Memoirs of a Porcupine

by Alain Mabanckou

  only a few hours ago, at the first light of dawn, I mean, today, Sunday, I shook the dust off my belly and my butt, at first I hadn’t understood why no villagers had passed by the two large stones where I’d hidden for the night, then later it dawned on me that today is a day of rest, otherwise I would have seen hunters, palm wine tappers and other workers who go out into the fields at crack of dawn, and so, before leaving the stones, I stretched, I yawned, followed my instinct, I shuffled along awkwardly, I don’t quite know how I found my way down to the river, where for once the wild ducks and other animals were nowhere to be seen, I wanted to make my way to the bit where the water’s less deep, then decided against it, for fear of drowning, then I came across you, which is why, my dear Baobab, I’ve been sitting at your feet since this morning, talking to you, talking still, even though I’m sure you won’t answer, and yet the spoken word, it seems to me, delivers us from the fear of death, and if it could also help me stave it off for a little while, or escape it, that would make me the happiest porcupine in all the world

  the fact is, though I’m ashamed to say this, I don’t want to disappear, I’m not sure there is life after death, and even if there is, I don’t want to know about it, I don’t want to dream of a better life, the aged porcupine who ruled over us was right when he declared, enjoying the immediate impact of his thoughts on the group, ‘the toad wished so hard for a better lot, he found himself without a tail for all eternity’ and in fact the toad didn’t just find himself without a tail, he was also afflicted with such ugliness that it would be a crime even to feel sorry for him, and so, my dear Baobab, when men talk of the life to come they’re kidding themselves, poor things, in the next life, they think, there’ll be a clear blue sky, and angels everywhere, with everything lovely, they’ll be in a garden, in the bush, but a bush where the lion has no fangs, no claws, and will laugh, not roar, and no such thing as death, jealousy, hatred or envy, all humans will be equal, well I’ll go along with all that, but how can I be sure I’ll stay a porcupine, what if I’m reincarnated as an earthworm, or a ladybird, a scorpion, jelly fish, palm tree caterpillar, slug or some other wretched creature of far lowlier status than my present one, a status which would be the envy of any other animal, now you may think I’m just a braggart, a smooth talker, an idiot with bristles, it’s not that I go round criticising other species for the mere pleasure of exaggerating, no, it’s that modesty can be a handicap, it can ruin your life, that’s why, ever since I realised that if you’re going to accept yourself as you are it’s best to play down your shortcomings, for example, I’d rather have a nice set of bristles than the chronic mange you see on the dogs of this village, there are some wretched creatures in this world I won’t even mention, there are always some worse off than yourself, the list is endless, it would be quicker to count my tens of thousands of quills than to list every animal with a grudge against the world’s creator, I’m thinking of the poor old tortoise and its rough shell, the elephant with its awkward trunk, the hapless buffalo with its ridiculous horns, the filthy pig, stuffing its snout in the mud, the snake, condemned to slither about on its belly, the male chimpanzee, with his testicles that hang down like gourds of palm wine, let’s not even mention the duck, with its squishy webbed feet, like a gastropod’s, there are so many pitiful creatures here below, my own species are by no means the worst off, and if human beings were a bit more truthful themselves, they’d agree with me, because, for porcupine’s sake, if you’ll just excuse me for upping the tone a moment, I wasn’t one to be content with nibbling away at the bark a few metres from where I slept, idling my time away down a hole, gnawing the bones of dead animals or the fruit which had fallen from the tree, and once my mission was accomplished, let me tell you, I’d go back into the forest, and huddle up alone, though I’d never minded solitude until last Friday, I pondered the meaning of my relationship with my master, but let it not be thought that I was at such times overwhelmed, devastated, caught in the trap of my master’s curious destiny, oh no, I want to live in the here and now, I want to live just as long as you do, and between you and me, I’m not going to decide I’ve no right to live, and take my own life, let’s be quite clear about that, I’m trying to look on the bright side, I’d still like to have a laugh now and then, to show laughter’s not just for humans, for porcupine’s sake

  I don’t know if you noticed a remarkable thing this morning, when I began talking to you, I didn’t want to draw your attention to the fact, but I noticed a rather elderly lizard coming towards me, he stopped a few metres away, looked behind him, put out his tongue, waved his tail, I saw his eyes staring in amazement, as though he’d been turned into a statue of salt, terrified at the sight of me chatting away to myself, he took a risk and darted off down a rat hole, I laughed like a hyena, because I hadn’t had a good laugh like that for a long time, but I quickly put a lid on it because there are people in our village who’ve died of laughing, and when I think of that poor lizard I wonder if perhaps it was the first time he’d ever come across an animal acting like a human being, speaking coherently, nodding in approval, waving one of his paws in the air to swear an oath, I felt quite sorry for the poor reptile, even though our governor had often said that when I was small I was scared stiff of lizards, the one this morning must have thought he was dreaming, I just went on talking to you, as though it was all quite normal.

  it wasn’t by chance I came to hide beneath you, I decided the moment I saw you, while making my way along the river’s edge, I thought, I’ll go and shelter there, the fact is, I want the benefit of your ancestral experience, just from the folds around your trunk it’s clear you must have had to learn to live with the changing seasons, even your roots spread wide and deep in the belly of the earth, and every now and then you move your branches to change the direction of the wind, and remind all nature that a long life like yours comes from keeping silent, and here I am, for porcupine’s sake, chattering away, startled by the slightest leaf that flutters from your crown, just let me take a few breaths before I carry on, I’m panting a little, ideas rush and crowd my mind, I think since this morning I’ve been talking too fast, I’d like to drink a little water, I’ll just take a few sips of the dew around me on the grass, I’m not going to risk wandering away from you, believe me

  how I left the animal world

  how long ago it seems, that time when I left my own habitat, and drew close to the boy child I knew affectionately as ‘little Kibandi’, it’s been many years since then, but memories remain, as clear as if it was yesterday, at that time Kibandi and his parents lived in the north of the country, far from here, in Mossaka, a wet region, with giant trees, crocodiles, and turtles as big as mountains, the time had come for me to leave the animal world, and embark on my existence as a double, I had to reveal myself to my young master, and little Kibandi sensed I was there, from the moment I started to make him feel my presence, trying to throw a little light on his existence, I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t bonded almost immediately, I came at just the right moment, he was ten years old, the required age for receiving a harmful double, and when I arrived at the gates of his village in the North, I saw the little pup, standing behind his father, like his shadow, I felt sorry for the child, he’d just had his initiation, he couldn’t control the drunkenness brought on by the mayamvumbi, his father had just put him through a great test, a new world lay before him, he had become a new creature, the fragile thing the villagers of Mossaka could see behind Papa Kibandi was only a puppet now, a kind of hollow container, the contents of which had evaporated, he was just biding his time, till he met his double, when the two would merge and become one, he couldn’t sleep, poor little Kibandi, he was so busy struggling with the effects of the ritual drink, and all this time I was getting more and more frantic out there in the in the forest, the bush pressed in upon me, I couldn’t bear to be there, I was trying to get out, so I could go and live near my young master’s village, at that time I didn’t know I would incur the
wrath of the old porcupine who used to rule over us, who did nothing but rail against humans, from sunrise to sunset

  this was the most turbulent time of my life, when I had to weigh up the demands of the child and our little family of porcupines, I put up with the governor’s rages, as he became increasingly intransigent, as though he had got wind of the huge changes taking place in my life, as though he’d guessed what was going to happen to me, he held more and more meetings, sneering down at us, raising his voice, with affected gestures, stroking his little beard with his claws, then crossing his front paws, his snout pointed skywards, in imitation of some human being calling on Nzambi Ya Mpunga, no point our saying anything, he always had the last word, for example, he’d tell us such and such a river used to flow round the other way and when we asked the old guy how long it had taken for the water to make this spectacular change in direction, he’d toss his worn out quills, make a show of closing his eyes and thinking, point to the sky, it made me roar with laughter, and then he got angry and began to threaten us, issuing an ultimatum we all knew by heart, ‘if that’s how it is, then that’s the last time I’ll tell you anything about men and their ways, you’re just plain ignorant’, and when we went on laughing he’d add enigmatically, ‘when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger’, but when he saw I was still keen to go check out what the monkeys’ cousins were up to, the aged porcupine flew into a rage, telling his stooges to keep a close paw on me, could he possibly have known I was due to enter upon the scene, now young Kibandi had drunk his initiatory drink, he’d no idea, my dear Baobab, when I left I did it discreetly, sometimes with the connivance of two or three sidekicks, who wanted to hear from me how it really was with humans, because the aged porcupine always tended to exaggerate, and almost seemed to be calling for a war between the animal and human species, I would vanish into the bush for whole days and nights and it got so that that I only felt at ease when I was close to my future master’s village, whenever I got back home I found the governor in a rage, calling me every name under the sun, and to further tarnish my image, he’d tell my sidekicks that too much contact with humans had sent me mad, I was heading straight for the fox’s jaws, soon I’d have forgotten our ways, I would lose touch with what made us the most noble animals in the bush, he swore, our aged philosopher, that one day I’d get caught in one of those traps men leave in the bush, or worse still, even fall into the silly traps set by the kids from Mossaka, who knew how to capture birds with one of their mother’s aluminium bowls, and the other porcupines all laughed themselves silly, because they too considered it better to fall into a trap set by a real hunter than one left by a human being who wasn’t yet weaned from its mother’s breast, you’d always see them at the gates of the village in the North, but I must say, dear Baobab, that only the birds of Mossaka got caught that way, and mostly the sparrows, who are the stupidest birds round here, I wouldn’t like to generalize and say all vertebrates with feathers, beaks and anterior limbs used for flight are that stupid, oh no, I’m sure there are some intelligent species of bird, but the sparrows of Mossaka had such a low IQ that I actually felt sorry for them, sparrows the whole world over must be the same, I can see they must be cut off from the reality of life on earth, constantly flitting here and there, that’s who the children of the North had laid their traps for, the little humans, in the middle of nowhere, had these bowls, propped up with a piece of wood, and round them they tied a long piece of string you could hardly see, and they hid in the undergrowth about a hundred metres off, and, drawn by the seed left round the bowls, the poor things jostled and chirruped up in the tree tops then would suddenly all drop to earth at once, without setting up some lookouts to tell them if something was up, then the kids would tug the string of their silly traps and the sparrows would suddenly find themselves imprisoned under the container, but what was strange, dear Baobab, was that none of them had any sense of the danger, which would have been obvious to any animal, even the ones with no common sense at all, it didn’t occur to the birds for a moment that it was a bit strange to find a container sitting in the middle of nowhere, that seeds lying on the ground, untouched by other birds, might be a bit suspicious, I never got caught out myself, otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking to you now, and so my fellow porcupines, indoctrinated by the governor, were convinced I would get caught in one of these traps, ‘the drum is made from the skin of the fawn that strays from its mother’, our Australopithecus was wont to say, thinking I wouldn’t understand what he meant, and this remark created a great stir within in the group, some of my colleagues repeated it everywhere they went, imitating the patriarch’s gestures, teasing me, even, calling me ‘the fawn’, until one day I got so irritated by their jokes, which did not seem in the least bit funny to me, I explained that the fawn was the young of a wild animal, a deer, a buck or roe, whereas I was in fact a porcupine, and proud of it too