Because happiness is not a state that is easily sustained, it is impermanent, arriving at its own leisure and going just as quickly as water goes through extended fingers or a piece of stretched cloth, we must snatch the moment. Let us live in the instant and give in to glee. Let us make our mouths wide; toss back our heads; slap our knees; stomp rhythms into the ground; rattle our shoulders; kick our legs out; howl to the heights. For who knows what may come.

Photography by Ian N'Kosi Joseph. Words by Kwesi Ako Dash. © 2010

An uncle said laughingly, that the memory of it was in the boy’s genes. But he was not really telling a joke. It was genetic, like the contours rounding out the laugh that came from the older man’s mouth as he watched. Laughter that said, you can’t stop rain from falling or the moon from appearing and posing in the dark. And the child was like the stars that clustered themselves around the moon, with no concrete explanation, only that it just happened naturally. He touched the drum as if he knew it, and a thousand souls delighted behind the screens to the other dimensions. He hit the drum and could not understand that he was replicating a rhythm that had long been written for him, beating out concepts too deep for even his guardians to comprehend. Somewhere in the spiritual spectrum, women were gyrating in a circle, spinning their hips, leaning back, and working their shoulders to the ground. The men crouched very low before leaping out into the air.

Photography by Ian N'Kosi Joseph. Words by Kwesi Ako Dash. © 2010

They lollygag, for the moment, and sprawl at their leisure. They will smoke cigarettes and chatter on about whatever subjects take their fancy, pour wine into flute glasses that have been stuffed into jacket pockets and pocketbooks and held upside down between fingers, while digging their heels into the sand. They will stand, legs akimbo, in the shallow water with arms folded and trousers rolled up, thinking about nothing really. This is an occasion that must be seized, for they are still somewhat young and work is only an antidote against idleness and not yet required to sustain any particular kind of lifestyle. The thought of it alone is a bore. No matter, in a little while, they will ride up, two by two out to the surrounding areas and shop for residences with good yard space. Or, they will come by taxi to the city, arm in arm to look over a loft in one of those up and coming neighborhoods, where rents are being raised to accommodate the influx and other less desirable characteristics are quickly being identified and phased out.

Photography by Ian N'Kosi Joseph. Words by Kwesi Ako Dash. © 2009

Every religious house would surrender its offerings, dispatch to us the rolls of sacred material upon which all devout knees kneel, chant noontime prayers with their intricate verse, highlight for our view full sections of holy passages to induce us to tell our secret. And even the traditional sciences, for which the powers have no name, would pour years of libation, bidding us to tell our tale. But ours is not hidden from eyes that are willing to see, we dance here in sculpture, giving evidence that our time here was a mere audition; practice for the immature soul. It is the pattern of the maker of all things; the atoms and the elements. We are wiser for having come here and we dance in sculpture giving evidence; death is but a conversion to another state.

Photography by Ian N'Kosi Joseph. Words by Kwesi Ako Dash. © 2009