A Patterned Travel Narrative

Wooo! After hours and hours of meticulous drawing, I’ve completed my final illustration. I’ve got calluses on my fingers from gripping me pen and my right hand seems permanently clenched. But I’m incredibly pleased with the final result, it really encompasses all my drawing styles and the diversity of patterns that I’ve found here. And there’s just so many stories hidden throughout the piece. I look forward to sharing it with you back home…and I’m also looking forward to working in3-D for my next project.









And here’s a little piece I wrote for our final presentations last night. We invited all of our host families and mentors for a “spectacle,” a performance cabaret of sorts at our house. I did a spoken word narrative that explained the illustration, though having this translated into Bambara was, um, interesting since it got fairly conceptual and abstract...


This story begins with a prophecy in August,
a hint from a jinn, or Erica’s Larium.
A cat walks silently, no flesh, just bones
and patters its soft pads to hide in the folds of her subconscious.

It’s only in Timbuktu that it reveals itself,
empty and hung like shoes tossed over a wire.
It’s creepy, iconic, and humorous for those with dark humor,
a cat eaten by kids, left for us toubabs to discover.
Just one image of many, from two weeks of Mali travel
that repeats in my mind and the minds of those traveling with me.

We travel by van, with more people than seats.
Every space is occupied, this jigsaw of limbs.
“Your feet’s in my face, my hand grabs your thigh, and someone’s head’s in my crotch.”

We jump on the bumps when we forget to slow down,
With rattles and vibrations sent from the ground.

My mind flies above, to the future and past,
to anything that avoids this discomfort of now.

I meet Erica outside, content in the sky
and she explains she only travels by wing.
From these heights, she can spy houses below,
squares and rectangles that jumble together
and crowd and sprawl outward through the savannah.

She unzips her vow of silence
to sing a song of penguins
who peck until they pop through her confines of speech.
It’s gravity, not freedom, that carries them into the sunset,
since they’re penguins after all
and penguins can’t fly.

The grass writhes with an undercurrent of snakes
and they mingle with the ghosts of newly crashed penguins.
In darkness they wait for weary travelers in Segou
and whisper promises of a restless sleepless hot night.

We rise to visit, the island of Djenne
and arrive as the sun sets with the wide shadows of dusk
We watch the edges of buildings blend together
and only our minds continue the lines
to make sense of the doorways and rooftops and windows.

At night, the island wears its darkness with ease.
No street lamps to show where our dusty feet walk.
But the stars and the moon are enough for us wanderers
who walks past the mud mosque that silently watches.
A massive shadow in the twilight of stars.

Next, in the hot market of Mopti we wait
and fend of these hustlers, our “brothers” and “cousins”
and sit amongst piles of drying fresh fish.

Jake and Kunal sneak off around dusk
and return with success, a wine bottle in hand.

We swig periodically, and it tastes like water,
then a red wine,
and finally it finishes like rum.
Liquid warmth that burns as it moves down our throats.

Jamila closes her eyes in the unknown darkness of that night
aboard a ferry where we sleep 12 to a room.
One solitary light barely illuminates our quarters
and Monica swears she saw a cockroach crawl into the corner.

Dawn shines in brilliant whiteness and the room goes black to frame the scene outside.
Bleary eyes adjust to see the new landscape
and minds explode at the vastness that stretches from horizon to horizon.

India and I sit and muse as we watch
about the passing landscape from this 3rd class viewpoint,
Experiencing the world like pets trapped in a cage.

Now, it’s midnight in Timbuktu and Cam looks at the sky.
It’s profound scale mimics his revelations here on earth
and a meteor shoots as a sign.
He remembers a constellation, a perfect quadrilateral,
but I don’t know where it is, so I draw all the stars as quadrilaterals.

Nearby, stardust turns to desert dust
for the Boys, Jake and Kunal,
surrounded unknowingly by a camp of sleeping Tauregs.
They scoop handful upon handful of sand into their guitars,
a silent ritual, except for the metal rustlings of sand against strings
and the occasional bleat of a camel.

On another night, a star casts a wide arc.
Fingers pointing, we follow, and call it a satellite.
Kunal wonders, is this where our black and white soccer game comes from?
Do the players and fans realize we’re watching here in Dogon?

The plains of this place, walled in by the falaise
are wide landscapes for one’s mind to expand.
We walk methodically separate from each other
and lose ourselves in these hot afternoon thoughts.

I’m sure I had more profound thoughts than this;
but all I can remember are foods that I missed.
I wanted sushi and wasabi, orange juice and ice
and bagels and cream cheese and brownies and pizza
and apple crisp, crab cakes, and perhaps most of all,
really
really
good Italian bread with extra virgin olive oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar.

But the only vegetables we see here are grown from the earth.
Raised in raised beds,
mud earthen walls that cradle the bright green shoots of young plants.
And we walk through these fields, and watch women who watch us walking past.

Em sits in a Thinker-esque pose and gazes across the great Dogon Mesa
and she pretends it’s Mars with its red plains of solitude.
But she’ll have to wait until night for the galaxy to show.
In this clear air, we can see the Milky Way
perhaps called Le Lait, by our friends, les francais.

Stars flow through the sky to the deserts and rivers
and link and carry our memories together.
Their curves oscillate and beautifully reach
until all are wrapped and tightly entangled.

In the distance, I see two fishermen on a boat.
They are confidently balanced with the grace of those with years on the water.
Poles push them forward through time, these Malian gondoliers and
I think, what connects these two men, to each other and to me?

What nets do we hold in the spaces between and what are we trying to catch?

These threads are beautiful, invisible to all
but also connecting us all to each other

Why patterns, why repetition, why even bother?
What is worth learning in the hours hunched over
drawing unceasingly with the faintest of hand movements.

They can fill a space, they give content to the empty.

They can hide our mistakes, such as ink smears and oil stains and one smashed mosquito.

They can frame the world and bring order to chaos.

And they can tell a story,
As each cell becomes stronger with the presence of neighbors
becomes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

A cliché, I know, but isn’t this true,
for life is so much richer when experienced with others.
For their perspectives and stories and collective memories,
for their laughter and tears and sharing of fears,
for the comfort of knowing that you’re not alone
in this crazy and complex world we know as life.