by Edem Awumey
Descent into Night
Edem Awumey
Translated by Phyllis Aronoff & Howard Scott
©2013 by Éditions du Boréal
published in a French edition as Explication de la nuit
English language translation Copyright ©2017 Phyllis Aronoff & Howard Scott
Except for purposes of review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge support from the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.
Cover design by Sabrina Pignataro
Cover photo from Morguefile.com
Author photo by Steve Arnold
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Awumey, Edem, 1975-
[Explication de la nuit. English]
Descent into night / Edem Awumey ; translated by Phyllis
Aronoff & Howard Scott.
Translation of: Explication de la nuit.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-988449-16-6 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988449-21-0 (HTML)
I. Aronoff, Phyllis, 1945-, translator II. Scott, Howard, 1952-,
translator III. Title. IV. Title: Explication de la nuit. English.
PS8601.W86E9613 2017 C843'.6 C2017-904513-X
C2017-904514-8
Mawenzi House Publishers Ltd.
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Canada
www.mawenzihouse.com
For the dead . . .
and a few of the living, luminous with madness
To Kossi Efoui
Any resemblance between this fiction and any reality would be very interesting . . . and sad.
But now I’m at home, sitting on a chair, my head drooping lower and lower, until I drift off the only way I know how, moist lips against raised knees.
BOHUMIL HRABAL, Too Loud a Solitude
1
His nose pressed to the window of the train speeding through a world bleached white in the darkness of the night, Ito Baraka thinks back to the scene he has been rehearsing for days now. He stops in the middle of the basement that is his home. He looks up and examines the ceiling fan. He studies the housing and he thinks to himself that if he doesn’t have a rope, he’ll have to cut the sleeves off some shirts.
He looks at the fan with its rusty blades stilled, useless now, in a crumbling ceiling, and remembers his country and a failed spring. He hasn’t forgotten that on day three of their strike, the government sent the army onto the campus. Jeeps had taken possession of the space for three days, surveilling their flock of obstinate little intellectuals. Then, on the fourth day, the army charged, going after the leaders of the protest. It was a fine hunt, leopards chasing zebras in the wilderness, with beatings, clubs casually cracking skulls, stampedes in the corridors of the dormitories, arms and legs dismembered, the uniformed thugs tracking down their friend Neto, the vise closing tighter and tighter around him. Neto had chosen that nickname in memory of his idol, the Angolan poet and revolutionary Agostinho Neto. Because they were still at that age when you need gods. Ito Baraka hasn’t forgotten. Many years later, slumped on his sofa, he sees it all again, how the army finally cornered Neto on the third floor of the dormitory. On one side, the left, a window and a streaked sky.
Ito Baraka wants to be done with that past. Alone in his apartment, he rehearses the suicide scene. He looks for his scissors to cut off the shirt sleeves. Then he’ll just have to tie a good slipknot and let himself go. It will be a way, the final way, to put an end to the brutal invasion of those images that have so often kept him from closing his eyes, the vise closing around Neto trapped beside the window in the surrounded dorm, the kick of a boot, the glass shattering into a thousand sharp shards. The film is cruelly clear before Ito’s eyes. The army rearranges Neto’s face, uppercuts swelling his temples, uprooting his nose, and splitting his brow open. They lift the young man, who sees the shivering tops of the trees. The imperturbable majesty of the eucalyptus trees around the dorm, the ugly clouds, the corridor and the window floating, the impassive sky, and Neto thrown out the window. A hoarse scream, the scream of the little shit of a leader falling onto the hard ochre earth in the dormitory yard, a slick of blood around his head, a halo of sainthood won by the martyr with dilated pupils. Ito Baraka remembers, he was among the student rebels standing around their comrade’s body, its limbs twitching in a macabre dance, while the soldiers continued combing the corridors of the dorm looking for other black sheep. “A taxi,” shouted a girl in the group of students around poor half-dead Neto as his body’s dance came to an end with the death rattle of an ancient record player.
Ito and the others stood powerless looking at their fallen friend, the slick of blood becoming a pool, the lips of the dying man mumbling incoherent words, the first description and mapping of the beyond delivered still warm to those who, for the time being, were still among the living. Someone whistled, the army retreating, the taxi they found twenty minutes later, the hospital corridors strewn with other disjointed puppets. “Put him down there,” a man in a white coat said coldly. In the middle of the night, a doctor finally arrived, who shook his head as soon as he saw the poor guy. Ito thought of the rag doll his mother had made for him on her Singer sewing machine, that first companion he dragged around for a long time, holding on to it by one arm, and his mother’s warning, “If you pull him apart, I won’t be able to sew him up again quickly enough and he’ll die.” And since it was only then that the doctor arrived, he wondered whether the scalpels and the scissors had come too late for Neto.
The doctor sent them away and shut himself up inside an operating room with the dying man. When they came back the next day, they were told, “You have to wait, still in the operating room,” and in the following hours, “In post-op.” On the third day, “Coma,” and then for weeks on end, “Coma,” until they were forbidden to visit for some obscure reason, something about visits being restricted to the immediate family. Ito Baraka doesn’t know what became of the boy. That year it was hard to count the dead, the wounded, and the disappeared on campus, as order and fear returned to the amphitheatres with their shattered windows.
Ito Baraka, in his basement, rehearses the final scene. He glances at the fan overhead, he stands on his sofa, which creaks. He has a hard time keeping his balance because of the broken springs. He tosses the rope, which catches in the blades of the fan, and pulls on it. What comes next? Tie the knot with the end he’s holding. Then he senses his friend Koli Lem’s hand gripping his arm in the cell in the camp where they were held, back in his country, a nice knot right where Koli’s long fingers are pressing Ito’s flesh, and hears Koli whisper, “Don’t worry, we’ll get out of here, and with everything you’ve been through, you’ll become a great writer, you’ll be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn!”
Yes, Koli assured him in that place of dying lost deep in the sun-scorched savannah, Ito Baraka will be a famous and sadly painful writer, and as with his characters, he will choose the end he wants for himself. He will choose the time and the weapon and his last thought, an
d he will die at the height of his glory in his basement, in this apartment that is itself a tomb for the sun.
In their tropical prison, Koli Lem was still whispering, “You’ll be Yukio Mishima!” It is this time of prison, this century of all the madness and all the fiascos that Ito Baraka is trying to recount in a book, his last one, with what remains to him of blood and fleeting memory.
In the train bringing him back from Quebec City, where he was invited to give a reading in front of an indifferent audience, the face of his fellow prisoner continues to intrude on him, with Koli repeating, “You will be Garcia Lorca!” Yes, Ito Baraka will be—in what future?—a flamboyant artist or just a guy who disturbs people, and one joyful morning at dawn, in an empty yard, he will, like Garcia Lorca, be dressed in his final suit with a dandy’s stripes. They’ll make a wall of his books, stand him in front of it, and shoot him!
2
The train is a long reptile slithering through the night jungle. Ito Baraka hunkers down in his seat. To anyone who happens to walk through the empty wagon at that particular moment, he will appear a shady character, an old pile of skin and bones covered with a coat that’s too big and makes him look like a fallen god. Through the closed window, he thinks he can make out eyes peering at him, the inquisitive gaze of big black cats, cruel creatures whose claws are raking his flesh. He looks like Hamm, the grumpy blind old cripple in Beckett’s play Endgame. He thinks about Hamm, and about Beckett, because that’s where it all started for him.
The train is a noise and a dull ache running through his veins. He coughs and bends down and grabs the backpack between his legs. He starts to take out his big notebook, but then changes his mind and pulls from the inside pocket of his coat the flask he always carries, and takes a sip from it. His hands trembling, he gets out the notebook, opens it in the middle, and begins to read. He shivers. He knows he won’t have time to complete this book. He reads over the paragraph he finished when the train pulled out of Quebec City.
***
Nineteen eighty. There would continue to be only one way of thinking in the country, in keeping with the directives of the party. I remember we had to stand stiff-necked, all looking in the same direction, the direction of the wind, and after long days of immobility, our joints would ache, and an army general would appear out of nowhere and make us turn our heads in another direction, the direction of emptiness. And my father didn’t see how we could survive between those two poles of wind and emptiness. In our neighbourhood there was an old man they called the Walker, a wretched creature scarred by a series of failures and misfortunes. He would walk the streets of the neighbourhood heaping insults on everyone he met, calling the passersby wimps, losers, nutless, gutless, goddamn niggers, jackasses. At six in the morning, we’d hear the guy in the north end of the neighbourhood, and his voice would gradually move towards us and his volley of insults would once again disturb the more sensitive of the good citizens and fail to impress the old people, who had been through it all, and worse, since the sky of lead and misery had fallen on our heads. And they pronounced the man a madman and philosopher and said he’d spent twenty years in jail for affront to public decency, slander, treason, and other crimes. And the better informed of our fellow-citizens confirmed that he had said things against the powers-that-be, nobody knew exactly what, and one day a sergeant and his detachment came out of the watchtowers of the city and tossed him in jail. There are watchtowers there, right in the middle of the city. Watchtowers, army camps, men in fatigues, green jeeps, and a sergeant sitting in the rear seat of his patrol car, an Uzi across his skinny chicken legs. Also airplanes in a gloomy sky.
Very often, my father, a surveyor who worked in the fields with his tripod and transit and other optical instruments, would catch sight of a flying object in the sky. It might be an army helicopter doing reconnaissance on our hotheads, and my father, to avoid trouble, would move his field of observation, while the neighbourhood madman continued insulting us in his voice of an opera singer who has seen better days, the shrill notes of rage and frustration finally catching in his throat, cutting off his breath, and throwing him against a wall darkened with the piss and spittle of idlers. His words were the morning refrain that answered the crowing of a noisy rooster perched on the roof of the neighbourhood movie theatre. The Walker, calling us chickens, toadies, and losers, philosophizing about what he called our duck walk, ranting that we would never get further than the boundaries of our henhouse-neighbourhood, drawing a parallel between our daily promenade of the living dead and the gait of the few web-footed birds that strayed into the Bé lagoon. And he walked fast, exhorting passersby loud and clear to join the ranks of what he called The Revolution, the real one and not the one of the men in fatigues who had gotten us into such deep shit. The man would raise his fist, his whole body stiff. My father didn’t want me to end up like him if that’s what philosophizing was, asking for trouble and a boot in the ass! I enrolled in philosophy anyway, and got into Plato, Kant, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. My favourite, though, was Diogenes the Cynic, because, like him, the swindling brats around the dumps at the Train Station Market would search in broad daylight for light, light that was irremediably corrupted by the veil of cruelty covering their malaria-yellowed eyes.
3
At night, I would sleep with my wise men and madmen from Athens, Rome, and the Age of Enlightenment, books by Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau, and Kant strewn on my bedding. I would read by candlelight—it was expensive to leave the fluorescent light on for long—at the risk of burning the mosquito netting, along with my notebooks, the mattress, and the whole sleeping household. I had made some friends at the university, two guys and a girl who were to be important in my little life. Beno and Wali were in the faculty of arts and Sika was studying law. We would spend entire afternoons at Beno’s place remaking the world. A broken world, in fragments scattered on the little low table around which we sat talking, trying to glue together the pieces, the shards of shattered lives and dreams. That was before the riots and the crises that came one after the other, the crises and the outbursts of violence that had begun to reinvent death with a hole in the chest, a stiff on a sidewalk perforated like a target that impatient children or sharpshooters at a circus or fair have emptied their slugs into, a corpse of a girl with a hole between her breasts.
We led ordinary student lives between classes, books, flirtations that quickly petered out into boredom, and watching the turbulence of the ocean in the evening, when it wasn’t yet sending back swollen corpses. However, later things were different, and there were fire and long knives shining during that night of massacres and summary executions. My father could no longer study things in the distance with his surveyor’s theodolites or observe the pitching of the fishermen’s boats moving towards the open sea. Instead, in his comings and goings at the outskirts of the city, he would come across what he called charcoal bodies—people burned and abandoned in sinister dead ends in which nothing could survive but fat, glutted black flies. My father would tear his eyes away, rub them with the palm of a trembling hand, and glue them back onto his instrument, and another human form, it too charred, would come into view on a vacant lot. And he would try to guess if it was a man or a woman. Very often, the charcoal body would have its mouth open and my father would conclude that the person should have kept it shut.
That was well after the university years, when we already sensed the hellish time coming and would talk about it in our discussions at our friend Beno’s house. Beno’s father, a teacher, thought we were studying for our exams, to him we were still well-behaved, disciplined youngsters, and it’s true our long, impassioned debates were harmless. There was never a real blow-up. But soon there would be, with explosions in the neighbourhoods of the city. The TV spoke of terrorism and attempts to undermine the gains of peace and security, the fraudulent peace sold on our airwaves as the feat of the century. But death was beginning to freeze
the faces of the most reckless. The Angel of Repression had begun prowling the alleys and the bars where we would go drinking to defy the fear, the invisible Angel portrayed in caricature wearing a helmet and holding a grenade with its pin permanently pulled, ready to trash any area or activity suspected of being contrary to the Nouvelle Marche, the new destiny defined by mutual agreement of all the active elements of the nation when the men in fatigues took power. We learned to know the Angel when we were shut up at Beno’s place in our circle of young poètes maudits discussing fiery, iconoclastic works of Allen Ginsberg or Ezra Pound. We rubbed shoulders with the Angel until the day in February 1988 when the Faculty of Arts at the university invited a writer from the Congo, Sony Labou Tansi, who I remember had, somewhere around Brazzaville, come up with the sentence “A word is a dead body that aspires to resurrection.” Writing as a matter of dead flesh that you stroke with your pen in order to get a sound, an echo, out of it. That image floated in my mind. I saw the writer pushing a cart and picking up bodies in the streets of imagination, death with a bluish sheen, adorned with a necklace of shiny flies and pearls, with macabre beauty marks and blowtorch burns or bullet holes in a body reduced to a torso. In the middle of his presentation to the students, Sony said, “Let’s not remain silent, let’s speak up, they won’t do anything to us!” They wouldn’t serve up our grilled testicles and guts to the generals with the finest wines at the next dinner on the calendar of the nation. His words resonated, as if a breach had been opened up in a reinforced concrete sky, and like wound-up clocks we were driven to act, to find a way to enter the corpses of the words Sony had resuscitated. We imagined it wouldn’t be very complicated. Each dead body left on the asphalt of our revolution was pierced with holes of different sizes, holes through which we would penetrate those bodies and breathe life into them. But my father said, “He’s nuts, your Sony, this is not a game!” For days after the man left, we talked longer and longer, until dawn, in Beno’s little room, and from our refuge to the street it was just one step.
