Gay-briel/Kondomu.
This painting in watercolour and watercolour crayon belongs to a sequence of paintings about angelic protection.
Gay-briel, by its very title, shows the playfulness of Orokie’s imagination.
There is something highly serious within the body of the angel, which, as ever, is depicted with elegance.
The angel’s wound echoes the wounds of Christ, as does Angel 4, in Malaikawatano, who is wounded on the head (See Matthew 27).
But this angel is an African hermetic angel. Gabriel has become Gay-briel and the Archangel of Water and the Moon has transformed into an angel of fluid reflection.
Though fallen, sensing exile from the dance of brotherhood, this angel’s navel is tuned into the Sacred Lake of Africa, Orokie’s homeland.
This experimental watercolour by Orokie successfully fuses narrative, pathos, and satire.
On his head, in full religious splendour, Kondomu wears a religious condom, as if mocking the religious forces that withheld the distribution of condoms, in Africa.
Gay-briel
“Gay-briel.”
“African men do not fall in love, right,”
He said strongly—a prophetic angel—
Said it without option, without grace note,
So as my body quivered (as I fell)
Struck by an arrow: his admonition.
In silence he left the meaning dawn…
As feathers drifting through empyrean air
To be gathered.
So, this angel forced down
Upon earth, in exile, with ear lifted
Towards the green-brown, camouflaged war-beat
Of home, his beautiful, reflective head
Fluid with life, I dare not interpret
As a falling in love, or a falling
In with any elegiac Western fire.
In the arch of his penis, he is still
Archangel, a contender still knowing