davidbowie.de

Foreword I Wish I Could Swim. David Bowie " She-devils are ageless", was Bazra´s quick repartee: "They are always in their prime when they have to bewitch a son of Adam." A Grave for a Dolphin - 1956. I met and fell in love with Iman in Los Angeles on October the fourteenth, nineteen ninety. Moments after we started dating, the press broke the "story" of our relationship. This opened up a strange spin for us both and particularly for me personally.
When I was seven or thereabouts, my half-sister, Annette, left England for good. She had fallen in love with an Egyptian and was to travel to his village to marry him. She would write. My father may have received news but if so those letters were not shared. I never heard another thing from or about her. -
"Exclusive! We find Bowie´s missing sister!" screamed the Daily Something. And they had. What was more, when, all those many years ago, Annette had arrived in Egypt, she had converted to Islam, which had meant undergoing a name change. Being the first Western Christian girl to ever visit let alone live in her husband´s village, the most appropriate name for her was obvious. If you care to listen I will tell you that I, David Robert Jones, a Protestant, Caucasian boy from South London in jolly old England, have a wife and a sister, both called Iman.
At some point in the seventies , I had picked up a book containing a short story called "A Grave for a Dolphin". An Italian Duke, Albert Denti di Pirajno, had written it in 1956. Unusually, he wrote it in English because of his love of my country. I thought it a magical and beautiful love story and in part had inspired my song "Heroes".
It tells of a twenty-two-year-old Italian boy, Camara, who has been stationed on the coast of Somalia at the end of the Second World War. One sweltering night brings the exhausted and beaten beauty Shambowa to his hut. She has escaped capture from a group of raiders who had intended to offer her to the slave-market beyond the sea. Camara tends to her cuts and bruises and they quickly fall in love.
At night, after making love, they would swim by the light of the moon, then, once again lie together on the beach. Shambowa reveals that she swims as if born and nurtured in the sea, catching fish with her hands. She swims with the sharks yet does not get torn to pieces. She slyly jokes that the sharks are her "uncles". One night a dolphin joins their swim, Shambowa excitedly claiming it to be a childhood companion whom she has not seen for many years.
Over the days and weeks that follow, the dolphin appears regularly to play and swim with Shambowa, sometimes even following the little dinghy that the boy uses for fishing. Then, seemingly from nowhere, Shambowa becomes ill with fever. There is little that the Italian boy can do in this isolated place and he has not the slightest doubt that Shambowa is dying. In the late evening she passes away.
That night she appears in his dreams, shouting and clapping her hands so loudly that he awakes with a start.
He runs from his shack to the beach and finds the dolphin, dragging its huge body onto the sand. Cut and bleeding, its dorsal fin in shreds, petrels and gulls are already swooping savagely for the daintiest pieces. Though defending it as best he can, the poor creature dies halfway between the sea and the little shack.
Camara digs a grave next to the one he had dug for Shambowa and buries the dolphin there, next to its lifelong friend, as though the dolphin´s destiny was somehow bound to Shambowa and the corpse could not just be thrown back to the sea.
His posting in Somalia comes to an end and he returns to Italy, unhappy and lost, to resume the expected marriage to a childhood girlfriend followed by a life of dreary domesticity. His spirit and his heart, of course, remain in the sea and on the sands of the far coast of East Africa.

Amazingly, within months, a script dropped through my Berlin letterbox based on this self-same tale. I thought, although an astounding and lovely coincidence, that because of the considerable amount of space devoted to the protagonist´s thought processes, it would not be a project that could be translated successfully to film. So I passed on the opportunity. As with all things, the book and script slipped from the moment and disappeared from my memory.
All these years later, I carry both the name Iman and a dolphin on the back of my calf.
Just before Iman and I married in 1992, I was performing a number of shows in Japan. In Kyoto, I had heard, there was a tattooist of great renown. This was fairly unusual profession to encounter in Japan because of its strong associations with the Yakuza. I had prepared well and drawn on paper a fair representation of what I wanted. It also required the translation into Japanese Kanji a favorite homily of mine as well as the name of Iman. My guide and I left for the outskirts of Kyoto one evening and entered a small house, its interior furnished in the singularly sparse manner of all Japanese dwellings. The framed photographs on the wall were the only concession to the western way. They alone were worth the price of admission. Like soccer teams in bloom, the images showed groups of naked men covered from ankle to neck in glorious pictures. Their heads were shaved, the bald domes likewise covered with tattoos.
With a full head of hair and a suit and tie you would never know what extraordinary tales of daring and violence were being paraded in front of you. If the carrier of these mythologies were struck down by illness or something more violent, as was the possibility inherent in this particular lifestyle, then the skin could be sold for many millions of yen allowing the surviving family to live on the proceeds of the sale.
The skin would be opened to reveal the back and front of the body and framed by the purchaser in a huge glass fronted frame.
As I was only having about thirty-five square inches done, I felt I should warn my family not to look for castles in Spain upon my demise. It didn´t hurt much.
Winter had become spring something one doesn´t notice in Los Angeles. It was 1991. Iman and I had been living together for only a matter of months when she received a script from her then film agent. "I´ve been asked to play, surprise, surprise, a Somali girl and they want you to play the European who falls in love with her. It´s the most beautiful story," she said, "but not a movie I don´t think." It was a screenplay based on an obscure short story called "A Grave for a Dolpin". Things like this happen to us all the time. Incredible coincidences. Mystical, I bet. Like, we´re both skinny and we both get up at about five thirty  in the morning. The list goes on and on. I´m glad our story doesn´t follow the one penned by the Duke. We love the dark velvet sky and the moon that throws streaks of gold onto the deep silver sea. We want to swim side by side for as long as we´ve been given till one of us slips under the waves for the final time."

We want to swim side by side for as long as we´ve been given till one of us slips under the waves for the final time.

Zitat

We want to swim side by side for as long as we´ve been given till one of us slips under the waves for the final time.

Schnüff. Hab gerade richtig feuchte Augen bekommen.

Zitat

We want to swim side by side for as long as we´ve been given till one of us slips under the waves for the final time.

Schnüff. Hab gerade richtig feuchte Augen bekommen. Warum bloß finde ich niemanden, der so ist?
[size=0px]Ich fürchte, ich darf meine Ziele nicht so hoch stecken![/size]

Ich glaube, im wirklichen Leben gibt es solche Leute nicht.