Photo Story: The Other Side
She arrived with clenched fists, wide eyes, and strong lungs. During the cleaning, the elders caught her stretching her neck, peering into the darkness of a near past. This would be her lot in life: a bellowing voice, roaming eyes, and a sankofa spirit. Curiosity and intrigue lifelong companions. She’ll question everything, even the origin of trees. She fears them at night when the wind races through like a freight train mimicking the clamoring and wailing of voices. She’ll demand to know who’s there and consider each tap, scratch, and drag a clue, a direct path to the other side.
Photo credit: Claudia Dea
“Resonate” doesn’t do any justice to how this piece made me feel…it speaks to my soul on a deeper level than the words of the English language know how to describe. Ironic, because of your choice to use a word from another culture, one that I didn’t know until now, and one that somehow describes my feeling and the characters, a “Sankofa spirit” so delicately but with an intense yearning for the past all at once. This story just sounds so beautiful, but I also love how creative it is and how it tells a story of another entire world unlike my own, in only so few purposeful, gorgeous words. I hope you don’t mind that I have put this page in my favorites bar so I can go back to it for the rest of my life. This is truly my favorite writing piece, ever.