A few months ago, a pile of bones captured my fascination. Scattered across my desk, they were ashen, rather small, and of fanciful shapes. I was unable to identify the animals whose remains these were, nor could I name their skeletal parts. Which left me free to mine—out of these crumbling, fragile relics—an entirely new presence. Coming to life on brown paper with with a few stokes of white, red, and brown pencils, there she was: my Bone Princess.
Set upon a patch of scorching desert sand, she casts a one-eyed look at you, which masks how vulnerable she really is. Her soft flesh is shielded—and in places, nearly crushed—by her armor of bones. She is damaged: no arms, no legs, yet she accepts her pain with pride, and with regal grace. Inside and out, she carries a sense of morbidity.
As all creations, she became an independent spirit. As such, she made me wonder what had happened to her. I imagined her turning to me, curving the elegant, elongated lines of her neck, to tell me her story. This was how my novella, the first one in this collection—I Am What I Am—came to be.
Twisted.
❋
To illustrate the connection between the poem Dust and the story I, Woman, I included two photographs in this book. Together, these photographs suggest the transition a piece of art undergoes in the foundry.
One photograph shows my nearly completed clay model (still in my studio, where the armature holds it in place) for a sculpture of two dancers. The sculpture is titled Can We Take Flight.
The other photograph shows my finished bronze sculpture titled From Dust. Having been fired, its armature is no longer necessary and has been removed.
In each photograph, the dancers strike a different pose, which represents a verse in my poem Dust. The poem, which comes directly from their lips, is a duet describing a love-hate tension in their relationship.
When the sculpting process takes several labor-intensive months, an intimate feel develops between me and the clay. So much so that the dancers come alive even before I place the last mark on them. They start having a voice, describing not only their finished state, but the process, the change they undergo, starting at the studio and ending at the kiln.
“I stand here before you, not knowing my name...”
So starts one of the strangest stories I have ever written... Having witnessed the casting process—which takes as long as six weeks from the time the clay model arrives at the foundry and a bronze sculpture is made—made me think of death and rebirth, which is the theme of my story I, Woman.
A Note to the Reader
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