Read You Must Set Forth at Dawn for Free Online Page A

them can remember that? They don’t even remember what it means, un
less I remind them. I was a child when we came here. When our people dance for
you and cook you
fufu, ewedu, jogi,
and other foods from home, no one come tell
you that we descendants of slaves from A-be-o-ku-ta. But yes, much has been lost.
The government help a little, they come here sometimes, bring visitors, and the local
council preserve our history by staging shows every year. We observe the seasons of
the gods . . . Sango, Obatala, Ogun 11 . . . we used to have a babalawo, 12 but I don’t think anyone remember how to read Ifa 13 ; anymore . . . some of the children go away
and never return . . . in fact, the best dancers are the older ones, they the ones who
keep our traditions alive. They teach their children, but the children not very interested.
They only do these things when there are important visitors, so I don’t know
what going happen when the older ones die o f. . . .
    Shadowed by soaring rockhills—if the god Ogun sought congenial habitation, it would be nowhere else—they danced for us the sedate, ceremonial steps of the Egba, and fed us dishes whose recipes had been carefully preserved from the vanished home. These were the life exiles, generation exiles, those who had died to a faraway homeland and awakened to a new earth, exiles to whom the call of origin had thinned over time and dissipated into the winds of passage, drifting with mists from the cascading waters of Bekuta rockhills and evaporating the same way. It vanished wistfully into the territory of legends, of the deities of mountains and valleys, was fleshed out in purely performance modes that increasingly underscored its now vestigial status. Recollection stepped gingerly into temporary recovery spaces of town halls or school fields, ever submissive to the present. The exigencies of that present—careers, economic survival, politics, and the rest—reinforced their supremacy over memory or sentiment. After each emergence, the adaptive masks and costumes of origin reentered their normal abode of camphor-saturated boxes and shelves—until the next festive or commemorative occasion.
    Not the sheerest thought of that vivid state of suspended animation, exile, had I entertained on my encounter with that settlement in the Year of Mandela’s Release. I was paying a call on family and preferred not to see the sparse population of Bekuta as exiles but simply as one of the many branches of the Egba—a clan of wanderers who had vanished into the forests one day and could not readily find their way back. Regarding my own future, exile was simply not on the divination board.
    Three years later, all had changed. A new dictator, Sani Abacha, an identical agenda—the perpetuation of military rule—but a different cast of mind, and with an increasingly ruthless, ever-widening network to act it out. The thought of real death—not the remediable conceit now of exile as a mimic death— became an insistent, strident companion. As I set out on one mission after another, in pursuit of what surely, simply had to be the vital key to repossession of one’s real space, my mind took refuge in Bekuta. It was not a morbid condition, just a matter-of-fact possibility that stared me in the face. Agitated by the thought that some misguided friends or family would take my remains to Nigeria, I announced openly that, if the worst happened, I did not want Abacha’s triumphant feet galumphing over my body and would settle for the surrogate earth of Jamaica. And I began to make preparations to buy a patch of land in Bekuta.

    FATE, I CONCLUDED, lured me back to Jamaica for the next, determining visit in 1995, barely two years into the exile that followed the ascent of Sani Abacha. The vehicle was
The Beatification of Area Boy,
a play that was originally intended for Lagos but was now headed for production in the land of the Rastas. Bekuta beckoned. My