A sky-blue door carries Lubaina’s shadow. The sanitiser booth is an unpicked bud. CCTV cameras, petals. Tongues caress the bloom on a pink wall.
[enter stage right]
[scene one]
We live in clothes; we live
in buildings – do they fit
us?
Women are installed in curving walls. Women are moons in orbit. Swahili fabrics sing taarab dramatically. Sheets of metal handkerchiefs perform a catharsis. Textile is eating the audience.
[scene two]
What are monuments for?
Thirty hand-painted ceramic jelly moulds. Crops. Cloves. Coconuts. Fourteen prints in the colours of a continent.
[scene three]
Sultan asks the audience members,
What does love sound like?
Crimson flowers emerge from a boat of hallucinations. A dacron sailcloth hangs from the head. Out of the sea comes a shore dancing. Bleeding in three languages. النزيف. Kutokwa na damu.
Haemorrhage.
#Old Boat/New Money
A squeaking wooden boat swallows $$$ in one gulp. A song written by the beast of the blue. Money is wet. Blau. Boat is wet. Bleu. Black is bloody wet.
[scene four]
How do you distinguish safety from danger?
Abandoned spaces stagger on the shoreline. Water is not a reflection of sky. Cowrie shells and the pristine sands overlap. The here-sea stinks. Decomposing seaweed. The else-sea smells of cloves. Danger with a safety pin. This is how you know.
[exit stage left]
*Photo by Phil Botha on Unsplash