I’ve been reading autobiographies
Since I was a little girl
& astrologers have been telling me for years
That I’m supposed to tell stories.
The telling of this story
is a process of reclamation,
of finding the thread
by the distant visual memory,
ancient journal entry, old photograph, saved artifact & pulling,
unraveling for all it’s worth.

Tonight’s story
is of a journey that began over twenty years ago
& has never left me.

What was I doing in West Africa?
whim
weaving
connecting
finding necessity
and luxury
joy, freedom, release
culture
shock

What was I doing in West Africa?
in 1973, at the age of 20?
You could say, I had nothing better to do.
Really I went on a whim.
Dissatisfied with the limitations of academia,
I was looking for a place to study weaving far away.
I remember that the woman on the phone told me
that she could send me weaving to Italy, Greece, Ireland or Ghana.
Although I had never been to any of those places,
I decided on the spot that Ghana was it.
I’m the kind of person who orders the unknown item on a menu.

I got off the phone excited, having made my decision,
& walked across campus to the library
to look up exactly where this place was.
I’ve still never been to Ireland.
& Italy and Greece are deeply resonant places for me.
But I knew that I could get to Europe,
it existed in my imagination.
I had even been there once
when I first found weaving
in Denmark one summer.
But Africa had never occurred to me.

I grew up in suburban Washington, DC.
I never had a chance of being in the mainstream
even of the fringe,
being born to two socialists
at the height of the McCarthy era.
The religion that was practiced in my family
was socialism.
A basic belief in human dignity, and human rights.
Firmly anti-capitalist.
Pro-worker, anti-boss.
I always knew that my ethnicity was Jewish
but the religion was socialism.

At twenty,
I was trying to find out
what I really needed or wanted in my life.
I made a distinction
between necessity and luxury.
I was trying to strip down the rules
of my suburban middle-class upbringing,
trying to decide what if anything to keep
and what to discard.
There was so much that I had grown up with
that we clearly not useful to me.

In Africa, I was relieved to find, as I had suspected,
that there are many ways to organize life on earth.
That everyone gets born and dies,
& eats when they get up in the morning, if they can
How can I describe the joy, freedom, release
Of having to learn a whole new way of looking at the world.
Or the shock that all I had been raised to take for granted
Had disappeared and been replaced with a new code.
It seems to me that the appeal was as much
That what I found was so different from what I knew
As it was the particulars of what I found there in that year of travel.