the sourcerer: Sine Qua Non.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Sine Qua Non.

Touenke Djami Roger

36 years old.

Born in Minta, Central Province of Cameroon.

Bamileke Tribe.

The strong man. He comes from a family of big people. At home he trained in graphics and screen printing. During the course of our talks, he told me a story Shakespearian in it's twists and turns. He left that life behind and came here to discover more, to know more. Ex Judo champion of Cameroon, Roger dreams of starting a school where he can teach homeless children martial arts and soccer.

"You throw a stone, you don't know where it will land."

3 comments:

D said...: Lovely, lovely portrait. I've been toying with the idea of slowly collecting vignettes, doing a book of little 1-2 page stories/portraits of all sorts of people. Or maybe just refugees, since I am convinced they are generally the cream of humanity, the most educated, intelligent, motivated and courageous, and unexpectedly, so often the most moral too. And yet we treat them as if they are parasites instead of recognising that any society is made better by absorbing people like this.

But I think maybe you'd do a much better job of it.; April 4, 2012 at 9:09 AM
the sourcerer said...: Thank you D.
That's a great idea! Collaboration?
And the stories I've been hearing....; April 4, 2012 at 9:25 AM
D said...: Anytime!; April 4, 2012 at 3:56 PM

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You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.