The Myth of Merula

Yesterday I met Blackbird. Readers who follow news of NASA may recall that she was the first African American woman to travel to Mars. If you haven’t heard of her, it’s not surprising. She left in secretive circumstances and returned to an even more secretive atmosphere. I will be interviewing her as part of my work on Uncovering the Myth of Merula, which is my Master’s project in digital storytelling. So far as I’m aware, my interviews will be the first Blackbird has ever granted. My work is being fully funded by a grant from the Institute for Encounter Story Studies. Blackbird is widely rumored to have reported alien contact when she returned to Earth. For the next two years, I plan to work from my base in Sevare, which is a small town near Mopti, across the Niger River from the Sangha region of Dogon country. The Dogon country is where Blackbird is from, and the Dogon country is where she returned, after she came back to Earth. She lives there today in peace and obscurity, filling her dwelling with strange artwork and inventions that she refuses to sell.

It took me several days to identify where Blackbird lives and to arrange a meeting with her. I learned from my guide and interpreter, Apurali, of an old Dogon woman living without a family and known to the youngest boy, throughout the plateau and hills, as Merula the sorceress. As Apurali and I pedaled our bicycles up and down the age-old foot-paths, our faces scoured by sand and our eyes squinting in the pink-yellow light of the afternoon soon upon the plains and rocks, Apurali seemed to change in his attitude. He expressed to me the fear that the old woman would not talk to me. He told me for the first time of one other American, a famous author and researcher of alien abduction stories, who had tried to get Blackbird to talk. After meeting him and sitting with him, she had refused to speak with him until he went through an initiation ritual led by the most renowned and oldest Hogon in Dogon country. The Hogon, Akundyo, had declared him unworthy of being entrusted with learning the story and telling it to others.

As we drew closer to Blackbird’s dwelling, we could see her standing in her front doorway. She wore a turban, blouse and skirt vivid with yellow, red and blue colors. Her skin was very black and smooth, her cheekbones high, her nose narrow and lips very full. She did not frown or scowl, but her face looked as if it had set into an expression of permanent heartbreak. Her eyes were still and unreadable. Her mud-brick house looked unusual, because it was larger than the typical Dogon family residence, and it was not clustered with other dwellings and granaries. It’s somewhat out in the bush, close enough to the nearest village to hear the occasional cock crow or dog bark, but far enough not to be able to hear people speak. She is the only person in Dogon country besides Akundyo and the other Hogons, to sleep alone. Akundyo sleeps by himself in a cave high on the cliff, where he is said to be licked clean by a giant serpent each night.

As we pulled closer on our bikes, avoiding the goat dung piles and leaning them against the side of her house, a rooster crowed from the nearby village, and a cat jumped into one of the open windows. Then we saw that there was an uninvited guest. Apurali’s eyes widened when he saw who it was. “Akundyo!” I heard him almost whisper. He spoke with Akundyo in the native tongue. I felt the old man’s piercing, knowing eyes examining me as if to sense my very soul. I reached into my backpack and pulled out a fistful of kola nuts, offering them to him. He took them gladly into his leathery old hands and gazed at me approvingly. He broke into a grin when I presented him with some money.

We sat in awkward silence for a long moment, while a hot breeze carried the ubiquitous sand into the air to carry out its ceaseless scouring, making me squint and blink. Blackbird had so far not said one word. Apurali had fallen into a deferential silence. Akundyo did not seem in any hurry to speak again as he chewed his kola nuts contentedly. I was considering several possible icebreakers, when Blackbird finally spoke to me. “Soon, my bones will lie inside the rocky cliffs. As the sand scours them, it will know, but the people of this world will not. You were sent to me to hear my story. You must return to me so that I can tell you the things I have seen and the things that have happened to me, before these things are lost. You must tell my story.”