The town sits in the palm of great jutting mountains and when I arrive everyone at the guest house assumes I've come to climb them. "When are you going up the mountain?" "Did you climb the mountain today?"

They seem slightly disappointed that I am not here to climb the mountain.

Ever year on New Year's Eve, people travel from all over the country and beyond to climb the mountain and ring in the new year on top of the big rock. 

the light

The light was cartoonish on Lumley beach this evening with the bright faded yellow of the Casino right up against the blue deepening of the sky. Behind a tree the setting sun hid orange and the clouds smudged pink to blue-grey. Behind me a solitary girl walks towards me with a neon pink tank top with OBAMA GIRL on the front. I turn to walk back and see two people jogging down the beach over the rust-coloured clumps of seaweed washed in from who knows where. One head bobbing in the evening waves. a forgotten cotton cloud resting on the mountain. Fishermen silhouettes throw lines from the rocks by the tree where the sun was hiding, now gone. Everywhere a darkening pinkishness. 

There is a tree in our back garden that is full of birds. As I sit at the dining table writing I look up and see the branches bouncing up and down like diving boards, birds landing and dropping and flying off. The tree is an apple tree; local apples – yellow with a pink blush, small rounded pyramids clustered under the shade of foot-sized leaves. 

Banana Island. Sunday. 

where do you want to be in five years? 

my imaginary guidance counselor says to me

and I think

what happens when the shiniest thing in the ocean is a bottle cap?

what happens when you see an eel's tail flailing from beneath a rock - 

only to find it is the ribbed arm of a sandy sea-drowned jumper. 

the fish do not fight the waves

but they have tiny translucent fins

like delicate geisha fans

fluttering

effortlessly

using the tug and pull to their advantage

and I think

does that parrot fish

have a five year plan?

Jesus said the birds in the trees and the fish in the sea 

don't worry about paying rent or what's trending on yahoo

but he is wrong. 

birds make nests and I need a place to sleep tonight. 

and in five years? 

I will still need a place to sleep. 

and fish? 

well maybe fish

with their effortless to-ing and fro-ing

with their tiny translucent fins

with their round mouths hoovering the rocks they might call home

maybe fish do just live 

by the grace of God. 

dancing with devils

(9 April 2012) Freetown, Sierra Leone - Every Easter, hundreds of traditional "devils" come out to dance through the capital, Freetown, displaying elaborate animal heads. Each "devil" comes with a fan base from its neighbourhood and, often, a budding politician looking to raise their profile on the street.

It is really really bright outside. I am having a hard time coming to terms with the brightness. I forgot my sunglasses at home. I’ve been up since 2:30 this morning and you would think watching the dawn slide in millions of tiny increments into day would prepare you for the shock of the brightness of day, but it doesn’t.

Two days ago I was in California - green and wet and misty. The light refracted and subtle. Today I am walking down the street in Freetown, the sun high and bright, dust and sweat.

It’s almost impossible this transition. It’s impossible to make sense of it, unless you begin to think one or the other is a dream.

breakfast with eggs benedict will not change anything.

the eggs are not as tasty as I'd hoped.

the coffee slides down.

the chatter surrounds. us.

you talking about work.

and what you have found out about yourself.

you seem happy.

you seem to be enjoying your eggs.

Occupy Mugabe

The Strand. Wintry sunset shining orange over grey buildings. It’s cold. You can see smoky breath from mouths of shoppers rushing with bulging bags from early new years sales. And outside the Zimbabwean embassy – ten years of drumming and singing and whooping and ululating and praying. Puffs of warm breath and hope and will expelled from the mouths of bundled African women.

They arrived here in 2002.

Shoppers pass by them with bags, bankers with briefcases, tourists with excited chatter.

Black skin greyed with the cold, maybe thirty, or thirty-five people cluster inside two metal barriers, decorated with photos of Mugabe and, more recently I assume, of Gaddafi, and banners in the black red yellow green of the Zimbabwean flag.

END MURDER RAPE + TORTURE IN ZIMBABWE

A huge WANTED poster with Mugabe’s mug shot and a list of hundreds of names, the dead and disappeared. The reward offered: Freedom for the People of Zimbabwe.

At the table in front, the woman asks for any donation I can make.

We are completely self-funded, she says, rubbing her hands in the cold.

Next to clipboard petitions to the United Nations and the European Union asking them to withhold aid to the SADC countries until they face up to the reality in Zimbabwe, there is a clear plastic container, the kind penny sweets come in, with a clutch of small change, a few pound coins among the silver and bronze.

A stone’s throw from the group, occupying the corner of a great stone building on the Strand, the embassy’s tall windows display the more positive aspects of Zimbabwe’s culture. Small wooden statues and photos of Victoria Falls, healthy smiling boys and girls, with the Ministry of Tourism’s strapline: Zimbabwe, A World of Wonders.

Embassy officials take photos of the activists and send them back to the mother country so the government can monitor dissidents, the woman says.

I empty the change out of my purse. It amounts to less than a pound. I drop it in slightly ashamed (and more ashamed now as I write).

Those who returned, she says, were detained on arrival.

It can’t just be Mugabe, I say. It can’t just be one man that made this happen.

Even Tsvangirai has joined in now, she says. He is the same thing. They eat at the same table.

My shopping bags are heavy; I put them down between my feet as I sign both petitions and wish them luck. I walk away and then turn back. The group is praying together and puffs of warm air rise upwards.

plaza de duarte, dominican republic

I sit in Duarte park, a few blocks from L_____'s flat. Groups of people hang out on metal park benches drinking and playing dominoes. Tables of empty green beer crates on their side are chairs. In the middle, a large stone statue with someone bronze - Duarte! - standing on top, trees around the edge and wrought iron lamps yellow against the night and yellowing the bricks and the faces of people walking through.

I sit alone on a bench and write and watch and no one seems to mind.

It's a blustery evening and the wind is cool, verging on cold now the sun has set. Suu Kyi is a small, warm weight on my lap. He watches warily the child swinging a thin stick, shouting, who comes close and is pulled away by his mother, as she eyes the points of Suu Kyi's tiny bared teeth.

This is a space for us.

A door - a hole in the wall - opens into a cramped space packed high with packaged and tinned goods and two old fridges with grimy windows and icy beer bottles in a deep freezer.

The kid is screeching and throwing things and i think Suu Kyi is right to eye him. But then the kid is dragged away and Suu Kyi rests his small warm chin on my arm.

Tinny music comes out of the hole-in-the-wall but the main sounds are voices and laughter and the odd clink of bottle on bottle. Big green beer bottles - Presidente - or people pouring amber liquor into white polystyrene cups. Young and old, straight and gay. All in the yellow light.

generations, sierra leone

in Kabala it's best to be prepared for the rains

lumley beach sometime in august

There is a squint of sun, pink, behind a curtain of clouds above the beach. It’s the imperceptible moment between afternoon and evening. The sea is brown and choppy. The tide has brought up bunches of brown seaweed. The bar girls say its from the sea, its where the baby fish live. They laugh.

It’s bizarre, the beach strewn with natural refuse when we are so used to the spread of man-made rubbish. It’s like the sea has coughed up some bloody phlegm. It’s disturbing. People remark on it. Then we pretend to ignore it. Someone says it’s the mining company dredging the seabed just around the headland from Lumley beach. The mining company strenuously denies it.

aberdeen bay at twilight, detail

blue tinged evening in Freetown, rolling down Murray Town road on back of a bike, we pass a welder's hut with people gathered around, orange sparks flying, the welder wearing cheap sunglasses for protection.

down by the river
(Yilewa, Sierra Leone)

you and me

there i was thinking i was breaking your heart

but i'd just been looking out the wrong window

all along

it was mine

that was shifting in its chair

getting ready

bracing itself for the tidal wave

i didn't see coming.

i felt the prickles on my neck,

but i swear i never saw it coming.

i swear.

text messages to myself

***

Flying up the hill to Fourah Bay College on a motorbike in that moment after sunset, blue grey city below, and water sheeny shiny out to the limits of the earth, leaning in close to the bike driver to keep from falling off the back, thoughts flying, spinning off into the blue, the road before us steep and wet and black and I feel like bursting, like this is where I live best.

***

7am the sun sits on a shelf of sky like a fluorescent orange over Freetown

***

Night smells along the open road, The lovely smooth freshness of dark skies swooping past, arm out the window, palm against the wind. Worry Free. The night speeds past and the world seems like it might survive us,. Like maybe, after all, it knows better.

***

sunset

kola nut

23 May 2011

Gay Talese writes about failure. And what about failure? Why can't we celebrate it?

*

We woke up and half the tree had fallen. Not just a limb, but a massive branch with its own limbs and foliage, a mini tree lay on its side like a sunbather looking up at us. We had coffee on the porch and watched John chop it up with a machete.

It's raining now and the air is crystal. From the porch, through a picture frame of tree branches we can see the pastel colours and sharp outlines of downtown Freetown across the bay.

On the speakers, PJ Harvey is scratching out an angry nostalgia about England and I wonder if I will ever be at home there. Will it always be a surreal mix of sunny childhood and family stories, mixed-up with memories of TV shows and old songs. Will I always have to pretend?

I spent last week in Makeni, a town in the middle of Sierra Leone where a huge iron ore mine hopes to level the surrounding mountains and develop the country with smiling promises. Photographing for an NGO, I take pictures for people who will never come here, to show them how the project is changing lives. We intrude on the project's 'beneficiaries', people just busy going about living their lives. We make them do things they were not in the middle of doing. Can you sit over there and wash some clothes? Can you chop up some food? Can you look sad? Can you look happy? Can you give us your story? Can we feed your story to our hungry donors?

*