AKWAEKE EMEZI

Take The Mark | Single-channel video | 04:54 | Trinidad, 2017

"It is believed that to take the mark exposes the spirit behind the child."

They are always trying to cut us, either our flesh or the connection to our spirit cohort. Scar the child, they say, and it will lose its powers because it has been identified by the mark—this will put an end to its death and you will have a human child again because an ogbanje's cohort abandons it if it has been exposed. (They are wrong, our cohort is not like other cohorts.) Scar the child so that its cohort will no longer regard it as one of the group, since it is not the same as it was when they decided together on what it should do in the world. (They are wrong, our cohort is loyal.) Scar the child to discourage its return to the human world. Scar the child and it will no longer be ogbanje. (They are wrong, exposure does nothing to us.)

They've told the same stories for years. To allow an ogbanje child to live as human, you must cut it from its cohort, or it will die early. (These measures against us are dated. We are sixteen thousand years old. We adapt.) In this portrait, the ritual of cutting is reclaimed. The creation of a scar is used to strengthen the bond with the cohort instead of severing it. The ogbanje relishes in exposure. It makes no effort to pass as human. It marks itself towards this purpose.

The ritual was performed at midnight as the old year transitioned into the new—audio includes firework explosions. Footage shows only preliminary cuttings; the remainder of the ritual is left undocumented.