Monsignor Haddad Middle School Art Teacher Exhibited at Plymouth Center for the Arts

Congratulations to MHMS Art teacher Ms. Erin O'Donnell for who recently had a poem written about her artwork. The photograph was taken last February when she went to Tanzania in the Massai Steppe while visiting a Massai boma. The poem, entitled Double Exposure, West Meets Tradition by Shelia Mullen Twyman, was read at Visual Inverse at the Plymouth Center for the Arts.

Double Exposure, West Meets Tradition

She sings with a throaty voice scratched by sands

from the time Ngai created the world and gave

the Massai the noble gift of raising cattle.

She adjusts the stiff collars of bright beads

she wears around her neck and sings about her boma,

and how her back still aches from building her house

with sticks and mud, grass and cow dung.

She sings while carrying water jugs, collecting firewood,

milking the cows, washing clothes and cooking

for her husband who is old and wrinkled,

who complains the food is not delicious,

salt not enough, no pepper. Stupid Woman!

She weeps when he yells that his bride-price cows gifted

to her father were wasted, and also his very powerful seeds

for her to become pregnant and carry his son. She has not

produced a child, but his very powerful hands have produced

dark bruises along her slender body.

Late morning heat blends with dust from an Eco-tourist jeep

as it wends its way toward the boma, and she brews Kericho tea

for the guests. Her husband dons his plaid shuka and joins others

in the boma to dance, sell trinkets, show off his wealth-

a noisy, dusty, milling herd of cattle and goats. The tourists

leave with photos of the exotic Massai, migrating wildebeests,

zebras and predators that prey on them. They leave the big skies,

endless plains, the almost incomprehensible vastness of untouched,

primeval Africa, and they are happy.

Not so her husband, most unhappy that his wife did not smile

all afternoon. Stupid Woman, I will repossess my cows I squandered on you!

She cries. She cries like a fourteen-year-old child that she is.


-Shelia Mullen Twyman