How Do They Call You?
Inspired by a Fantastic Negrito show
Drums reach somewhere inside me that nothing else does. For me, they’re more felt than heard. They know something about me that I don’t yet know about myself. An awakening. As if a startling cool breeze suddenly grazing the back of my neck, outdoor house lights switching on as I approach the door, my very heartbeat.
The feel of the drums comes from within me, not without. It moves me and I jerk involuntarily. I hear a bright light, I see a syrupy sound, I feel all the ancestors who came before me. When I hear drums, I am all and nothing.
I become present to my escaping, numb with sensation, distracted by my focus. I am there, I am everywhere, I do not exist. I believe that I doubt that I have never known anything at all. And it pleases me.
I feel the drums and I am happy to be alive. I don’t know that I am alive. Millions of fragments of other lives persist within me, and in the drums, they reveal themselves. They dance so that I may dance. They make me alive and I surrender to them, not by will, but by compulsion.
Today I will sip drum beats so that tomorrow I may tell a story of all the lives I’ve ever lived.