…but we are not the desert…We are part of the desert, and when we go home we take with us that part of the desert that the desert gave us, but we’re still not the desert.
-Ntozake Stange, interviewed by Anna Deavere Smith, from her A.W. Mellon Lectures, April 2024
It is strange to say that when we were in the desert for forty days- what happened there was quite unlike the Bible’s forty days- we received no unearthly visions, or unknown voices, or messages from above. We heard only the yips and haws of the drovers, driving camels on their death march, but we not on ours.