I—who was a slave—
and you—who were a slave but are now a stone,
are now a House of Slaves
that towers like a threat, like a lighthouse over the island,
a hundred million times brighter than the Lighthouse of the Mamelles,
which lights the way for planes and ships,
those latter-day pirates of modern civilization,
that seek to plunder the sky and the ocean waters.

Your light comes from the depths of the ages,
from the low straw huts in the savannas and ancient forests
where you sit with your wife and children,
and all of you thresh corn to bake your bread,
and no one even asks about the bread and whether it will suffice.
It is enough for you to look at the setting sun
as it weaves itself into the branches and hangs upon the thinnest of them,
so it resembles—frighteningly resembles—a bloodshot eye
that looks only at you and your family, and you tell the children:
“That is the eye of our Great Father, and the tears
that welled in him as he walked the earth
will pierce the grass and trees as light,
and all will be afraid and stop dead in their tracks: birds and wild animals,
snakes, mammals and poisonous lizards,
and an endless deep night will fall suddenly over Africa
when the sun-eye plunges into the ocean.”
And when deep night reigns over Africa
you will think you had never seen daylight.

The children huddle close to their mother,
and they all huddle close to you.
And to calm them, you tell them stories
about the good spirits, about the ancestors,
whose good fortune it was to have died in their own country,
for this is the only way to preserve the connection with the living.
With each new story the eyes of the children blaze even more,
resembling at first little flames that lap like tongues
at the edges of the forest,
but the strong wind of the stories fuels these flames
and a terrible fire flares in the children’s eyes,
threatening to burn everything in the forest.
Soon the eyes of the children begin to resemble
the sun-eye of the Great Father,
and their flames reach even here,
here to the island of Gorée—to the House of the Slaves.

Huddled against it, I am crumbling like a stone
and sinking, sinking, into this light.