FLESH AND THE DEVIL by Kola Boof Read online

  Flesh and the Devil

  A NOVEL by Kola Boof

  •

  Translated from the Arabic by Said Musa.

  ____________________________

  Flesh and the Devil. © 2004 © 2010 by Kola Boof.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  In the event of reviews, however, perrmission is granted

  to the literary press--so long as the rights of the publisher and

  author are printed therein.

  ISBN: 09712019-7-8

  ATLANTIC LIBRARY DIGITAL EDITION

  Note: The front cover photo, “Through An Ancient Wall”

  was donated to Kola Boof by Israel’s famed Russian

  photographer Sergey Kuklin. Kola Boof thanks you

  Sergey Kuklin and sends you a big kiss.

  Flesh and the Devil:

  Part One

  “The Creation”

  ______________________

  “There is no such thing...as the past, the present

  or the future.

  For they are all three...simultaneous.”

  --King Kashta

  Ruler of ancient Sudan

  ••

  Father

  Before the White people created time and sailed on ships to bring it to us--we lived forever.

  •

  We were not that tribe of charcoal people that could fly...no...we were their neighbors, the deep dark brown people who could reside underwater for days at a time.

  My name was Kofi, but I died when I was about nineteen from a rotten tooth.

  I was a son of the swimmers that settled along the ocean in the roam of West African jungle and the black wombs of warm lakes. The charcoal people knew us to be fierce warriors and aggressive hunters. Imaginative, storytelling, superstitious men and women with muscular tomb-esque bodies, thick boar-sized buttocks, flat wide noses, wind-defying hair and fully everlasting lips. Our evil was more wicked than nary the most vicious hyena and our goodness was more godly than the creek of heaven in honey.

  The charcoal people worshipped the sea, because they were afraid of it, and we, the sea dwellers, worshipped the sky, because we could not fly, and therefore, feared the wrath of both sun and moon.

  Still, the flying tribe and the sea dwellers alike believed in the one true thing--the story of creation.

  It is what kept us from war in the beginning, because our fathers talked about it and sang about it and told every generation about it each available moment.

  I am not the only African who remembers so clearly.

  Father would stand before the fire pit where mother roasted yams with whatever game he and his brothers had hunted down. He would be chewing on some fig or slice of kola nut and his chest would heave from the passion of his words as he taught us the story of creation (for all our lives, so we wouldn’t forget), his brow always lifted to the universe as he said, “The Sky was the man and the Sea...was the woman...and they hated each other!”

  Not just us children, but all the wise people listened whenever someone was telling the story of creation. The art of listening, whether it be to animal sounds, humans or wind and rain patterns, was considered one of the highest virtues of mankind in those times.

  Father would explain, “They hated each other, you understand, because there was no land, no earth back then, so they had no way of touching. It’s the not being able to touch that keeps the griot man and the fire witch at one another’s throats.”

  Mother would always splash a little water on her long, heavy breasts at that moment--pursing her lips and rolling her eyes at father.

  “Onward and forever, they were in a competition to see who was the most powerful one. The Sky would thunder and lightning, but never shed water, because the shedding of water would mean that he loved the Sea and this would give the Sea a victory. So instead, to slap her, the Sky would make fish-scooping, fire-breathing Teredactyl’s appear or send giant evil fire rocks hurtling past the night moons and into the Sea. And the Sea would hiss and howl, because she had only one thing to impress the Sky with and that was her mysteriously dark depths that not even the sun and moons could see all the way to the bottom of, and she would tease him with the leaping of her dolphins and the blowing of her whales and the rainbow-reflecting beams of giant jellyfish, and still, with all her beauty...she was frustrated that she hadn’t the power to reach up and touch the Sky.”

  “So, of course, there had to be land...and one day, the Sky lost his advantage. He became anxious and alarmed, because he looked down and saw that the Sea had made a new creature...a dolphin with breasts!...leaping into the gold bars of the sun! It was a half woman, half fish--with a face dark and beautiful as hunter’s ebony and with hair just like ours--a short, thick jungle that was powerful enough to hold the water and sun at the same time and not lay down, but be as an equal God against the elements.”

  “The Sky could not believe he was seeing such a beautiful creation! A thing whose eyes were of the sensitivity and intelligence of a seal and whose dolphin tail writhed with a sensuality. Zig-zagging through water slick and soulful as an eel. Teasing as it came and as it departed.”

  “He had to have her! But just as he devised it, the Sea told him--’None of my creations can survive in the Sky’--and with that, the half woman, half dolphin disappeared beneath the depths of the Sea like a wet dream.”

  “The Sea named her daughter the word that now means LOVE in our language--Ajowa. And when the Sky heard her name announced, he was amazed and infuriated that he could not possess her...so this time he thought of a way he could touch the Sea--he would attempt to make a mountain rise out of her!...and to accomplish that, he would send no mere burning meteor to crash into the Sea...oh no...he would send one of the earth’s two moons!”

  “The silver Moon and the white Moon, which together, were the Kindred Spirits. So this we rebuke three times. To make their love apart...to make their love apart...to make their love apart, because the Sky was mad.”

  And so the silver moon crashed into the sea of love while the white one remained high above. And this was the beginning--of touching.

  “The Sea, you understand, was not powerful enough to brace the impact of the landing moon--for it tore through her depths like a million bolts of lightning, the round mighty power of it crashing to her floor and burrowing into the silk and satiny black mud from which she’d fashioned Ajowa. Bringing a great explosion, children! An explosion more fiery than sunburst! For it cracked into the womb of the world and pierced the earth’s core and sent forth all the fires of all the dragons in the universes. And erupted...and erupted...until the Sea thought she must be dying.”

  “But she wasn’t dying. She was giving birth! For out of her rose a great richness of black soil and solid rock, gases and fires that made a mountainous sloping valley of green and jungled majesty. For this would become Africa, the beauty released from the one moon, who was earthbound and bitter now--and its declaration of love to the other moon, who was heavenly and had turned against the Sky and vowed not to shine for a thousand years. A thousand years I will not shine, it said to the Sky--and so the Sky and the Sea found their lights turned off, becoming completely black those first nights, seeping the one into the other as the stars dimmed to support the Moon...and there was nothing that could be seen or heard but darkness.”

  “Ajowa...the woman who was half dolphin, rose out of the crater where the great explosion had taken place--and she came to the surface of the Sea--and she glowed as brightly as the golden bars of the sun...until there was light enough to make the
night look like an orange sunset. This glow that radiated from inside Ajowa flowed like a fog across the hills and valleys of the newly formed land causing all manner of trees and fruit to spring up, and to punctuate her magic--she thought up butterflies--and set them loose in the jungles!”

  “The Sky had never seen anything like it! He had to have her!”

  He had to possess her! (I knew the story by heart)

  “And so he made thunder and lightning from the Sky...and the Sea and her daughter thought it was merely a giant hail storm being released at first, but then...no...they thought it was a battalion of Teredactyls. But then, no...it wasn’t any creature they’d ever seen before. This one was a new one.” Father would pause then, his eyes going from face to face before dramatically announcing, “For the Sky had fashioned...a man.”

  And when father got to this part, we children always cheered and applauded! Such a wonderfully patriotic feeling would race through us!

  Mother’s pretty black face would be grinning and smirking, simultaneously, and our eyes would beam the size of saucers as we felt as if we were witnessing our own father men returning to the village once more after a hard day’s hunt.

  “Yes, a man. Fully male with two legs, thick as pillars and muscular arms spanned out in flight, his hair as dense and wooly as Ajowa’s and his skin blacker than hers--the color of charcoal. The Sea saw the penis between his legs and sent a fleet of sea horses to form a red splotch across her blue complexion as her most acrobatic dolphins flipped rings in acknowledgement of the man’s beautiful penis and his muscled stomach and his measured flying...which was more graceful than a hawk’s!”

  And then...all of a sudden, he did not belong to Sky.

  “The man landed upon the earth and set his feet apart and poked out his black chest as though daring the sun to burn him, and he put his hands on his hips like this, and between his mighty, muscular legs hung his beautiful penis as though it were a Scepter of power and invincibility. He rose his head as though it were a crown and turned his powerful voice against the Sea...and said...’I am called God. I am called Master. Above all the beasts, I am the greatest and the King. Come-hither, Ajowa. Come and greet God’.”

  Into the Sea, he dared step his foot. Out into the tide he walked, as though from the Sea he had come.

  “He stretched out his hand and commanded--I have been sent by my father, the Sky, to possess you. Now you must set aside your mother. You, the goddess of love, must leave the womb of the Sea. Come to me, Ajowa!”

  But Ajowa’s mother, the ocean, you understand...was not in agreement. For in West Africa, we had a saying: “Count on the ocean--to find out women.”

  And thus the Sea rose up a tidal wave to kill God!

  To rope his throat with seaweed so that she could drag him deep and drown him and snap his neck at the same time.

  And as the Sea rose up a tidal wave, the Sky yelled down at her, “You wet...bitter...bitch! I’ll drop the red planet on your rolling blue ass!”

  But the Sea could not be intimidated. She summoned an army of all the sharks that had ever ripped birds out of flight and opened her floors so that volcanoes erupted into screaming, hissing hot whirlpools whose crushing throats would someday inhabit the earth as boa constrictors.

  “And she realized then that because of the land...they could touch...and that the Sky wanted to enter her, as had always been the lamentation behind the Kindred light of the moons.”

  “To enter the Sea.”

  “To penetrate her depths as though the Sky owned them and were the God of them, and then leave her...the ocean...touched and left forever on the bottom. Forever on the bottom looking up at him!”

  We boys would laugh at that part, but father would continue, “You must understand that already...the Sea felt enslaved, because the Sky seemed, to her...endless, boundless and free.”

  “So...the Sea...stood up!”

  A tidal wave as high as any bird had ever flown! So high, in fact, that some of the Sky’s fluffiest clouds were submerged underwater...not because woman was about to be entered...but because woman had not been entered before. (Father said that women, more than men, don’t like “change”.)

  “Ajowa rose in the window of the Sea’s wall of water--her body suspended in the S shape of a sea horse. Her curious seal’s eyes beholding the passionate black gaze of God. Her curiosity pumping at the ecstasy of a creature who looked so close to her own image.”

  Father would pause and ask--”Could the Sea have killed God?”

  We would only stare at him, wide eyed with our mouths ajar in wonder. We would nod.

  “Of course, she could have! But tell me...why didn’t she?”

  My oldest brother would always bolt upright at that point and say, “Because the Sky gave her what she wanted.”

  “She wanted love”, I would chirp right behind him.

  “And how...could the Sky give the Sea love?”

  “By raining!”, we would all reply in unison, our hearts warmed by the one thing that all the generations and evolutions of Africans considered to be sacred and divine--rain.

  “Yes”, father would say in a low, tender voice. And his black chest would be heaving as though he’d just been chased from the jungle by a cheetah.

  He would say, “The Sky stopped the Sea from killing God by giving her love. For the first time ever--he let it rain. Her own likeness falling upon her face as though she...the Sea...was being brought into the world all over again.”

  “And when it rained...the whole seed of our kind came into being. The Sea fell back in her ocean bed and let him in--and Ajowa swam freely to God, her tail splashing with joy as she anchored her hands against his ankles beneath the low tide, and with her mouth she kissed his penis--and then God lifted her up out of the water and carried her into the jungle...and as the rain fell upon the feast of their meeting, Ajowa shed her tail and she had legs! Smooth, beautiful satiny black legs that were soon parted by God. And he lay atop her and put the whole world inside her. And that was the beginning of the earth and humankind. And that was the first time that it ever rained. And that was the beginning...of our people’s love story.”

  “BUT...”

  Father raised a single finger here as if to say--the story isn’t over. Then, somberly, “What is love...without a curse?”

  How can there be “love”...without a curse?

  ••

  The grown ups always nodded, immediately, because if there’s one damnable thing African people obsessed about, it was love. Father would nod his head, too, and proceed to finish the story as though none of us had ever heard it before. “The poor Moon of course...was very angry and vengeful. Hanging solitary in the dark of night--so that the Sky and the Sea could touch via land and make love through man and woman.”

  “And when the night became a blanket covering God and Ajowa’s lovemaking--the Moon broke its vow to not be seen for a thousand years--and it showed itself to be so full and bright that it nearly blinded them. And they stood up before it, their naked black beauty sealed in the Moon’s ivory glow, and the Moon said...’I curse you!’”

  “I curse you Man and Woman and shall wring out of you children.”

  And as the Moon said this, Ajowa began to bleed betwixt her legs!

  “I curse thee that your children will know the heartbreak and sorrow that your parents, Sky and Sea have burdened on me.”

  “That you stole my love...and hindered my light.”

  “I send my curse on the wings of the owl for all the evenings that are yet to grace this bitter earth. And you shall hear my sobbing in this world forever, and I will not go away for a thousand years...but I will watch you be born and take death...each and every Night...till tomb.”

  “For I am no longer part of the two who were kindred, but am now just half of misery.”

  “O misery!”, cried the Moon. “Where is my company?”

  “Half a moon. Half a moon.”

  “My curse be upon thee!”

&nbs
p; Man and Woman. Sky and Sea.

  1,000 Years Later

  Mother

  •

  My name was Soraya, and although I died giving birth to my seventeenth child when I was twenty-seven...I remember being in the world back when we humans were astonished and baffled by the sight of the very first “white baby”.

  None of us remembered flying or living underwater anymore.

  My days were the days when the offspring of the flying man (God) and the goddess of love (Ajowa) would join as one in a common ritual--the lifting into the Sky of all newborn children so that they received the blessing of the full moon.

  ••

  The charcoal clan (the Gods) and the more-chocolate-than-blood clan (the Ajowans) had long forgotten the original story of creation. They had separate beliefs now and this sometimes brought the two tribes to war. The Gods believed that the first human was a warrior called Bayajidda who fell to earth from the Moon so as to search for his lost love--Daura (the one who is lonely, the one who is calling us). And because the Moon was so pleased to see longing and loneliness united as one, it had anointed the lovemaking of Bayajidda and Daura and let rain fall upon them, spilling the earth with children.