AKWAEKE EMEZI

Nine Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Nine Black Jabs | Single-channel video | 1:10 | Trinidad, 2016

Let us say that you are a spirit who is very very far from home. Let us say that you have to walk inside a body and move this body’s face and smile this body’s smile as if you belong there. Let us say that no one around you can see you, not properly, that no one understands what kind of abomination this whole thing is. Let us say you are tired of it, and you have heard about a place that is not just a place as in land or latitude, but a place that is also time, a window where spirits can walk about before the sun rises, showing their faces through the skin, many many many of them filling up the roads and dancing and for once, for this blessed once, not having to pretend to be nothing more than a deteriorating fleshcage, not having to press their godmatter down down down where it cannot be seen. Let us say this place is called Jouvay.

This year, they are going as Black Jabs, Jab Molassie, the burnt sweet shadow, the void returning. You are not a Jab. But you let them smear thick night on your arms and face anyway, their hands stroking darkness across your jaw. It is an anointing. You are a lonely spirit, you see, and you are so very very far away from home and you are so very very tired of being alone. So you dance on the street with the Black Jabs, raffia sweeping from your shoulders, and they look at you. (You are not a Jab, you are ogbanje.) Your flesh is slack, you are riding it well, almost as if you are a temporary thing, almost as if you will lift away with the morning, with the clear sun. You will not. You are locked. You are not a possession. You are not a Jab.

Ten thousand Black Jabs, come out to play. One false little Black Jab, from too far away.