Day and Night Hunting

Abstract

Certain episodes of intense fieldwork, though documented on site and working their way into print, may later haunt their erstwhile scribe as though clamoring for more thematic salience. Decades after the events recalled in this essay, a distinguished pianist invited her peripatetic friend to participate in a literary occasion to take place in a spacious living room (accommodating a grand piano) where for years she has been previewing new programs for an intimate audience. Accepting this generous invitation, the writer thought to placate that tenacious clamor by arranging elements of forays into the Malien bush so as to take them up a hermeneutical notch. The resulting text combines seasoned narrative (culled from a book entertaining the notion of a pan-African hunting goddess) with spruced up journal entries—thus reviving sensations inviting reflective embellishment. Figurative codas expand the tenor of each trip as gleaming or murky. However remote the donsonton from their collective ken, the audience in that room excelled in listening.