I captured this collection of images entitled “The City that Rushes to Wait” in Monrovia, Liberia. This set of photos depicts the stillness found in the Liberian capital known for its commotion and noise.
Salt air and superstition surround the sea. They say that in the water belies dark spirits; “Don’t go in the water or else,” they warn you. Avoid the very vessel that carries cargo, houses gods, and acts as a final resting place for our ancestors for fear of its powers–both physiological and metaphysical.
What does it mean for the tide to kiss a country’s coastline when its people shy away from its consuming embrace? It means that the oceanfront becomes sacred and the same spirit believed to possess the sea, so too possesses the minds and hearts of the people. Paralyzed is the population at the frontier of the shining shores, like a congregation before the Divine in a house of worship. They even perform rituals: friends convene, peddlers hawk fresh fish, and lovers look longingly into the beyond. Worshippers encounter divinity at this Atlantic altar and maintain their distance out of reverence and unspoken awe.
On her first trip to Africa, Iayana channels the aquatic enchantress Mami Wata at Kendeja Beach. Like the seductive spirit, her silhouette leads one’s eye to the water, in search…
In the humid heat, a child bathes in the ocean. The waves gather around him and the sun settles into the horizon conspiring to break the fever called daytime.
I find myself in the suffocating grips of many a dog day during my last trip to the city that bred both my parents. I collect a memento of my time spent in Monrovia as the workday in town slowly unravels. Life is slow, the heat merciless. To capture a moment so mundane feels like wringing a sun-dried towel for droplets of water. Leave it to nostalgia to wash banality in beautiful colours.
A roll of film who travelled aback a nomad through continents for months was, somewhere along the journey, exposed to poisonous rays of light. An oversight on the traveller’s part led to a light leak that revealed the imperfect yet romanticised life of the nomad. The nomad welcomes the unexpected and even sees the imperfection as a gift. The nomad says, “But how wonderfully you’ve captured the silhouettes of the dancing coconut trees and the obscure hue of the midnight sky.” The defective roll of film thanks the nomad for appreciating its charm.
For her final trick, before she rests for the evening, the sun casts a glow on all things visible to her. So magnificent is the scene that old fixtures become renewed by her abating beams.
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Chyna Cassell (chynacassell.com) is a Liberian-American event producer, creative writer, multidisciplinary artist, and a proud member of the Transatlantic Writers Group. She has a bachelor’s in Global Studies from The New School. In 2021, Chyna was awarded the Civic Engagement & Social Justice Grant to conduct international field research in Liberia for her thesis titled Mother Tongue: The Relationship Between Food and Language in Liberian Culture. Later that year, Chyna received the Eugene Lang Opportunity Award to fund her residence at Casa na Ilha Residency in Brazil. She is a forthcoming artist-in-residence at Hangar Residency in Lisbon, Portugal, where she will focus on developing new and existing fiction works, visual art, and event curation. Her work is published in The Shallow Tales Review and forthcoming in the New York African Film Festival’s Archives.