”
By then Aboubakar was beginning to have success with the dye pot, and he was having success in France as a calligrapher and an artist. He got a foundation grant to study in Japan with the master dyer, Masakazu Akiyama.
Today he lives between France and Mali, where he has started an initiative for organic farming. It could be argued that he is the only person living in West Africa who practices a wholly natural, wholly organic dye process rooted in ancient technique, which he flexes with Japanese knowledge.
“I have one woman who helps me who can do the whole process. She really understands indigo. She was working as a washerwoman when we met, and my family would pay her to bring water from well. I began to train her to wash the cloths from the dye pot; they require special care and washing. After seven years she understands it; indigo is inside her. I can trust her with everything.
“The vats are my children. I name each one, names from our spiritual tradition. You know, there truly is life inside indigo. You have to learn a respect for that life. It depends on faith. The interaction with the dye pot is like an interaction with faith. It took me many years to understand and master this. You are in a relationship with that life. These organisms—I know all their needs. I need to hear them to know what they need and then they can give me all the beautiful things that I need. You interact with the dye pot with an ultimate trust and pure heart. With indigo, I feel like someone who is honest. I feel no conflict in myself, just completeness, and I am far away from everything of the world. As much as I care for them, they adopt me.
“Every time I begin a new vat, it’s like the first time, and I become really proud at the end of the life of the vat. The last shades are a very light blue, called ‘blue naissance.’ Blue birth. It is the color of a bluish eggshell.
“The freshness of the color at the end of the vat gives me goose bumps, something like a first memory. I feel like I gave the vat the best—everything. It is the happiest time for me, but also a kind of mourning.”
Aboubakar told me that many times he killed the vat, which lives with a delicate alchemy, and mourned his lack of attention to something—the wrong balance of heat and light, a moment of inattention, tainted water or something else that might disturb the vat’s alkaline balance. “Indigo teaches me to be humble in life. There is something bigger and taller than me; I am nothing. How can so much beauty and hugeness come from that tiny leaf? It is like trying to understand God—you cannot in a lifetime understand everything of indigo. You cannot really put words to the emotion. I’m looking for my own shades inside of these blues. I’m sure I cannot ever find them. When I find them, I will no longer have interest. When I find them, I will die.
“Marabout is a title that carries a lot of negative assumptions—but my spiritual father is a marabout for lack of a better word. My parents were both followers, disciples of a great medicine man, a marabout. He taught them much about plant medicine and cosmology. My mother was a modern woman; she fed me with Similac and not the breast. She and my father had a fancy car, a high life. But they were followers. My teacher was also his disciple. He tells me, “God is the father of the fatherless. Indigo is the mother and father. Dream. Target. And love.”
Indigo is love.
Part III
The taste of life
Twelve
It’s Never Late, New York City
Accra farewells are so intimate. You leave your beloved at the airport, and in the middle of the big city, if you are near the coast and the flow of air traffic, pick that very plane out overhead. The roaring sky and exhaust are a long reprise on your good-bye. From the plane, I looked out my window and could mark the yellow glare of the Irish pub just before the junction at Eurama’s. I knew that she and Lady Diana would be sitting in the shop, Senam the tailor across from her, and they would run into the street to wave at me passing overhead.
“My dear, stop all of this cloth cloth cloth! You have every cloth in the world. Even the beautiful ones, you now have them!” Eurama had said as I stood with her at the airport with all my anxious booty, packed into bags and a trunk—a large black metal box painted with red crescents that many women used to store their cloth. Her kids had taken it to Kojo Signwriter and had “Yaa McKinley”—Yaa the name for a Thursday-born child—emblazoned near the lock. As we packed my things into the car, she and her sisters and some of the area women offered a litany of advice: how to eat and stay slim; how to handle my money so that I could continue to care for Kwale, who was now enrolled in school and living full time at Eurama’s; how to conduct myself back in New York now that I had some blue sense; and how not to disappoint them by becoming a stranger again.
“You could not be more a part of us. We are your family. Whatever you don’t have in America, you have it in Ghana! You have to settle down. Stop
all of this restless journeying. It’s time for you to have a child—even just one child—so that you can finally taste life. I beg-o! Then you bring us that child, and we will put it at our back and carry it! I would love to carry your baby! But I want to feel like these our prayers for its very hard-headed mother, who lacks patience but not beautiful things, have been heard.”
From Accra you fly in a long arc, northwest over the Sahara. As the hours progressed, I watched the line on the map on the screen slowly grow long. From Bamako to Kayes in Mali. To Nouakchott, Mauritania. Morocco. Then suddenly we seemed to be flying with absurd speed north toward Scotland.
I tried to settle into sleep, to force myself to surrender to being flung across space and into a kind of mourning. What would it mean to live at home in New York now, without Eurama and my people in Accra, without daily cloth and its stimulation in the eye, without being a part of others in the way I’d finally stitched together communitas.
As soon as I settled against the armrest, I heard a tense whisper: “Owufo!”
Farther up the aisle, a stewardess tore the plastic cover and unfurled a Ghana Airways blanket. She settled it over a man I’d watched all morning, handsome, dignified in his suit and bowler hat, a style Ewe men favored, bent over in a wheelchair that his daughter was pushing. Our departure had been delayed for nearly eight hours, the plane held by the Saudi government for clearance of funds. I had checked my bags and gone to Makola with Eurama to do her shopping, and come back to find him sitting in the same position.
The Westerners aboard the plane were oblivious to the death until we landed at Kennedy Airport many hours later and the plane was held to await a police inquiry. But unable to sleep, I had sat up, aware of the whispered comforts and sympathies, the benedictions passed around. I clutched a bag with my feet; it held my most precious indigo, among them mourning cloths. His death seemed another reprise on my journeying. I had often worried that I was courting death by collecting them. Perhaps it was a bit of magical thinking, but what did his death now mean?
One day soon after my return I traveled to Stamford, Connecticut, to visit my grandmother. When I alighted from a taxi, I saw her at the top of the long stairs up to the house surveying spots of ice. She didn’t hear well, didn’t notice that my car had arrived, and I stood looking at her. The house was forested by white birch trees and cedars as red-brown as West African earth; the weak sun filtered a white-gray light so that everything appeared blanched; and her white skin, white curls, and white wool hat disappeared into the tableau. The deep blue mohair coat she wore looked set ablaze. In the weeks after returning home, I felt like I lived with stunned senses. I was starved for color and visual complexity as I walked the desolate streets, a feeling as acute as my loneliness for human company. I had seen my grandmother in that coat, in that pale winter landscape, many times before. The coat was part of the iconography of my childhood, of her life commuting to New York City where she ran her late husband’s elevator company. I realized then that it was something about that figure, and the contrasts of starkness and blue fire, that I had probably always been seeking, both in cloth and in human attachments.
My phone rang, and she heard its low pitch and looked up at me. I waved to her as Eurama’s voice carried from the phone.
“One Alhaji Taiwo arrived here this very early morning. I heard water in the pipes, and I was at the tap filling buckets. Everyone in the house was asleep. I saw this dirty traveler over the wall, and I was worried, Papa! I said, ‘Ah, what four a.m. news is this? It is only death at this hour.’ He said he was from Ibadan. Your friend Peju gave him directions to my place. You know these Nigerians, they can travel. He wouldn’t stay; he wouldn’t let me boil water for tea. So, anyway, my dear, your indigo is in. There is a note in it from Peju. I’ll wait and see who is coming to your end and send it to you.”
My grandmother stood watching me, smiling. “Well, look at you! You’ve come back; we’ve probably only lost the African half of you!”
Two months later, in the depth of a winter storm, I trekked from Hell’s Kitchen out to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to a convent, to meet the sister of a woman whom Eurama had met and who received the parcel from a visitor in Accra from Tulsa.
Packed between ground cassava for eating and a bottle of Eurama’s famous shitor pepper was an exquisite cloth. Folded inside of a brilliant treasure—a piece of old adire that the cloth seller at the University of Ibadan guesthouse had given to Peju, a regular at the club, for me—was a blue and white Vlisco cloth, designed with a pattern of lovely round disks.
“You know this one: ‘It’s Never Late,’ “Eurama told me when I called. “That one is for your baby! Hurry up and have one so you don’t disappoint me.”
My son was eight weeks old when Eurama arrived to “bath for him.” Standing in my living room, she wrapped him in his cloth and put on the gold jewelry she had ordered. White waist beads to measure how he was growing, to hold his diapers, were instead wound on my wrist, confounded by Pampers. We put honey on his lips, then salt, representing life’s sweetness, its coarseness, and whispered his name to him.
“Oh, obruni! You need to give him a proper ceremony!”
She was the first to put him on her back, to ease him into being carried. She stayed on until he was three months old, doing the work of a grandmother.
And when my daughter was born two years and a month later, I talked to Eurama in Accra from the hospital.
“Ayeeko! Well done. Now you are fully mother! You have two children for America and this our Kwale for Ghana. Hei! I forgot to tell you! She is menstruating. I took some of the money you sent and I’ve bought her first cloth. Imagine!”
She laughed when she told me that she was on her way to a family meeting for an aunt who had died. “I’m wearing the jeans you gave me. They are going to say America has spoiled me, but I won’t mind them!”
One morning I awoke at dawn to my daughter’s cries, fed her, and began the day, but by seven-thirty A.M., I was overcome with fatigue, teetering. I collapsed into a deep sleep, leaving the children to their father, oblivious to everything until the phone rang at 8:05.
“It’s not good,” my grandmother’s caretaker, Abena, said.
I bathed quickly, carried my daughter on my back, left my son with his father, and took the train to Stamford. When I arrived, I walked past the priest and my grandmother’s neighborhood friends to the bedroom, impatient with the ceremony, the greetings. My grandmother lay on her bed, in a nightgown. The bed was made up as it would be in Ghana, with layers of lace-edged sheets. A shock of white hair stuck out at the crown from beneath the belt of her terrycloth bathrobe, tied neatly near her ear, holding her mouth closed.
No one much dies at home anymore in America, not as a plan. I knew she was going but had left for the night, hoping that I would be able to return the next morning, or that my mother would arrive from Vermont before it happened. I could hear the wind escaping her, her hands felt like they had become only bone, and I hoped that she would be without us for only a few hours. I could not stay—I had my children with me. My daughter was just three months old, and she had been born with a cleft lip and palate, a rift in the continents of flesh that make up her face. She needed care that I could give her only at home.
Suddenly I felt very capable, adept, taking on the will of the women I’d known in Accra, making calls to family members and to the funeral home and police while I nursed my daughter.
In West Africa mourners gather to witness the end of a life. They embrace the head and begin to pour liquor and herbs into the body even as the person is dying, to give them comfort and preserve the corpse. I felt guilty that I had not been there to ease my grandmother’s way, that I did not let myself openly love her and allow her to know she was mourned right until she slipped away. She died as singly as she had lived.
Out in the yard, my mother, who arrived too late, stood tearless and quiet under the rush of breeze in the cedar trees that my grandmother had loved and had seemed
a part of. She had spoken about them even as she was dying. The body, encased, sterile, was lifted into the undertaker’s SUV pulled up onto the lawn. We would not encounter it again until it was burned down to ash.
As the body was being taken out, Abena sat in the kitchen eating sardines and kenkey. Kenkey is eaten with the hands, and it had repulsed my grandmother, causing her to lash out about “people” and “their mouths.” “What is it that you find so great about these Africans?” my grandmother demanded.
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