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Dedicated to those who aren’t supposed to see the Night Masquerade, but see it anyway. May you have the courage to answer the Call to Adventure.
Grains of sand blew about pretending chaos, but each arced a trajectory that coincided with those around it.
“You try too hard to be everything, please everyone.
Right before my eyes, the world seemed to expand, while staying the same, as if reality were breathing.
“Ah, that explains why you’ve never seen an Icarus,” he said. “They’re large green grasshoppers who like to fly into fires. Then they fly out of the flames and dance with their new wings of fire and fall to the ground wingless. The wings grow back in a few days. Then they do it again. The zinariya says that some woman genetically engineered them as pets long ago.”
“You thought we were savages. You were raised to believe that, even though your own father was one of us. You know why. And now I’m sitting here telling you how I learned I was a harmonizer and you’re so stuck on lies that you’d rather sit here wondering if I’m a spirit than question what you’ve been taught.”
Elephants are great violent beasts, but only because human beings have treated them in a way that made using violence the only way for elephants to survive. There are many elephant tribes in these lands and beyond.”
When I opened my eyes, I was facing the desert and I could see the dream that wasn’t a dream retreating from me into the distance, like something sneaking away.
He hesitated for several moments and I wanted to hug him for those moments. “Three days after we left your home, you stopped hearing from your partner Okwu.”
“If you think I’m such a mess, why did you come with me?”
“As we were coming, I was dying,”
“When elephants fight, the grass suffers.”
My family was dead; what more change could I endure? What was heroic about this happening? If this was a revolution, it was an awful one.
The violence was here now.
How many had fled the destruction?
“So calm in all this chaos,”
“Why didn’t you answer me?” “I didn’t want you to come.” “I thought you were dead!” I said. “It’s better than you being dead, Binti.”
“For you, for your family, they all deserved to die.
One does not fight a war it cannot win. I hid in the lake and waited for the others. Now when the time comes, we will fight the war we will win.”
“I am more than and better than what I was when I left here.
we’ll be the grass crushed beneath the feet of two fighting elephants.”
“What reason does a man have to be beautiful?” Chief Kapika asked as he watched me spread the leaf on the dry dirt. “Beauty does not need a reason,” Okwu responded.
I bit my lip. “He only knows the little we know here,” I said. “Forgive him for that.”
“Are you alright?” He sat beside me. “No,” I said. “I will never be alright again.”
“Okuruwo are always held at sunset,” I said. “‘When the fire and the sky are in agreement.’”
Are you alright? “I am here,” I responded.
“I left because I wanted more,” I said. “I was not leaving my family, my people, or my culture. I wanted to add to it all. I was born to go to that school and when I got there, even after everything that happened, that became even clearer.
“Your people are not the type to survive war,” Okwu said from behind me in Otjihimba.
He put the jar back down and turned to me. “Is it an insult if I said you look beautiful with it and without it?”
can see you more clearly now,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen you with it and without. The two make one.”
“I think, maybe, I think you’re part of something, Binti.”
“There,” I said, putting it down. “Do you feel different?” “No,” he said. “But I am.” He smirked and then laughed.
Now, I was overwhelmed. There were no taboos or hesitations in the way. And when I pulled my lips from Mwinyi’s, his arms still around me, I didn’t look into his eyes. “I feel like I’m falling,” I breathed.
It was so unlike Earth, where wars were fought over and because of differences and most couldn’t relate to anyone unless they were similar.
When the Meduse anger had come forth, I’d immediately assumed something was wrong with me instead of realizing that it was simply a new change to which I had to adjust. I’d thought something was wrong with me because my family thought something was wrong with me.
The Himba Council members were to do this, but I think they’re afraid. I think they’re hiding. I’m not. And I’m a collective within myself, so I can.
The Night Masquerade was mourning Binti.
And none … none of them believed they could really evoke deep culture. They didn’t believe in … they had no hope.
Then he asked, “Where is Binti?”
Binti was change, she was revolution, she was heroism.
“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” Mwinyi said. “No one is ever ready for such a thing,”
Even back then I had changed things, and I didn’t even know it. When I should have reveled in this gift, instead, I’d seen myself as broken. But couldn’t you be broken and still bring change?
I held out my arms to him and immediately he rushed over. He gathered me in his arms.
She calls you the ‘gentle warrior’ and believes our union would bring Miri 12s forward.”
“Shhh,” I said to Mwinyi, still holding him.
“I spoke to the Root,” Mwinyi laughingly explained as I danced and danced with joy. “And it opened up. And we were able to get everyone out.”
The war had begun again, my home would never be what it was, but this, I understood more than ever now, was inevitable. Change was inevitable
But it could make you more, if you let it. I’d found it.
“Will his happiness kill him?” Okwu asked.
“It grows because it’s alive,” I whispered, looking at the red grass. “It grows because it’s alive.”
