Memoirs of a Porcupine

by Alain Mabanckou

  the next day, the whole of Séképembé was in shock, Kiminou was dead, and though it was generally agreed she had been eaten, it was assumed to be the result of rivalry between the mother’s and father’s lines, there was some dispute between the two, out came the scythes, the spears, the axes, the chief of Séképembé managed to calm the two camps, he proposed a trial on the day of the funeral, where the corpse picks out the criminal, Kibandi was half expecting it, dear Baobab, so he was prepared, Papa Kibandi had taught him to get round these things, my master had stuck a palm nut up his rectum just as his progenitor had, back when he was trying to catch out the sorcerer Tembé-Essouka, and the corpse of young Kiminou picked out one of the other marriage candidates instead, and the poor innocent was buried alive with the deceased, with no further trial, because that’s how things were done my dear Baobab, the universally dreaded trial by corpse, where the corpse picks out its aggressor, is widely used in these parts, whenever someone dies, the villagers rush to do it, to their minds there’s no such thing as a natural death, only the dead can tell the living who caused their death, I expect you’d like to know how it’s done, well, four strong men carry the coffin on their shoulders, a sorcerer chosen by the village chief picks up a piece of wood, knocks three times on the casket, and says to the corpse, ‘tell us who ate you, show us where the wrongdoer lives, you can’t just disappear into the other world without vengeance, come on now, stir yourself, run, fly, cross the mountains, the plains, and if the wrongdoer lives across the Ocean, if he lives up in the stars, we’ll seek him out and make him pay for what he has done you and your family’, the coffin suddenly starts to move, the four strong bearers get dragged into a devilish sort of dance, they no longer feel the weight of the corpse, they run left and right, often the casket drags them way off into the bush, then brings them hurtling back into the village at breakneck speed, and though they walk on thorns, on shards, they feel no pain, they are not harmed, they plunge into water, but do not drown, they pass through bush fires and are not burned, and once White men came here to watch this practice, so they could put it in a book, they said they were ethnologists, they had difficulty explaining to some of Séképembé’s less sophisticated inhabitants quite what an ethnologist was for, I had a good laugh myself, because I could just have speeded things along by saying an ethnologist was someone who discusses other people’s customs, which strike them as strange when compared to their own culture, no more no less, but one of the Whites made so bold as to explain to the poor lost souls of this village that the word ‘ethnology’ came from the Greek word ethnos, meaning ‘people’, therefore what ethnologists study is people, societies, customs, ways of thinking, ways of living, anyone who was bothered by the word ‘ethnologist’ could simply say ‘social anthropologist’ , which created still more confusion and most people just went on thinking they were people who were out of work in their own countries or who had come to put satellite dishes in the village so as to watch people, so anyway, there they were, these ethnologists or social anthropologists, they’d been waiting for someone to die, and luckily for them an individual had been eaten here, not by my master, by another guy whose double was a shrew, the ethnologists all cheered ‘fantastic, we’ve got our stiff, he’s at the other end of the village, the burial’s tomorrow, at last we’ll be able to finish that darned book’, and they asked if they might carry the coffin themselves, on their shoulders, because they were convinced there was something not quite right about this whole business, that it was really the men who carried the coffin who shook it about so as to get people falsely accused, but the question of whether or not the White men could take part in the ritual divided the village, some sorcerers were opposed to foreigners meddling in Séképembé’s affairs, in the end the village chief played diplomat and swore that the rites of the ancestors would still work, even in the presence of the Whites, because the village ancestors are stronger than the Whites, and he convinced everyone that it was a good thing these outsiders would be present during the rite, what’s more, they’d mention Séképembé in their book, the village would become world famous, people from many other countries would be inspired by our customs, to the greater glory of the ancestors, and that put an end to the discontent, which transformed into a collective sense of pride, another row almost blew up when it came to choosing one out of the twelve village sorcerers to supervise the ritual, they all wanted to work with the Whites now, when only a few hours earlier such a thing would have been inconceivable, and all the sorcerers began bragging about their family tree, but only one of them was needed, the village chief took twelve cowries, marked one of them with a little cross, put them in a basket, shook them and asked each sorcerer to close his eyes and put his hand inside and take one cowrie at random, the one who drew out the marked cowrie would have the honour of directing the ritual, the suspense lasted until the eleventh cowrie, when one of the sorcerers, who had kept on putting off his turn drew it out, before the envious gaze of all the others, and so, once all these negotiations were complete, the ethnologists or social anthropologists finally lifted the coffin, amid laughter from all the villagers, who seemed not to be concerned that their hilarity might bring shame upon the corpse, and the sorcerer, who was also fighting back guffaws, gave three sharp knocks with his bit of stick, struggled to find words with which to ask the corpse to point out the person who had harmed him, but the deceased understood what was expected of him, as well he might, because in his remarks the sorcerer added, ‘be careful not to bring shame on us in front of these White men who have come from afar and think our customs are just one big joke’, the corpse didn’t need to be asked twice, a light rain began to fall, and when the coffin started jolting forwards, hopping like a baby kangaroo, the ethnologists at the back shouted ‘come on now, comrades, stop shaking the damn’ coffin, let it move on its own if it’s really gonna move’ and the other ethnologists replied, ‘stop assing around guys, you’re the one who’s moving it’, the corpse started dancing around, speeded up its rhythm, dragged the ethnologists off into a lantana field, then brought them back to the village, pushed them down as far as the river, brought them back up to the village again and the whole mad chase finally came to a halt in front of old Mouboungoulo’s hut, with a huge thrust, the coffin broke down the door of the guilty man’s hut, drove into his home, an old shrew that stank like a skunk slipped out of the house, circled in the courtyard, then shot off down to the river, the coffin caught it at the first thicket of trees, came down on top of it, and that is how old Mouboungoulou met his death, dear Baobab, and apparently the Whites wrote a long book about the incident, over 900 pages, I don’t know whether the village of Séképembé has become world famous, what I do know is that other Whites have turned up since, just to check what the first ones wrote in their book, several of them left empty handed because the locals with harmful doubles were wary of them, and suddenly it seemed like no one ever died when the whites were around, a few corpses refused to go along with the ritual, refused to play the game, or sometimes the villagers would instruct their families, in the event of their death, not to allow their corpses to take part in the ritual in the presence of Whites, who might then go and sully their global reputation, so now, you see, the ritual is practised only with great caution, but the most convincing reason, let me tell you, dear Baobab, came from a guy called Amédée, and the reason I speak of him in the past tense is because he has passed on to the next world, may his soul rest in peace, he was what humans called an educated man, a cultivated man, who had studied for many years, he was respected for it, added to which he had travelled widely, he had been up in a plane several times, one of those noisy birds that rip the sky in two, every time you think it’s going to take your head off, apparently Amédée was the most intelligent men in the entire south, not to say in the whole country, but that didn’t stop us, we still ate him, as you will soon learn, he claimed that the book written by the first Whites on this question had been published in Europe and translated into several lan
guages, he asserted that it had become a key work of reference for ethnologists and Amédée, who had read it, was harsh in his criticism, saying ‘I have never read such a trumped up work, what else can I say, it’s a disgraceful book, a book which seeks to humiliate Africans, a tissue of lies by a group of Europeans in search of exoticism, who would like nothing better than for Negroes to continue dressing in leopard skins and living up trees’

  a breeze is rising now, your leaves fall upon me, it’s a pleasant feeling, it’s these little things that remind me of the joy of being alive, and looking up at the sky above I think to myself how lucky you have been, to live here, in this place, so close to paradise, where everything is green, here on top of the hill, overlooking the surrounding countryside, the trees all around are bent low towards the ground, while you consider the moods of the sky, with the indifference of one who has seen it all, over the years, compared with you the other vegetable species are mere garden gnomes, you watch over the entire plant world, from here I can hear the river running, splashing down onto a rock further downstream, people from Séképembé hardly ever come here, even if they cut down every single species in the bush, no one would lay a finger on you, the villagers respect the baobabs, I know it hasn’t always been so, I know things have been said about you, I can read in the veins of your bark, some of them are scars, some madmen in the village tried to finish you off, and in a destructive frenzy, for porcupine’s sake, they set about you with an axe, to chop you up for firewood, they said you hid the horizon, you blocked out the light of day, well they didn’t succeed, their saw buckled in the face of your legendary resistance, then they made do with gaboon planks for their coffins, their houses, the same wood my master used to make roof structures, and some villagers believe you have a soul, that you protect this region, that if you disappeared it would be a bad thing, fatal, even, for our region, that your sap is as sacred as the holy water in the village church, that you are the guardian of the forest, that you have existed since the dawn of time, that’s why, perhaps, the sorcerers use your bark to heal the sick, others say that a word with you is a word with the ancestors, ‘sit at the foot of a baobab tree, and given time, you’ll see the whole universe pass before you’, our old porcupine used to say, he told us that at that time the baobabs could talk, respond to humans, punish them, whip them with their branches when the monkey cousins took up arms against the plant world and in those days he went on, the baobabs could move about, find themselves a more comfortable spot where they could take better root, some of them came from far, far away, they would pass other baobabs going the other way because one always tends to think that the soil elsewhere is better than one’s native soil, that life is easier elsewhere, I think about those days, when everything was on the move, and distance was no obstacle, nowadays no one would believe the governor, no man bloated with reason and clogged with prejudice would ever have the idea that a tree with its feet planted once and for all in the ground could move about, after all, the incredulous soul would retort straightaway, ‘and why not the mountains while we about it, eh, they could go walk about too, say how d’you do at the crossroads, talk about the wind and the weather, swap addresses, exchange family news, it’s all just twaddle, that is’, but I believe it, for once I’m with our governor, they weren’t legends, it wasn’t just twaddle, he was right, and I know that you must have moved about too, you must have fled other lands where the desert threatened to erode, regions where you can count each drop of rain that falls, you left your family, returned to the rainy region, you must deliberately have chosen the most fertile spot in this country, I don’t know of any other baobab round here, I would love to trace your genealogy, find out which tree you’re descended from, and where your earliest ancestors lived, but perhaps I’ve strayed too far from the subject of my confessions, talking of you, it must be the human in me speaking, in fact I learned my sense of digression from men, they never go straight to the point, open brackets they forget to close