Afriboy, The Book of Repentance.

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Daler 3404, as it appears on the web, contains 44 illustrations by Orokie. The original notebook has 80 paintings/ink works – in other words, almost 50% is missing. After 5 pages of familiar work that shows African faces and evokes African tradition, the web version jumps to an illustration of two, stylised faces and a single line of words:

“The world was all before them.”

The quotation from the concluding lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost hints at what has been omitted: 6 pages that sketch the psychodrama behind the notebook. These notes describe the structure of Dante’s Divina Commedia and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In effect, Orokie is presenting his work as an epic, a dialogue that considers his own fall and descent into mental and visual darkness, and his return to life (having ventured into the Underworld). In the missing pages, Orokie illustrates three out of the four lines that close Paradise Lost, Book XII. He does not consider the line that refers to Providence and God’s goodness. His journey is not Christian. He does not take the Bible as his guide. And he recasts Adam and Eve as Adam and Adam, as two same-sex lovers. This is hinted at in the public version of Daler 3404:


This peculiar cropping of Daler 3404 suggests that whoever complied the book did so with a partial view. He selected certain types of images – the homoerotic – rather than attend to the themes of the book. Consequently, nothing much makes sense.

In his notes. Orokie focuses on the central book of Dante’s epic, Purgatorio, and this is the framework that underlies virtually all of Daler 3404. Orokie’s story re-imagines Dante and Virgil as they cross Lethe, the river of memory loss. Orokie’s source texts are the original Italian version and Dante’s Purgatory as translated by Longfellow. References to these sources edge the watercolour.


Something else that is not clear is the colour palette used by Orokie. Again, this is a result of cropping. As vision returned to Orokie, he seemingly linked the primacy of vision with primary colours: red, yellow, blue echo the works of Mondrian and that painter's hermetic, colour vocabulary. The psychic drama is set on Mount Purgatory (with an intended pun on sexual mounting); more precisely, the location is the first terrace of Pride, where those who have misdirected love towards harming others wander with stones above their heads. 


Daler 3404 is a book of penance and humility. It is a book of struggles in which Orokie remembers to paint, to atone through artistic tones, to express the redemptive nature of kinship, and bring back into memory signs, symbols, styles, and people who were known before his accident - those who cared for him and helped him to recover.



Here, the warrior-lover carries a phallic sword and like St. Sebastian he is pierced by arrows of (Mondrian) vision. (It is worth noting that Piet, as in Piet Mondrian, derives from the Greek for "rock"). The flighted arrows are beginning to resemble wings, an indication that wounds heal and out of trauma new life is born. Tellingly, in this illustration, light radiates from the navel, Orokie's osotwa, the psychic link between two male lovers. 

 Daler 3404 is a work of tremendous introspection and human courage. The Divine Comedy, in a way, is merged with comic books, to create a narrative about an afterlife on Earth.

 (If any reader wishes to contribute to this debate, please email artmercurialmm@aol.com)

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