TELL A TALE

The five hour car ride to the middle of nowhere compounded by my too-late-for-lunch arrival at a location with no phone reception whatsoever were reasons good enough for me to acclimate to the boiling room I had just dropped my backpack in and try to unwind. Yet, after a couple of hours of trying in vain, I found myself sitting in the backseat of a broken but steady enough Jeep, getting on with the touristic affair of visiting the sprawling N’Zi natural reserve outside Bouaké.

It was about 4:30 pm and the resort’s promise was to take its trusting customers on an adventurous 3-hour long ‘safari’ across the savannah but my first go-round to this same place five years prior had already taught me not to expect much more of this grand marketing vocabulary than bare trees, cranking wheels over long sinister dusty roads, sneaky mosquitoes taking a bite out of every bit of flesh exposed… and more bare trees. And, sometimes, the sight of a curious gazelle or two watching a crew of nosy bipeds yet again invading their habitat.

So I just sat quietly in the back of the truck and gave space to the six other gentlemen I was riding with, the local driver and guide chatting with a young man I later learned was an intern coming from France and a family of three German-speaking fellows, sons and dad, all absorbed by the search for wildlife. Meanwhile, I just hung there, camera in hand, waiting for something of interest to manifest itself and trusting that it would do so eventually, since, five year into my dedicated photographic journey, no more did I need seeking a picture when I could just enjoy the slight breeze denting its way through the suffocating heat, survey the fading sunrays jiggling and backlighting the trees… and wait.

Then it dawned on me:  yes, the backlit trees! The glowing sunlight caressing and shadowing their figures onto the willing sky descending upon the savannah and enveloping its visitors with a comforting embrace: there was the scene, there was the feeling, there was the story!

Right away my photographic instincts kicked in and there I was, lost inside the picture making of it all, undaunted by the human curiosity oozing nearby in the vehicle, blessing the Fujifilm engineer who first designed a bending LCD screen precisely for moments such as these when herky jerky movements over sinuous paths in the wilderness could only forbid stable photographic stance; when, instead, precise composition was to form out of the fusion of technical practice, instinctive appeal, split-second decision-making and sheer happenstance.

This is how these figurative tales were birthed onto the scene, their completion occurring a few hours later inside a finally-cooled-down-by-the-evening wooden hut serving as hotel room, accompanied by the saxophonic dexterity of one Kenny Burrell, the visual, the memorable and the musical melting onto reminiscence of traditional gatherings by the fire when elders lead youngsters to learn wisdom through vivid tales, an ancestral African tradition I was raised to hear and read about, even though the middle-class city boy in me, abandoned somewhere between the theoritical appraisal and the practical dismissal of culture, never quite experienced it.

Still, I have seen these tales amid the woodlands on a random Tuesday afternoon and felt the creative urge to encapsulate them in photographic form, a metaphor of sorts with reverence for the traditions we put aside when we bowed to ‘modernism’ as it diluted our most beautiful, useful and soulful of ancestry.