Black Bazaar

by Alain Mabanckou

I am white of skin

  When I want to sing on hope

  My luck is not in

  Yes, I can see the birds and the sky

  But nothing, nothing glimmers on high

  I am white of skin

  Louis-Philippe tells me that without homesickness nothing comes out, even if you can see the restless birds in the branches. Now it just so happens that I am also far from my country, and I feel like I’m in exile, so am I going to spend my life crying about this? These Haitian writers are like hunted birds. They’ve had more than thirty-two coups d’état back home and not a country in the world has equalled this record yet. With each coup d’état, flocks of writers have emigrated. They left everything behind, setting out with nothing apart from their manuscripts and their driving licence. I wish I’d been born Haitian so I could be a writer in exile who understands the song of the migrating bird, but I don’t have any manuscripts, or a driving licence to become, in the worst-case scenario, a taxi driver in the streets of Paris …

  * * *

  When Louis-Philippe talks about his country, his eyes go moist with emotion. I’ve got received ideas, clichés in black and white, as well as colour snapshots too. Life there has its ups and downs. When he tells me about how their country was the first black Republic, I applaud, I feel proud as a Toussaint Louverture painted by Edouard Duval-Carrié, the most rated Haitian artist in Miami. But I stop clapping when Louis-Philippe talks to me about the Tonton Macoutes and company. Ouch, I screech, ouch, papa Duvalier and son? Uncle Aristide not at all Catholic?

  I filled Louis-Philippe in on how, over in the Congo, we know a few tunes from his native country, we grew up with his music. You could hear the voice of their musician Coupé singing “Away with you” in all our bars. And when we heard “Away with you”, it meant it was dawn and the bar was about to close. But there were always those last remaining gentlemen who deliberately ignored Coupé Cloué even though he told them several times: “Away with you! Away with you! Away with you!” Coupé Cloué is a sort of Haitian Manu Dibango, the same shaved head, the same smile that reaches all the way to his ears.

  I also listened to the rhythms of their group Skah Shah de New York with Jean Elie Telfort’s voice, because I’m an open-minded kind of guy after all who is thoughtful about the ways of the world. I enjoyed the song Camionnette by Claudette et Ti Pierre, and whenever I heard that summer hit it meant there was a burial or a party to mark the end of the mourning period in our neighbourhood, and sometimes even a wedding because we’re like that back home, in life and death we dance to the same rhythm for funerals, weddings, divorces and for the other joys and trials of everyday life. There is joy in pain, that’s the way it is in my small country …

  * * *

  I won’t easily forget how guilty I felt for not knowing how to dance the Haitian kompa properly. Not that there was anything fancy about this dance, all you had to do was grab your partner by the hips and make a compass with her, the way we used to in geometry at elementary school, that was it. Easy to say but difficult out there on the dance floor. And I admitted to Louis-Philippe that I’d had to make my excuses to the only Haitian lady in our district of Trois-Cents. This woman was stunned to see that a negro from the Congo didn’t know how to dance the kompa, even though everybody knows that all black music comes from Africa and there’s no point in teaching Africans how to dance because it comes naturally as soon as the music starts up. And this Haitian lady was called Mirabelle. She said she was going to teach me the basics. And I said great, at last I’m going to be able to dance the kompa.

  Mirabelle had an enormous and very firm B-side, it was easy to grab hold of and let yourself be carried like a baby kangaroo stuffed inside its mother’s pocket.

  “Hold on tight, little one,” she said to me, “or you’ll fall off when things heat up. Don’t be shy and don’t hold back. If you feel something rising up between your legs, don’t be ashamed, it’s only natural, it means you’re starting to master the kompa.”

  So I squeezed her tight in order to rub myself up against her as best I could. But I was dancing the Congolese rumba and that annoyed her.

  She shouted:

  “The Congolese rumba isn’t the only thing in life, there’s the kompa too.”

  And I answered:

  “No one can learn a dance in one day …”

  “Dance this kompa for me instead of talking! Squeeze me hard in the upright position, make like you’re rising up and sinking down while lightly brushing against my chest. But watch it, I don’t want you crushing my breasts!”

  And then she said I had to go a bit faster than that, that I had to wrap my arms around her, and glue my face to hers. I applied myself: I was sweating, she was sweating, we were spinning, we were colliding with the other dancers, we were heading for the wall, then for a dark corner where she took the opportunity to stuff her hand between my legs and declare with a big smile:

  “I see that now you have mastered the kompa! I didn’t know you could learn so quickly! There’s something growing hard between your legs …”

  At least I saved face that day. But I still can’t dance the kompa properly because I always tread on the toes of my partners – especially Haitians from Pétionville …

  * * *

  Like me, Louis-Philippe has got a moustache. He wears glasses for being short-sighted, I don’t, which is only to be expected because he’s read more books than Roger the French-Ivorian, especially the Latin American writers. And he also maintains that a writer should wear reading glasses so people can tell he’s really working, that it’s all he does, that he sweats, because people won’t believe you’re a writer if you haven’t got reading glasses. So it’s hardly surprising if I wear clear glasses now, it makes it easier for people to imagine I’m short-sighted.

  The day Louis-Philippe saw me with these glasses, he chuckled:

  “It’s true I said in jest that you should wear glasses to fit with the image the general public has of a writer, but you didn’t have to go and buy the most expensive pair on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré!”

  When I turn up at his place, he can’t wait to show me the most recent naïve Haitian paintings he’s brought back from his island. And we talk about everything. I say bad things about Mr Hippocratic. And explain how I’d like to move out of the building that has ruined my life.

  Louis-Philippe thinks that, now Original Colour is no longer there, I should try talking to Mr Hippocratic from time to time.

  “Mr Hippocratic is desperate, he’s the kind of person who only wants to hold your hand, but he doesn’t know how to go about it, especially with you. Try to reassure him, to make a friend you can talk to. Remember he’s a brother in colour, even if he doesn’t know it …”

  My pals from Jip’s know how prudent I am when it comes to money. I only spend what I’ve got and I don’t covet other people’s possessions. I don’t want to owe anything to anyone. I refuse to be tempted by our consumer society. So I don’t like loans, whether we’re talking simple or compound repayments or by instalment, I don’t like credit cards with payments either deferred or not, I don’t like overdrafts that pretend they only cost you cents when the more cents stacked up by the banker the more the debt piles up. Cents are a bit like the yeast that makes the dough rise. Behind these loans, behind these cards and these overdrafts there are always shady schemes even if the banker has the friendliest smile in the world and suggests you pop over to the café right opposite his bank’s cashpoint. When a professional invites you to join him for a coffee like that, it’s so he can have you by the short and afro-curlies. It’s not expensive, the café opposite a financial institution, but you’re still the one who pays for it in the end. The thing about yeast is that you can’t see when it makes the dough rise, you wake up one morning and it’s already spilling over the edges. They add on interest for this and that to the coffee you drank on a day you can’t even remember any more, a coffee that wasn’t even black and that was served up in something as small
as a Coca-Cola bottle-top …

  Deferred repayments? Overdrafts? I know what’s inside those scalding hot cooking pots and how it all turns out. The men and women who end up paying off the whole debt are few and far between. Or why would the banks push us into placing the rope around our necks instead of them staking all that money on the stock exchange and leaving us alone in our poverty?

  I’ve rumbled their business model: nowadays, poverty has become the best investment for a financial institution, there’s no point in buying apartments and putting tenants inside any more, you’ve got to invest in poverty. Soon you’ll be able to buy shares in it on the Paris Stock Exchange, and the shareholders, including the small investors, will make a killing …

  I pay my taxes on time because I don’t want the bailiffs turning up at my door with a sinister-looking locksmith. There’s nothing worse than an ill-timed visit from these people with their long faces who proceed to itemise your hi-fi, your old typewriter bought from a second-hand shop in Porte de Vincennes, your electric toothbrush and your Italian cafetière.

  Did I say bailiffs? Their grey suits get up my nose, I’m sure they always wear the same one. Their thick glasses try my patience, I get the feeling they can stare right into my body, and that they can part my bones to see if I’m hiding a secret stash of money between my growth plates. As for the injunction letters, they stop you from sleeping at night because you can never understand them even if you read them a hundred times with the latest Code of Civil Procedure right in front of you. There’s always a last minute article or a subtle qualification, the upshot of which is to make you pay the call-out fee for the sinister-looking locksmith as well as the administrative costs of the bailiff in the grey suit that gets up your nose …

  In short, I am a man whose generosity knows no limits. Original Colour didn’t understand this. I give money to the beggars who sit in front of the mosque at Château Rouge. Why them? Well, because I prefer them to the beggars who wear me out in the métro because you have to wonder if they aren’t laying it on a bit thick. The beggars in the métro are aggressive, they accuse you of being responsible for their misfortune and they think you owe them something. Some of them even go right ahead and insult you.

  I came across one on Line 4. He was as old as the prophets in the Old Testament who used to live for longer than we do. It was as if he’d been following me for several stops. Was it because I was well dressed or because I looked like I was a pushover? Maybe. Maybe not. In any case I slipped him a few coins because he told me he hadn’t eaten for four days and four and a half nights. I was happy to have done a good deed. I felt light-hearted and I held it against the other passengers for not smiling at him because a smile is the key to life after all, as our Arab on the corner likes to point out.

  When the métro stopped at Etienne Marcel, the guy waved at me as he got off. He didn’t realise I was getting out at the same stop. I watched him rush into the nearest Arab on the corner’s and grab a bottle of red wine, which he started necking before my eyes. What a swindle, I thought, this guy hasn’t put my cash to good use. I won’t allow myself to be hoodwinked ever again by beggars in the métro.

  So that’s why I prefer the beggars at the mosque in Château Rouge. They won’t get blind drunk like that. The eye watching Cain will prevent them. They’re not aggressive, they don’t insult anybody, they don’t ask, they wait to be given something. And when you give, there is only the beggar and Allah witnessing this heartfelt act …

  * * *

  I’m not a fearful person, I don’t lack courage or open-spiritedness. It’s a question of strategy: a living coward is worth more than a dead hero. This was a very sensible piece of advice given to me by my deceased uncle who had deserted the army camp during the Biafran War because he wanted to defend his humble being and die a slow death rather than for ideas that’ll be obsolete in a few years as Georges Brassens, the singer with the moustache, puts it. I’ve realised that desertion runs in my family because I too fled military service in my country of origin. Weapons and all that, it’s not my thing. In fact, when I spot a man in uniform – even the security guards at a shopping mall or for the cash machine of a local bank – I cross over to the other side, I pick up the pace and I don’t look back. I imagine World War Three is at hand, that troops are moving towards Porte de la Chapelle, that the famous Senegalese soldiers will be called to the rescue as they were in the old days. That’s why I hate war films, however brilliant the director. The last one I saw was Saving Private Ryan. Yes, it was a bit different from The Longest Day which was in black and white, but it was still a war film, there were uniforms, weapons and all that, explosives, detonations and human flesh galore and all tightly plotted, but in a proper war there’s no plot, there’s no close-ups, there’s no wide-angle shots, there’s no classic dialogue, people shoot themselves and the dead get counted so the historians from the Sorbonne and future generations won’t bicker about the exact number of victims.

  One of my childhood friends who advised me to do my military service over in Angola – and even to get myself recruited as a soldier – claimed that being in the military was a cushy number because during wars the soldier has a better chance of survival than a civilian who, on top of everything else, will die without honours. But I love peace, I’d far rather die a civilian and be buried in a communal grave. Someone once recommended if you wish for peace, prepare for war. I don’t agree with him. For me the person who wishes for peace must prepare for peace, end of story, the word war is surplus to requirements. And on that subject I have a photo of Martin Luther King somewhere in my suitcases. And in that photo, the black preacher is standing in front of a picture of Gandhi …

  But back in the home country they were making us go to Angola to fight the war – they tried to cover up this up by saying we were going there to do our military service, and that we needed to be ready in case our neighbours the Zairians, who are a lot more numerous than us, attacked us to steal our oil, our timber and even our Atlantic Ocean.

  It was at the time when we had to help the Angolans who were fighting against their rebel Jonas Savimbi and his men hidden in the maquis. So our government sent our young men to Luanda in their masses. We saw this as a punishment since the children of prominent citizens and other powerful figures in the regime didn’t have to go, not them. And Jonas Savimbi’s rebels hadn’t done anything to me to make me hunt them in the bush where they survived by hunting, gathering and fishing. Better still, I admired Jonas Savimbi’s big beard, his big nose and his green mamba eyes. I was happy when he routed the Angolan armed forces, and I crossed my fingers for him to win the war. Why go and fight against someone you like?

  If us plebs were in a hurry to go to Angola it was in the hope of clearing off to Europe from our neighbouring country, which was a den of traffickers working hand in glove with the airlines. All you had to do was raise the tidy sum of three hundred thousand CFA francs, and you could fly off to Europe. I managed to get the hell out for good from Luanda.

  I first arrived in Portugal before washing up in Belgium, and then in France with the ID of a long dead compatriot whose brothers had sold his residency card to Angolan traffickers. I go by the surname and first name of this disappeared person, so you’ll understand if I haven’t revealed my real name up until this point, still less the name of the street where my little studio in the 18th arrondissement is located. Obviously, the day I kick the bucket my little brother who lives in the home country will rush to sell my papers to the Angolans who will, in turn, sell them on to some idiot keen to make the journey to Europe.

  But look, I’m in good shape and good health, and my wake isn’t set for tomorrow …

  * * *

  I don’t enjoy recalling those times of sacrifice, the work I did well in spite of myself before going to Angola. I would get up in the morning and wait for a truck in front of a bus shelter opposite Studio-Photo Vicky, on Independence Avenue. I would climb up onto the truck together with some other guys. The truc
k would purr its way along the Avenue, stopping every two hundred metres to pick up more packers. By the time we reached the town centre, day would be slowly breaking. We could hear the waves roaring. The sea was just metres away. The fish sellers in the Grand Market would be parking their old bangers at the entrance to the port and waiting, anxiously, for the return of the Beninese who had the monopoly on fishing the Côte Sauvage. The natives thought it was a humiliating job. That was the sea for you. Fights breaking out between fish sellers, arguments that ended in fisticuffs in the middle of the ocean …

  This was where I worked, having failed my baccalauréat in Letters and Philosophy and my father having concluded that school wasn’t for me, that in any case it was a factory for turning out the unemployed along with people who wanted to become President of the Republic when in our country if you wanted to become President all you had to learn was how to execute a coup d’état and put your tribe in charge.

  The truck would tip us out on the roadside like sardines, and we would walk up to a barrier where men in uniform would check our identity, confiscate our bags, and only then let us through in single file. And so the hard day’s work began, with the unloading of containers watched over by foremen. We were endlessly being accused of stealing objects from abroad in order to sell them on in Trois-Cents. At the slightest theft, the guilty person would be marched to the main customs office where he was stripped before being whipped with barbed wire and then a final settlement would be drawn up making him a debtor for life. With so many objects from all over the world the temptation to steal was there, no doubt about it. But it was the customs officers who indulged in this trafficking, we were just scapegoats. We the subordinates, we the less-than-nothings could only covet those marvels from a distance …

  At one o’clock in the afternoon we were finally allowed to stop for a bite to eat. But even during our break, the foremen stuck to us like leeches. On each table they put a monster of a guard with a weightlifter’s physique, who chewed big chunks of cassava, had a swivelling eye and was listening out for the slightest whisper. We didn’t leave the port until evening, after interminable searches during which each worker was made to wear his birthday suit and put his hands in the air in a hut we nicknamed the “Screening House”. When we stepped outside, we felt as if we’d passed a tax inspection with flying colours.