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Word from the Editor
Don’t Tell Me Not To Cry
George Dunbar Knuckles, Sr.
(1950 – 1998)
Until you’ve tasted rainwater
come down from the dark
African sky
in July
Until you’ve tasted dust
on a country road
thick with the scent of palm kernels
from a passing truck
Unless you’ve smelled
that special scent
of a burning farm
that special scent of sun-dried
leaves
and bark and trunk
and ashes
in the evening
while the ground is still hot
Unless you’ve seen the raindrops,
big, heavy raindrops
fall heavily on the lagoon
and quietly watched the ripples –
a million ripples
appear
then disappear
As you drank your coconut water
and cane juice
and ate your crawfish soup
and dumboy
If you haven’t been to Rallytime
or Sinkor Airfield fish market,
Jallahtown, Slipway
or Soniwehn
or Carey Street, Cuttington
Singyea, Gbarnga
Gbataalah market day,
Firestone, tapped rubber from a tree
and made a ganga ball
or swam in the warm Atlantic
roasted palm nuts on an open fire
or smelled the scent of the forest
after a warm April rain
Heard the strange laughter
of the Country Spirits
or seen the young virgins
dance their way into town
and seen the Snake Baby
Don’t tell me not to cry
for Africa
Don’t tell me to forget
Don’t tell me not to worry
for my home
I know what I am missing
I know Liberia
I know Africa
I know my home
You know the taste of kitili,
new rice and water oil?
You know ‘Cross the Creek?
You ever been to Mt. Vobli
on Easter morning
and swore you heard the angels sing
Those happy Easter hymns?
And you tell me not to worry?
Don’t tell me not to worry
I know Careysburg
I know Liberia
I know Africa
I know my land
my people
I know where I was born
and I know where I must die
I know my home.
from, Thinking of My Home: Some Writings By George Dunbar Knuckles. Copyright © 1994.
REPRINTED WITH © PERMISSION FROM THE LIBERIA LEGACY FOUNDATION.
"I am a teacher, a psychologist and a historian.
As such, I am interested in the aims, the methods
and the content of the socialization processes
that we ought to have in place
to create wholeness among our people."
— Asa G. Hilliard III
Bai T. Moore wrote a short, bitter poem in the 1960s about the sham practice that praises a man only when he lays freshly dead. Such a charade should be eschewed for the pretence it is, though many of our dead do inspire heartfelt praises, Aaron Fallah Brown (May 18, 1952 – April 29, 2007) being one.
The ancestral world is richer,
we are more protected than ever,
but our earthly loss is great.
— Molefi Kete Asante
This issue is a quiet reflection on the life and work of this extraordinary man, Aaron Fallah Brown, whose creative range and productivity was too deep to be contained within these pages. The twenty-seven images and eight poems of his work here are just a minuscule representation of all he put his hand to. His art and the styles, techniques and forms he used could fill several textbooks.
We have always been imagining ourselves. We are not Isak Dinesen’s [Karen Blixen] ‘aspect of nature,’ nor Conrad’s unspeaking [Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad]. We are the subjects of our narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come in contact.
— Toni Morrison
It is known that Aaron took his work as a painter very seriously, that his work was titled, cataloged by date, series, and that we could not get this full information is truly a breach. Aaron's paintings capture time in motion; like a griot's epic song, they render truth with beauty, and one need not be literate to participate in the experience. Through visual poetry, Aaron's work tells a history, in the concrete and visible; it brings on feelings, emotions, sentiments, thoughts, memories, expressions, times . . . huge events. By the end of his life, he was creating playgrounds for schoolchildren where they could play and just be children. His other works—murals, paintings, sculptures, industrial designs, architectural designs, landscaping—are everywhere all over the country. He was a tireless worker, reimagining our world, memorializing events that could stupefy any artist, and then again might ignite the exact opposite reaction. And Aaron was an artist aflame with passion and vision.
What there is to know about Aaron the man, Aaron the artist, Aaron the boy from the ghetto, is summarized in the tributes from those who knew him best. As one of the progressive-minded intelligentsia of the 1970s, his work during that period reflects his abiding concern for social justice, the class struggle, cultural identity, economic empowerment, all rooted in his own experiences. He sought to define culture in his work. His work expresses culture to mean dignity, culture to mean pride, culture to mean identity, and survival. He critiqued and satirized, without enmity, the culture that maims, mutilates and sacrifices us - political or ethnic, religious or social.
While others worry about racial superiority,
let us be concerned with the quality of culture.
— Ralph Ellison
He did not die a rich man, at least not materially so. Something other than the pursuit of riches and glory seemed to animate him. He did die wealthy, however, filled with a sense of completion, satisfaction; his soul intact with a clear conscience, his hands never soiled with blood.
In his childhood, he was the kind of boy who took things apart to try and reassemble a better way. He was a boy inventor, fashioning toys with scrap rubber, junk wood, old screws, discarded wire. He drew and painted pictures in the sand, mud, on walls and paper. By age twelve he was into satire, confounding his friends by integrating social criticism and humorous jibes in his drawings. Later, he turned an upraised eyebrow at the neocolonialist partisans and power-obsessed 'nationalists'. He felt the heat for how he interpreted democracy through art, which brings to mind Ralph Ellison's famous statement: "Now mind! I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest."
Aaron's classmates at CWA say he was the irresistible wit and life-force that brought a group of privileged male students to Soniwehn, where life-long friendships and legends formed in the small ghetto bars and cookshops. Aaron began to roam the other side, friends at his side. And we know, like so many of us, Aaron fled the bloodshed, anxious to go back home soon as the mass slaughter ended. The real life is at home, that's where the heart is, we all know that. And so in 2004, Aaron went home—straight into the economic war.
The gift of love is the greatest. It's a difficult thing because there are people I know that I can't stand. But love doesn't mean affection. It means treating them justly even when they are terrible people. That takes a bit of doing, an awful lot of grace.
— Janet Collins
And in April 2007, Aaron died. He had only reached age fifty-five.
Integrity. Humility. Greatness. Simplicity. Principled. Self-confident. Focused. Courageous. Generous. Noble. Kind. Thoughtful. Selfless. Spiritual. Humane. These descriptives stream through the writings describing Aaron. They stream through his poetry as distilled purity, saying something about the tender soul and open spirit of the writer. One wonders why Aaron's brother would choose the dramatic and accusatory topic, "Household Wickedness", for the burial rites, and why Aaron would hold the strong belief before he died that he was poisoned, evoking the symbolic Pan African tale of the sacrifice of Okonkwo's foster son, Ikemefuna, from Achebe's masterpiece, Things Fall Apart.
What did they do to Aaron? An East African proverb says, "The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people." What "household wickedness" came against Aaron Fallah Brown? Our own home proverb goes: "If your house don't sell you, the street can't buy you." Perhaps the truth of the matter is best left to fiction for serious novelists to wrestle with, for only storytellers can tell the whole truth with its paradoxes and complexities, without holding back.
A man teaches as he acts . . . The wise person feeds the soul with what endures, so that it is happy with that person on earth. The wise is known by his good actions. The heart of the wise matches his or her tongue and his or her lips are straight when he or she speaks. The wise have eyes that are made to see and ears that are made to hear what will profit the offspring. The wise is a person who acts with MAAT [truth, justice, order, balance, harmony, righteousness and reciprocity] and is free of falsehood and disorder.
— Ptahotep, 2350 BCE
from, The Teachings of Ptahhotep.
An African book and the oldest complete book in the world, written sometime between 3800 and 2350 BCE, 4750 years ago in KMT
[pre-Islamic Black Egypt].
Aaron went home, back to Soniwehn, back to where he used to sell cold water on the streets as a boy. He rode the peak of his craft at the pinnacle of his artistry. He hung out in the marketplace for inspiration in short trousers, t-shirt, rubber slippers. He drew from that world, beginning on a new series of paintings emphasizing hands outstretched in different ways, bodies in motion. He had a car he hardly drove, preferring to walk immersed in the life of the street. He taught at the University of Liberia. There were no funds in the university account to cash his paychecks. He remained optimistic. He was working, using his craft, painting, building, engineering, using his gifts, feeling good. He was buoyant, ebullient, super-productive.
He taught art workshops out of a rented studio space on Camp Johnson Road. Gave free lessons (a tough teacher, expecting no less than genius). A Department Head at the Ministry of Public Works, he hardly ever got paid, though he accomplished things that even trained engineers said were impossible, like designing the beam that spans the road for the welcome sign at the ELWA junction.
He had to vacate his art studio. He stayed on, of course, at both jobs. Being Aaron, it seemed he had to, as he said.
There is no specialized institution to teach art in Liberia, no institutional support for traditional apprenticeships. He was one who would stay to serve unpaid; to teach; to learn. But commissions came in. Negotiations were sweet in his favor. Financial pressures eased.
The artist Leslie Lumeh writes that Aaron left a sketch on his drawing board
of a wheelbarrow contraption he was designing for yanna boys to ferry their
heavy loads around. It "would enable them to sit in it along with their
goods, and peddle it, instead of pushing loads all day," Leslie writes, and quotes Aaron: "leaving blisters in their palms and corns under their feet, for Christ!" The carrier also had a folding roof that would keep the boys out of the
sun's harsh glare, and a key and lock to secure their goods. Here we see again how Aaron approached his art, as indivisible from daily life. In the tradition.
We sit on the mat for Aaron Fallah Brown with our voices.
. . . Aaron Brown . . . Mary Antoinette Brown-Sherman . . . Zamba Liberty . . . George Knuckles . . . Nana Baffour . . . Lucky Dube . . .
Celestial travelers across the horizon, your presence here was felt. Thank you for coming.
And all the invisible, unknown, disremembered grassroots griots, classical artists of the soil, intellectuals, scholars, teachers, thinkers . . . visionaries . . .
"The time we have been waiting for will come,
when beauty and goodness will be inside us.
And we will know them and love them,
by looking inside ourselves."
— Sembčne Ousmane
(January 1, 1923 – June 9, 2007)
Thank you all for showing us, with such tenderness, other ways to "[look] inside [and at] ourselves."
Humble Respect.
Stephanie Horton
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