Jason Harris
Komba
- In North American mythology, specifically the indigenous Seneca nation, it was known as Gaasyendietha, a flying, fire breathing dragon that lives in the deep water of the Great Lakes.
Steam is rising off the shores of Limbe as the surf rushes forward. The beach is in an uproar, which is a surprise to me, because I was told it isn’t tourist season. The early morning fishermen are yelling and pointing at the weird constellation that has partially consumed the normally tranquil, black volcanic sands. The pulsing and writhing constellation are some type of blue orbs the size of marbles, piled knee deep for at least 30-40 metres. I drift towards the mass of people and fish and the din grows. I feel a hand grab my arm, and a fisherman, younger than I, deep toned and lanky, smiles and says something in Cantonese that I can barely make out beyond, “Stop and No”. It surprises me, but I remember that China has been in this country and others on the continent since before the turn of the millennium. I check my Goo-gog’s translator function and let him know that my Cantonese is not that good. He smiles. “American Chinese?” He says in English, almost hopefully. I smile back and nod affirmatively. “Yes, I am sorry, your Cantonese is excellent. Mine isn’t.” We share a laugh and he pulls me back away from the mass of fish. “No touch. C’est baby dragons. This many can kill with their poison.” What I took for marbles are actually whole sea slugs, perhaps millions, all piled together, all gasping for water. I say, “ID image” and zoom on the pile, and the image shows what indeed looks like small dragons with brilliant blueish stripes on its appendages, and my goo-gogs come back with “Blue Glaucus” or “Blue Dragon” with a green frame around the window that says ‘venomous’ in white letters. I say “Bookmark” the file so I can retrieve it later.
I have flown to Cameroon from the States to find my brother, who is on a mining ship somewhere in the expanse of water where the Gulf of Guinea turns into the Atlantic Ocean. Isaiah, my crush from grad school, is meeting me at this beach to help me investigate. I reached out to him, and we exchanged emails that helped me get my logistics together to make it here. We have never talked about ‘us’ on any device and that hasn’t changed. We left that small bubble we had built together on that campus years ago, and the memory of that part of my life is something that’s a whole separate convo that I try, unsuccessfully, to push out of my mind. The story of my brother, on the other hand, isn’t complex enough to overwhelm my memories. He is more or less a mercenary when it comes to work; the better it pays, the more likely he will do it. The only concession he gave our Mother after announcing that he was going to sea to, in his words, “get rich”, was that he would contact my mother every week. His last message arrived three months ago. The ship upon which my brother plies whatever trade he has chosen, is one of dozens off the coast of West Africa carrying on illegal deep water mining. Trillions of dollars, according to this or that broadcast, international ‘incidents’, environmental catastrophe; these ships represent the last rasps of breath of a dead empire and its decayed caste system of reckless, shortsighted exploitation.
Isaiah arrives and it’s a bit of a shock- he is as beautiful as ever, tall, a bit thicker but still fit, deep toned, with that dimple that persists even now, when his visage is serious. He has a family now so an impenetrable wall of formality extinguishes my buried hope that we would at least treat each other with some air of familiarity. Instead, he nods and I see that he is accompanied by a short man who looks impossibly old but spry. I gather myself for a brief moment, “Thank you for meeting me; it’s good to see you. I haven’t been able to get any information so far and when I arrived today, there was this crowd and these fish.” I point towards the mass of blue dragons at the water’s edge. Before Isaiah can respond, the short elder, who now I see is a Baka (pygmy is the ugly western term), points and shakes his head while saying something.
Isaiah pauses for a minute and then translates the Baka Elder’s words, “There are no words for them because words can give it life, and we do not want to give them energy to birth it; there are few stories of it because we want to forget that time when they were here. As long as we speak not of it, it will continue to sleep. The world is terrible enough – there is enough fire.”
“Can you tell him that there are people doing things in the ocean that are causing problems?” I proceed to explain that my brother is or was on one of the mining ships drilling for minerals, but what I really want to know is what is “it”, but from the gravity of the old man and Isaiah’s looks, that seems to be a door that will stay closed.
Isaiah relays to the Elder what I have said. The Elder is drawing on the ground with his walking stick; he finally looks at me, sharp eyes shrouded in the wrinkles that make up his face. He briefly cracks a smile, but the laugh that accompanies it is bitter and short. He has a bag on the ground and he pulls it up, wrapping his bag around his waist and with half a glance, he mumbles something and briskly walks back towards the road, the walking stick that is taller than him barely touching the ground. Isaiah looks shaken and remains quiet. I look out past the incoming tide, out into the gulf, wondering what could evoke that kind of reaction from the usually unflappable Isaiah, let alone shake the resolve of a villager from a people that has 30,000 years of history behind it.
“What did he say?” Isaiah begins to walk away briskly, following the elder but stops for a moment to say, “He told me to come back with him to the village to greet my ancestors, because Komba has cursed us all to join them.” I stand and watch them disappear into the throngs of people and my back is towards the beach, unaware that the door I thought closed was open, and the sky is being smudged with a billowing of black, here to finally quell the appetite of that and those who make meals of men.
Jason Harris
Jason Harris is a Baltimore-based futurist, educator, and cultural technologist. He is the founder and facilitator of the BlkRobot Project, a long-term educational art effort designed to place multi-functional art of scale in predominantly Black neighborhoods. He over 25 years experience in Information Technology in various roles. He has participated in Afro-Brazilian cultural arts such as Capoeira and Samba for over 20 years. Jason is a writer whose work has appeared in Black Enterprise, BmoreArt.com, and various online publications. He self-published the speculative fiction anthology Redlines: Baltimore 2028, and is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. He also runs the SoulBot Saturday Design Squad, a STEM course for Baltimore youth. He has facilitated classes and workshops at the University of Baltimore, the University of the Bahamas, and Goucher College. He currently teaches technology classes at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.