Selfies With White Dwarfs

By Biko Agozino

This is a series of selfies that I took during the August 2017 solar eclipse in Virginia, USA. The shower of colors from cosmic rays that emerged as bubbles around my African silhouette image made me wonder where they came from and where exactly was the eclipse that I was trying to capture without daring to look the eye of the sun squarely in the face as it raced from West to what Nnamdi Azikiwe serenaded as ‘the land of the rising sun’ in the East, a poem that was later adopted as the national anthem for Biafra.

In My Odyssey, Azikiwe recounts tales of a meteor that blazed across the sky the night he was born in Zungeru near the great water and how tongues wagged about the prophesied greatness of the newborn before he went to live with his grandmother in Onitsha where he swam in the West-East flow of Orimiri and later grew up to challenge the Orientalist colonization of Africa by the West.

The images reminded me of the song by Bob Marley and The Wailers – Natural Mystic. Except in this case, being photographs, you cannot hear even if you listen carefully as Akinbode Akinbiyi advocated in The Sound of Crowded Spaces conveyed by photography. Rather, if you look carefully you will see the mystery of realism in the pictures even without hearing the sound of an eclipse, described with an app for the blind, from pictures.

As in Frantz Fanon’s haunting phrase, ‘Look, a Negro’, I did not make it up. It was not rehearsed and staged with special effects. My smart phone just captured what was not visible to my naked eyes or what you are forbidden to gaze upon, lest the awesome beauty blinds you for staring at, or evoking, what can’t be seen, a la Teju Cole who wrote about being blind-sighted by a 'blind spot' (probably because he had a strange habit of washing his eye-balls with warm chlorinated tap water).

The images also make me conscious of the indigenous knowledge system of the Dogon of Mali who are able to accurately predict the appearance of the Sirius star over cycles of sixty years for thousands of years and celebrate the reappearance. They also accurately identify the Sirius B White Dwarf that accompanies the Sirius on its visits to the earth’s astral path. Some colonial anthropologists dismissed this as a myth and said that the Dogon have no right to know such things unless some Europeans told them.

My ‘Selfies with White Dwarfs’ series of photographs of the fast-moving eclipse appears to be a reminder that certain meanings can be revealed by nature to those who are willing to look carefully and see what may be hidden from the wise and the prudent.

Some people posted on Facebook that evidence of the path of the eclipse from the north west to the south east, unlike the east-west rotation of the earth across the face of the sun daily, proves that the earth is flat and the moon landing was staged. Ha ha ha, my selfies with the eclipse were not staged, halo and all.

I have used one of these iconic photographs as the cover picture for my collection of essays published as a book: Essays on Education and Popular Culture: Massliteracy, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2019. Can you tell which picture was used as the book cover?

The pictures approximate the streams of consciousness that travelled with the eclipse from West to East, unlike the eye of the sun that goes from East to West, but exactly like the course of the great river Niger from the West to the Southeast across West Africa.

The pictures were submitted for exhibition in Recontres de Bamako 2019 and this blog post alludes to the Director’s statement but the entry was not accepted for the exhibition.