Backpack
Your whole day fits on your back — class, the bus, travel, or work — with your hands free. It's a black caiman backpack with Yara up front, a caiman with a calm gaze, from my Animal Kinhood series, the kind that gets through a rough patch without shutting down.
Melanosuchus niger
The silence before the pulse is what matters.
The entire Amazon basin (Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, French Guiana), the Orinoco basin and the Pantanal wetlands. It inhabits slow waters, lakes, várzea (seasonal floodplain), and both blackwater and whitewater.
It works as a school backpack, a travel bag, or one for work: sling it on, load it up, and go, hands free. Up front you're carrying a black caiman who doesn't rattle over anything, the kind who settles a room instead of filling it. If you're going to carry it eight hours a day, it might as well come with a calm creature looking straight at you. Who she is lives in her biography; here she arrives light, in backpack form.
In her story, Yara nearly closed the studio during the pandemic. She mixed at close to a loss for six months so her musicians could keep standing, and what held her up was her mother, who sent her food in plastic containers. Since then she never turns down a tray from her, even when she doesn't need the food: it's her way of never letting down the gesture of the person who kept her on her feet. A backpack carries the day's load; Yara learned to carry a rough patch without letting anyone fall. There's more of her in her biography, and she's part of a family of characters I make — I'm Yago Partal — you'll find the rest in the collection.
