Written piece
Argungu Fishing Festival.
Chidera Offor
Nigeria
About this piece
A densely visual poem of Nigeria's Argungu Fishing Festival: canoes lining a metal-grey river at dusk, fishermen throwing their weight onto the paddles at the signal, sand crushing "finely like tourmaline" beneath dancing feet, brass-billed ducks flapping in the hands of waterlogged girls, and flags springing up like flowers as the first canoe crosses.
Argungu Fishing Festival.
Dusk has left the thunder-blue sky
with scraps of darkness. Canoes line the metal-
gray river, minnows darting
underwater in flashes of silver. The fishermen are colorless
in the distance, and when the signal blasts,
each throws his weight on his paddle,
the canoes speeding off in knife-thin trajectories,
the water surface rippling
like a corrupted film.
Laughter and music twin behind
in festive braid, turning, together with the crowd
and the racing fishermen whose overworked elbows
are salved by the sun-heated wind,
around the steep banks. Blanched sands beneath
the women’s dancing feet
crush finely like tourmaline, purified by these tidal baths
while currents are stirring up to form
long, sinusoidal arcs;
brass-billed ducks, a cluster of them
to the far East side, flap hysterically in the hands
of young, waterlogged girls.
Watching, breath-held, the first canoe crosses the finish line,
green and red and white flags
spring up like flowers,
perfume the air with joy. Perfect pleasure, skimming
like a contagion among this heterogeneous
audience, of nerve-racking roars,
the unstoppable omnivores scuttling
from end to end, though every face, it seems, has been
marbled into the dark. Light
pilfered from their eyes, the sickle moon
clawing the greater emptiness that sketches above,
nothing beyond the imagined,
the smoke-filled worship that binds sons
to their fatherland, a language that begins but shall
never come to end at the tip
of the dying tongue. It is the gift of an age,
this union, this unguarded intercourse we partake of
with the river, never again are we
the same, arranged carefully like offerings
around this article of fire, its elaborate sparks
rushing out with the heat;
all these simple-minded boats sailing the tide
below which there is
only abeyance;
it is the gift of grace: the becoming that follows
the shedding away of our fragile skins,
on this land where gods are made
drunk, losing their lofty positions among men
who have caught the night stars
with their dragnets. Here:
holy trawling shore, flat and sharp-sanded,
promising anchorage to those who ride the waters
farther into the unknown,
who, in returning, now bear the mark of freedom,
this gravity of discovery, mouthful
of stories. But right now,
we’re swept past the scaffolding; the fire
wilting finely into ash, the women’s
cymbals, the drumming men,
all of it coming to a stop,
silence
walling us in.