My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Seite 52

A compass, being a compass, is always
pointing to another where. It never
absolutely “arrives.”
West Africa: an ancestral home written
into the speaker’s body, the speaker’s
blood and compass pulsing with both
distance and closeness to that Africa.
Because we are thinking of horizons,
dimensions, earth and sky, doorways
and passages, I will respectfully conjure
Legba now.

Now consider Legba’s tongue:
multilingual, the bridge between
the realms.

I should also mention that Legba is
known to use a cane and have a limp —
we will call him iambic Legba,
or swaggering Legba. A kind of
shapeshifter and gatekeeper between
the worlds. I suppose a limp or strut
might be another way of thinking
about what it might mean to be of
two (or more) worlds (the living and
the dead, the black and the white,
the straight and the slanted) at once,
a bilingual or differently accented
walk, if you will.
Lorca writes “that the duende loves the
edge, the wound, and draws close to
places where forms fuse in a yearning
beyond visible expression.” Poet
Nathaniel Mackay considers the limp
a kind of mark of the wound. I would
say that Legba knows duende very well,
or that duende comes from Legba.
In fact, it is said that blues guitarman,
Robert Johnson, met the “devil”
at the crossroads and sold his soul in
exchange for his sound, the depth
of his music. That devil is said to have
been accompanied by a dog at the
crossroads near a river. Many people
say it wasn’t the devil at all, but, in fact,
Papa Legba.
Please stay here with me for a moment
to really consider the implications of
this god/loa who could cross worlds,
shapeshift, move through doorways,
speak to the living and the dead, exist
in many times and worlds at once! In
the context of captivity, dismemberment,
terror, executions, racial and economic
brutality, Legba would have been a X.
As Komunyakaa writes in “Lost Wax”
where he “remembers” the Middle
Passage, “Legba mends hope.” X marks
the mend, the stitch, the junction.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Horizon. A kind of marker or boundary
that the compass implies we might
always move toward (again, the work
of reaching toward other worlds).

Now consider Legba’s legs: one short,
one long — limping, of two worlds.

51

Horizon: the line that separates earth
and sky, Here and There.

In West African Fon traditions and
Haitian Vodún, Legba, or Ellegua
(in Cuban and Brazilian traditions),
is the intermediary between people
and the spiritual pantheon. Legba is
the messenger. Sometimes portrayed
as an androgynous being, he is he
facilitator of speech, communication,
and understanding. Mostly father of
the doorways, he is believed to speak
all human languages. (Do you hear
Horton underneath these lines? “And
dart from world to world.”) Legba.
Translated into Christian traditions as
St. Peter or Lazrus, and often
mistranslated into Christian traditions
as a Yoruban equivalent to the devil.
In Legba’s Crossing, Heather Russell
posits that “it is in this domain
of freedom that Legba, the god of the
crossing sign, presides.” And that
salvation, or freedom, is, perhaps,
found in “the power to name, to define,
to imagine, and to create, unrestricted
and unbounded.” Komunyakaa
discusses a similar idea in his own work
in a conversation with Paul Muldoon
and Suzan Sherman in BOMB, “I wanted
a dialogue with the things around
me, to understand them. Eels, mud
puppies, cattails, Venus flytraps,
fish-looking creatures with legs called
Congo snakes, everything. I wanted
to know the names of trees, plants,
flowers. Naming became a type of
inquiry.” Perhaps there are at least two
types of naming to consider here.
The practice of learning the names of
trees, plants, flowers and, thusly, the
act of calling them by their names or
using their names. And the practice
of writing poems — which can be the
practice of naming an experience, a
practice which is always, necessarily,
steeped in a kind of inquiry.