New Guardians

You may recall encountering these characters before, fairly recently in fact, but not in this guise. As soon as I met them – the first in the British Museum, the second on a ceramic drinking fountain in Bristol, and the third in the yard of a bric-a-brac shop in Clevedon – I knew they were destined to become Guardians.

That first one is an nkondi, from the Congo region of Africa or, in the condescending language of anthropology, a nail-fetish. According to the label in the BM, you can only get the undivided attention of the spirit residing within an nkondi statue by hurting it badly enough, which is achieved by driving iron shards or nails into it. It seems like a cruel alternative to the usual pleadings, offerings, and sacrifices, and to western eyes, I suppose, it's an embodiment of that Conradian encounter with the "heart of darkness". Apparently, nkondi statues tend to have reflective material placed in the eyes and cavities in the belly, which have clearly gone missing from the BM's example. I have restored the eyes (they're actually mini-moons) but left the other absences as unhealed wounds.

In fact, when I stood before him / her / it, I realised I had a long-standing relationship with this particular guardian. Or, at least, with one of his / her / its close relatives. When I was a child, my older sister had a set of the 12-volume Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia (1957) – essentially the only work of reference in the house, other than the telephone directory – and I spent countless hours leafing through it. It was illustrated with sections of black and white plates, in the classic manner of pre-1960s books, and in one of these was a photograph of just such a "nail fetish". Someone must have told me it was a picture of "a god", or perhaps what somebody thought god looked like, because thereafter any mention of "god" invoked this image of a crudely-fashioned, log-like being, bristling with spikes, a rebarbative presence that haunted my dreams for many years. Of course, say what you like about Christianity, but the savage idea of hammering nails into your so-called "god" is a pretty alien concept. Um, no, hold on a minute...

As for the other two, it seemed to me they would best be deployed as guardians of a particular magic portal that I had discovered hiding in plain sight on the doors of a friend's wardrobe in Oxford (well, of course, where else are you going to find a magic portal? [1]). I reckon that grumpy goblin is a salutary warning against the dangers of identifying too closely with one's work...

1. C.S. Lewis aside, the place seemed to be rotten with them, during my 3-year stint there. Thankfully, unlike some, I never quite fell through into another dimension...