CULTURE PEARLS : From Here to Timbuktu : Tribal Shop Is Fertile Ground for Folk Art From Africa, Indonesia, Mexico and South America

Dayak blow pipes from Borneo. A 12-string armadillo from the Philippines. Life-size fertility statuary from Mali.

Every object has a story, and every story opens up a world at the Timbuktu Folk and Tribal Art shop in Costa Mesa. Tonight, the focus will be on knives and other weapons when tribal knife aficionado Xan Martin--who calls himself an authority on “anything that cuts, stabs or makes nasty bruises”--talks about Timbuktu’s collection.

“The pygmy hunting kits, complete with small bow and tipped darts in a skin that serves as both quiver and knapsack, and the six-foot Masai hunting bows are particularly fascinating,” said Martin, an actor who lives in Costa Mesa. “I’m probably going to buy both.”

Martin, who already owns 500 pieces, encourages the public to bring their own “curious” knives to the free lecture for analysis regarding origin and use.

Knives actually represent a small percentage of objects at Timbuktu. More plentiful, for example, are exotic musical instruments such as a dried cocoon ankle rattle and the aforementioned armadillo, actually a mandolin for which the animal’s shell provides the back.

Joanne Baker, a part-time nurse, and Bob Fox, a free-lance video cameraman, opened Timbuktu in October when the home they share could no longer contain the objects they had amassed while traveling. That’s understandable the minute you walk into the shop.

A statue from the Dogon tribe of West Africa dominates the front room. Carved from a single, immense piece of solid wood, it depicts a couple in a pose that Baker described as a characteristic Dogon motif: The man has one hand on his own reproductive organ and the other on the woman’s breast.

“The statue is an homage to the family unit,” Baker explained. “The body scarification is typical of the tribe. The protruding bellybuttons are accurate--the tribe sticks a little pebble beneath the skin to create the necessary scarring. He’s a warrior so he has bows and arrows on his back, she has a baby on her back. The base is a ring of beautifully carved children.”

The front room mostly displays objects from Africa and Indonesia; a second room features folk art from Mexico and South America. But sometimes the rooms get mixed up.

An almost life-size Day of the Dead skeleton from Oaxaca, for example, sits in one corner of the African room on an ebony chair from Malawi. (“Ebony is an endangered word,” Baker noted.) Across the room, also from Mexico, is the full suit used for the Crab Man dance (it’s covered with crabs made from painted coconuts) in the remote villages of Guerrero.

Baker moved here from South Africa 21 years ago; she met Fox, 46, on a blind date six years ago.

Fox grew up in Newport Beach, went to college in Washington, D.C., then lived in Europe and traveled for almost 10 years.

“Frankly, my education began the day I left the States, and I never looked back,” Fox said. “Reading travel books and seeing adventure movies growing up, I wanted those adventures to be true. I traveled across North Africa, I went to Indonesia. . . .

“When this typical Southern California boy stepped into a non-Judeo-Christian country for the first time, it was like going to Mars. I felt my feet were growing out of my head. We tend to read the world in right angles, we judge people by a certain set of moral values. That way of looking at the world changes the minute you enter a Buddhist or Muslim or animist society.

“Joanne and I are still hungry for knowledge,” Fox continued. “We figure if we invite people like Xan to talk, we’ll be learning right along with everybody else.”