Montage: Bouctou Lives by Keoraspetse Kgositsile

Also Read

 

Even nature at her best

In singing her mesmerizing beauty

With the permanent rainbow

That is the wonder of Mosioathunya

Says nothing of the woman of Mali

My Mali sisters are a rainbow

Even the deaf and dumb

Would aspire to sing

Here Keats would have found voice

And song instead of the finality

Of deadness

He dubs beauty and love

Though we do not see human gesture

Nor life in his Grecian urn

My sisters of Mali could

Teach any rainbow

The impartial beauty

Of nature through a rainbow

Of centuries of memory and mutations

Look at the flow of that ebony elegance

Walking that walk

Striding through your heart

Turning Bamako into a dream

And that blue-eyed ivory contrast over there

That strut is a vector on the graph

Linking Africa to where

And all of that all in

Between bespeaks where

Which woman have you not met here

In Mali I have seen my mother

My daughter I have seen

My grandmother and her very own too

My wife friends comrades

All the women I love and hurt

All the women without whom

I am not even here

All the women without whom

Neither you nor I

Could claim an identity

Which all that lives has

I wish I had enough

Art of eloquence and grace to sing

The woman of Mali