Artist Kevin Osborn began work on Tropos in 1984 while he was a teacher in French West Africa and then continued to develop it for the next four years. His journals, drawings, and photographs that became a source for Tropos record his awareness not so much of an obvious social duality, but of the dynamic space he has occupied within superimposed cultural matrices. The book, a dialogue verso to recto, and a narrative from front to back, is a graphic unfurling of that fabric. The text also, alternately constrained and released, in language uttered gently, or drowned out in turbulence, stated in accusation, violence, or reconciliation is set in ordered rings consistent from page to page, particular words calling out in turn when so compelled.