On Fatou Ndiaye, Saint-Louis, Senegal.
She works the treadle for four hours before she says a word to us. The loom is older than she is. It came from her mother, who had it from a man whose name nobody wrote down, and the wood at the beater is worn to a shallow dish where four generations of hands have gone.
A film records what happened. It does not record how long it took.
What I want to put down here is the silence, which has no image. It is not an absence of sound — the loom is loud. It is an absence of explanation. She does not narrate. She has nothing to prove to a camera, and after the first hour the camera stops asking. By the third hour I stopped taking notes.