Mbari: Art, Bodies, and Care at the End of the World

Once upon a time, an old man called for his son from the city…
He was frail and weak. He was dying. The time had come to say goodbye, to rekindle memories, to furnish the village with the proper rites of passage, to mark the spot in the ground where he was to return to the goddess Ala. “Let us do one last…thing together,” he said into the phone, coughing and wheezing as he did.
In two days, the son arrived, a bit disgruntled. He had been busy, you see. Most people in the city are too busy for the inconsequential ramblings of their elders in the villages. Nevertheless, the old man blessed and welcomed his son, fed him, asked him about his progress, and then took him a few feet away from the mud hut he had known as home for unspeakable years. “We will build another one, here – both of us – no one else,” the father announced to his suited, ill-prepared son.
They got right to it – offering prayers and libations and kolanut to the ancestors; slicing up the grass, cutting down four palm trees, gathering the debris; burning up the weeds. Soon a princely clearing slowly emerged, ready to be host to the hut to come. And over many weeks, filled with sweat, bloodied hands, and great toil, another home grew from the clearing. By this time, the father was a quarter to midnight, one gentle stroke away from being carried by Ala to cavernous depths. His city son carried on. He eventually finished the work and – in a moment of unbridled joy – rushed to his father’s side to announce the moment.
“It is finished! It is done! We did it, Papa. Both of us! We did it!”
“Are you…sure it is…done?” the old man asked his quizzical son. But an answer had barely left his lips when the old man – with an occultic display of strength that shocked his son senseless – jumped out of bed, pulled out a mallet, and shuffled towards the newly minted hut. Surveying the structure, he lifted his weapon and struck the side of the building, creating an ugly hole in the wall.
“Now it is done,” the old man said.
“Why did you do that? If you didn’t like the way that I handled it, you could have told me”, said the son, tears gathering to his eyes.
“My son,” the old man called to him, smiling as he approached him, mallet abandoned. “Nothing is done that does not have a hole in it. Nothing is so complete that it does not yearn to be something else. Now this gift of a hole is in the wall. When Emeka is going to the market and notices this ‘accident,’ he will tell all the others. Emeka has a big mouth, I know!” He chuckled, coughed, and continued. “It is the same thing with Mama Uche, the elders, the young bachelors, and those noisy girls that come to fetch water by the river yonder. When they see this hole, they’ll come up to you. Serve them palm wine while they greet you. Offer them kolanut. Make sure to speak a proverb or two.”
He turned from the ponderous face of his son to greet the hole in the wall once again. A morsel of wind rolled by, singing the night sky in the wake of its passing: “It is the wound that makes us. It is our shared pain that is the cord of our belonging. In the city, you were complete, whole. I offer this last gift, my son – a reminder that the wound is the way worlds gather. People who are complete don’t need each other.”

That story is the heart of this course. To build with the awareness that everything we build will one day fall apart. To find care not in completion, but in the holes that make relationship possible.