#8 - Door of No Return

(Russell J Turner)

This year we are using films from the Sight and Sound 2022 list as prompts

Second up from me is Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973 - #66), primarily influenced by my own visit to Senegal and Dakar about thirty years ago, particularly Île de Gorée and Maison des Esclaves (plus a small anachronistic nod to the Paris-Dakar)

The road to Paris ploughs through seas and schemes ‒
this motorbike won’t navigate those sands
whose shifting currents hide the whispered lands.
As ships sail out to all the world’s extremes
not far from Gorée’s echoed age-old screams,
where memory and monument still stands
to mark the manacles and fiery brands
that bled to manifest another’s dreams

Within the embassies we wait and yearn
for slips of paper worth their weight in gold,
as dimly then distinctly we discern
hyenas that bamboozle, thieve and burn
foundations of the constructs we’ve been sold ‒
illusions of departure and return

RJT