The Sirige

Atlas of Curiosities: Part 5

The Sirige is the most impressive of all Dogon masks, standing an impressive 15 feet tall.  When it emerged at the beginning of the procession it rivaled even the trees. 

A villager seated with us said that the height symbolized a link between this world and another world, and we marveled at the motion that the dancer achieved: now dipping, now rising.

When we inquired as to the mechanics of the dance, the same villager motioned to his own toothless mouth, the mouth of a dancer, as the bulk of the sirige is secured by a wooden bar gripped in the dancer’s teeth; the entire weight of the stunning mask supported by only his jaw.

Dear Peter,

I’ve read your Atlas of Curiosities and admired the astonishment you can convey through such wonderful details as the toothless villager above, and the enlargement of books engendered by the arc in part one.
My name is Sean Campbell and I am an editor at Penn & Anvil Press. We’ve previously published books in print of sonnet poems and nature poems. Now we are publishing an anthology of quite short fiction, each less than one thousand words long, named Decameron. I wanted to see if you were interested in submitting a piece to Decameron? Our email is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). You can submit as many stories as you’d like, we would even be honored to republish some of the The Atlas of Curiosities. I thought these were admirable pieces that could serve to exemplify what can be achieved through this form.
  We are also holding a fiction contest worth $300 dollars. All you would have to do is submit $3, per entry, to the paypal account under our email server.

Thank you for your time,
With well regards,

Sean Campbell,
Editor, Decameron

P.S. Below are links to previous publications from Penn & Anvil Press and the websites connected to Decameron.

66: the Journal of Sonnet Studies: http://bostonpoetry.com/66/masthead.html

Hawk & Whipporwill: Poems of Man and Nature: http://bostonpoetry.com/hw/about.html

Decameron: anthology of quite short fiction: http://bostonpoetry.com/decameron/

Decameron Prose of the day: http://bostonpoetry.com/decameron/prose/

The mask’s design, a straight line, serves to connect the worlds of the sun and Earth through the conduit of the dancer and his body. Like all Dogon masks, the sirige belongs to the afterworld, the realm of where life and death meet. The Dogon perform with their dancing masks to honor the passing of a respected elder. This dama dance ceremony will often last for three days and involve dozens of dancers representing figures from the animal world, male and female powers, and the afterworld. Once the dama dance has been performed, the aged bones of the elder are placed high in the windswept cliffs of the sacred caves for the dead, where the red mountains meet the sky in the little known land of the Dogon in southern Mali. The skulls of the Dogon elders watch over a people barely hidden from a modern world just beginning to comprehend that Africa is where human time began.
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1Y0-610 | 1Y0-611 | 1Y0-722 | 1Y0-731

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