Water

 If you go to the third floor of the Museu Afrobrasil, there is a dim room that is devoted to the history of the slave trade.  The nearest wall to you, on your left side, features poetry and essays written by black Brasilians about the legacy of this history.  Hanging amongst these words projected in large print along the wall are some of the metallurgical arts of the Trade: chains, hand and ankle and neck cuffs, those absurd hooks that were attached to chains at the neck, and some indeterminate tools a creative and determined mind could put to work.  If you haven't yet left the room, keep walking and you'll see on the consecutive wall two very large portraits of former slaves, one with his country marks very clearly arising from his cheekbones, like three not very long fingers branded into his face and swelling out to meet the surface.  

I hope you can tell me what is on the other two walls; I can't remember.  Because in the middle of the room is the frame of a slaver.  It takes up the entire volume of the room.  It is hollow; your mind can fill the space.  

Perhaps, like me, you'll leave the room thereafter and very quickly forget what is on the other two walls.  

And perhaps, like me, you'll pause for a long time on the second floor, amongst the dark-metaled sculptures that might ease the effect of that horrible skeleton of a ship.  There is one that you won't miss.   I am no welder, so I cannot name what material it is made from, but it is the color of coal.  And I am no engineer, so I cannot measure space without a tool in my hand, but I think it is a little bit over five feet long and perhaps about two and a half feet wide.  

It is a woman becoming water.

She is lying on her stomach, as if she'd been killed and she'd fallen into a river.  Her feet and her lower legs are water, and her body rises out at mid-thigh.  You'll see her behind prominently standing out, and maybe you'll make the same assumption that I made: she is indigenous.  (There are feathers strung to a cord around her waist.)  Only her beautifully sculpted back and part of her wavy-haired head and the left side of her blurry face aren't water.  Her arms are water and her stomach is water, and the female markers of her body are water.  

When you see the sculpture, you will see how difficult it is to determine where her body ends and where water begins.  The borders of her body are swallowed by it.

When you leave the museum, it might be raining.  Be careful not to mistake the raindrops for your tears.