Bàtá

by Timi Sanni

Paul Zoetemeijer

I have seen men with hair the color of rust whip caution like sand to the wind at the sound of the bàtá drums. In my language, the word for bee is the same as for honey, which is to say: a man is what he makes with the machinery of his body. Look at what we make with ours. In truth, elixirs are only fancy words for alchemy’s sting. Observe, people of the world, the drum and its folk, the avian rhythm for which, again, we mistake feet for wings. It is no fault of the drum. A goat laid down its life for the miracle of this music, and it may be the gods’ only boon to us. Men have killed for it. Even the fair-skinned ones who knew nothing of the sun to which from birth we’ve pledged our skins — they came, in those dark years, and carted away with it. Only there was no one to coax out its fine music. No one. Not until centuries later, when, like a god, it returned. And there we were waiting to beat it back into its joy. In the eyes of God, my people are a bee nest stirred into passion by the beekeeper’s wanton smoke. Driven mad by duty, look at what merry we make with the wind. How once, during a festival, my town was raided, the huts burnt, the crop reaped, but no one stopped dancing, because the music…the music. How we filled up on melody, filled up so much we made a home of the air.

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Timi Sanni writes from Lagos, Nigeria. Winner of the 2022 Kreative Diadem Writing Contest and the 2021 Anita McAndrews Award Poetry Contest, his work appears in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, New Delta Review, Lucent Dreaming, Poet Lore, Lolwe, and elsewhere. He is working toward a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Lagos State University. Find him on Twitter @timisanni