Wooden heart

Malick's fingers tell stories. Each of his 10 fingers, his 10 disfigured nails and his damaged fingerprints have spent most of Malick's life holding the sowtah, the traditional tool used by Senegalese woodcarvers to cut away parts of wood and shape it into mysterious pieces of art.

Malick's eyes tell stories too. Some happy but most sad ones. Like the day he fell in love with that American student who spent few nights of her internship sleeping in his atelier at the Village des Arts. Side by side. He thought she loved him. She only wanted to write about the lawbe, the caste group in Wolof society that includes all crafstmen that work with wood, like Malick. 



He does not like white girls that much anymore. They bring all type of temptations and are interested. Sweet-faced manipulators to whom he can succumb. His art is already a difficult fit under Islam, which denounces all type of sculpted forms, dating a foreign girl would make his life harder. No lawbe would understand.

White girls are also bad customers. They seem to underestimate the hardness of his passion, the magic of turning dead wood back into life, risking his fingers, his nails, his fingerprints... So today, when a white girl with a wooden heart bought one of Malick's sculptures and placed it in her confortable home, that same girl could only wonder whether she should have paid Malick more, much more, for taking a piece of his soul away from where it belongs.