Boats

Elaine Bleakney on her kindred.

Photograph courtesy the author

“Two Brothers at Usuma Lake,” by Victor Adewale

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Two brothers, two sisters, two boats. The boat in Victor Adewale's “Two Brothers at Usuma Lake” hosts a distance I can't help read as emotional. The family boat. The oar between them, the fishing about to begin, perhaps — a pause that Adewale chased with his phone: he had a a feeling about them. Sunlight in the haze made silver and articulating the reflection, the assurance of their presences on the very still lake. One (the younger?) gazing at his brother untangling the net. What kind of conversation have they had, will they have? What's in the tangle of their net?

No net in the photo of two sisters, my aunt (the eldest) and my mother (the blonde) and their catamaran, sometime in the 70s. I am not yet born. The photographer, my father, asks them to look his way. A pleasure boat, a pleasure lake. What shocks me about this image, scanned from a slide, a deepcut from the family album, is how difficult and painful their sisterhood was and how they share and seek each other out, even today. And my father, an outsider in so many ways, seeing something golden here, something he was starving to be part of, and to keep his distance from, and did. ¶

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About the Contributor

Elaine Bleakney is a poet living in the States and the author of For Another Writing Back, an avant-memoir. She has new poems forthcoming from the Yale Review and the Hampden-Sydney Review, and her ekphrastic essays have appeared in The Believer and Literary Hub.

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This is the #5 edition of KINDRED, a series on TENDER PHOTO. Each contributor selects a photograph from their family or personal album, pairs it with another photograph from the Tender Photo archive, and writes a short reflection on why they have selected both photographs. The idea is to find an analogy between two photographs that might be similar or dissimilar, but connected to an experience, emotion, or idea.

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