by Edem Awumey
We started listing those gems, thinking of using them when the time came to put on the play, when we would display them in big letters on panels. However, that time was slow in coming, and we had forgotten many of the scenes and were going to have to start again from scratch. Wali was still weak, and because we didn’t want to lose those words, we discussed how to make them available to passersby, to the crowds in the squares and markets, Beckett’s shit scattered to the winds of the Gulf of Guinea. I recalled that, several months before, a book had circulated in our group that spoke of pieces of paper, leaflets placed on the doorsteps of houses in Warsaw, in Paris. I don’t remember what book it was, or maybe it was just some article on resistance movements, the kind of thing we passed around at the time in the maquis and the halls of the university. We thought of Sony again, “They won’t do anything to us!”
8
“They won’t do anything to us!” I repeated to myself like a magic formula that would eradicate the heavy fear clinging to our skins, the shit that was impossible to expel, and as I’ve often done in times of doubt and anxiety, I thought of the only person who could make me forget that fear a little, or to be more precise, there was a chance that my wavering resolve would be strengthened, reinforced by my fight against that most extraordinary creature. I would have to confront that beast with bare hands and quaking heart, because although it would not be our first encounter, the beast still frightened me. Face to face with the creature, I had remained a timid kid struggling with a cruel stepmother with long teeth who was going to swallow him up, digest him and spit him out all soft after a terrible battle of bodies, with blows and wounds. But it was my therapy, and I knew that once the distance between us was eliminated, once I had broken the eternal ice of that inscrutable face and that tough flesh, once I found myself back in the vise of those rhinoceros thighs, I would have a sense of victory, and my feat would strip all substance from the fear. And I also knew that after the struggle, the Ogress, docile and maternal, would stroke my hair, my head nestled in her belly.
So one afternoon when we had no classes, I went to see her in the brothel in the Décon neighbourhood where she performed her duties. I arrived on the premises and told the manager I wanted to see the rhinoceros, Ma’ame Kili in person. We’d nicknamed her Kili for Kilimanjaro, to represent her huge body and volcanic nature. I remember the first time I saw her, which, to tell the truth, was my very first sexual experience. It was not with a beautiful ballerina at twilight on the seashore below the old wharf. No, it was with Ma’ame Kili, no less, in flesh and in volume. Wali had taken me there because he was convinced that the experience would loosen me up and make me more self-confident.
I arrived at the little room of the fat whore, a terrible fear running through my veins. I hesitated before knocking on the polished wooden door. It’s not too late, I told myself, I can still turn back. I turned around and looked at Wali standing a few metres from the gate to hell and giving me a sign of encouragement. I knocked lightly on the door three times... nothing. One, two, three minutes passed... nothing. “Knock harder,” whispered Wali, who had moved closer. I knocked again, a little more firmly, and a voice from behind the door thundered, “If that’s how you announce yourself, I guess I’m going to be dealing with a wimp! So, are you coming in?”
And I went inside. She was lying on an iron bed in one corner of the room. Under her loose clothing, I could make out her huge body. I cursed Wali, that son of a bitch, why did you do this to me? I lowered my head and looked down, and she said, “It’s not your head you have to lower, but your pants. Go on, do it!” I was furious, I had actually paid to be treated this way. I took off my clothes and she said, “Interesting, let’s see what we can do with that. Are you coming?” And as she said it, she began to unbutton her dress. She didn’t waste any time, she bared her massive bosom, a pair of breasts swollen with helium, horrible balloons from some ghastly party, and I wished those balloons would float up into the sky and I could grab hold of them and fly away, far from the trap I’d fallen into. Then I saw her belly, a huge, hideous, patchy tarpaulin with thousands of folds, a violent sea in constant motion, and it was clear that I was going to drown. A belly that spread out on the sheets like oil spilled on hot asphalt. Kili’s limbs, ancient tree trunks hastily cut down in the sacred forest of Bé, which was not far from the Décon neighbourhood and the brothel, tree trunks transported to the bedroom and attached to the rest of the body. But the most frightening thing was her tiny head, a ridiculous coconut in which shifty, suspicious eyes had been carved with a knife. Three hundred kilos of flesh assembled there for the pleasure or punishment of the thrill seekers she received in her ten-square-metre cloister. You’d think she must always have been there, it was impossible to imagine her dragging her cumbersome carcass on a journey.
Like the other times I had come to see her, I panicked when faced with the mountain. She said, “Here you are again! How long has it been, three months, six months?” She was already naked in the dark sheets. This time, the combat would end with my burial, and Wali would come to recover my body. Ma’ame Kili’s belly overflowed, blocking the view I would have had of her immense pubic area and the vague beginning of her thighs. I lay down beside her, anxious. She rose on an elbow and ordered, “Mount!” She raised and opened her legs, and I found myself once again in her vise. Breathing heavily, I began to move one hand over that gigantic body. My plan was to conquer the giant, and then nothing could frighten me anymore. Ma’ame Kili was a wild, complex, untameable world that I had to possess, or at least besiege, I had to climb to the summit of the mountain and know that I had succeeded, and since my friends and I wanted to confront danger, I had to take her, that fortress of a woman, a Bastille in a brothel stinking of sweat and cheap detergent. It was 1990, and a black boy in the tropics was taking the Bastille. With my friends, I was going to topple the heads of our kings, proclaim Liberty, and finally change the world. Kili was the most frightening of creatures, and to approach her I would have to find resources of nerve I did not have. That was what we needed, nerve, and the brothel was not for well-behaved, well-brought-up children ready to jump at their parents’ every command. Kili was my supreme act of defiance, my subversion, the rebellion of an altar boy trained and steeped in holy water by the Franciscans. I had just come out of the monastery to walk in the streets of discontent. I had to screw the hideous beast, and in the act my breathing became more and more normal, and that was the sign that the fear was finally gone, brutally expelled from my body with my cock’s ejaculation into the belly of the Ogress. I could turn her this way and that in surprising mastery of her steep, dangerous geography. Her hard words and her rough movements were perhaps only a facade or part of a carefully concocted show. She became soft, docile, as if exhausted, and that was the sign that I had triumphed.
9
“Why didn’t you ever go back to Africa?”
“I don’t know. I could have.”
“Is it nice there?”
“The sun there is always different, one day it warms you, the next day it kills you.”
“It’s not clear what you’re saying. Why did you leave?”
“I didn’t leave. I fled.”
“What?”
“The shadows.”
“You were afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Of what?”
“Of another uprising. Of writing on the walls and going to hell again.”
“Why did you write on the walls?”
“So people could read our anger in big letters. At least, we thought that was possible.”
“And after you left, did you write on other walls?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They weren’t the same walls anymore. I shut myself up in a room to make books.”
“With what? Your memories?”
“Words, a
city, a house with a yard filled with noisy brats, people, pain, blood, lives, my mother and her block of ice that she carried in a pail to the middle of the market, my surveyor father and his ink drawings, and a prison cell with a dirt floor.”
“A prison cell?”
“In a camp.”
“Like a camp for a vacation?”
“Yes. A long vacation, locked in. In the company of a shadow, a friend, Koli Lem.”
“Who’s Koli Lem?”
“Someone who’s gone now.”
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. I think so. He’s dead.”
“Where?”
“In detention.”
“In the camp?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you wrote books?”
“Yes. That’s what Koli had suggested. And I got caught up in it, one book, one play after another.”
“Why?”
“It was a way to keep talking to someone.”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
“It’ll come.”
“And now you’re sick.”
“They’re still trying to find a compatible donor for my leukemia.”
“You refuse to go back to the hospital.”
“It’s too late.”
“Why do you drink?”
“Good question.”
“Why?”
“It gives you wings.”
“And you fly?”
“No. You soar, you end up falling into the water with your burden of memories, you drown and you forget.”
Ito Baraka remembers that conversation, the first one he had with his girlfriend Kimi Blue, his lover late in the game. He remembers it almost down to the last detail, impossible to forget the questions marked by a seeming naïveté, that childlike candour with which she takes things the rare times when she’s not in need of a fix. Because Kimi does drugs. She’s a beautiful junkie with deep eyes. Powder, for her, is a way to reach the clouds of forgetting. She injects herself with that nasty stuff and feels alive again. And it seems to Ito Baraka that Kimi dissolves more and more with every hit, she loses her substance as a living person and melts into her surroundings, between the walls and the furniture, flowing like a river that runs downhill, dead water disappearing in tiny trickles into the gravel and the voracious earth. Kimi, the one reason Ito Baraka wants the train to take him home fast. And when he gets back, Kimi, as usual, will scold him for getting drunk again.
It’s true, Ito Baraka can’t give up the bottle. In the evening, after another day spent hanging around in the city, he returns to his lair. He throws his bag down and collapses onto the bed, closes his eyes for an instant, opens them again and looks at the dead screen of the wall awash in darkness. He turns onto his side, one hand groping under the thick fabric of his coat for the flask, which he extracts from its hiding place. It’s what he calls his midnight swig, the toast he drinks to the health of his fallen gods and ghosts. He shouts feverishly, “To your health, Bolívar! Go on, a good shot for you. To yours too, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin! To your health and an iron constitution, Amilcar Cabral! What has become of Guinea-Bissau? And Egypt, Nasser? What’s the latest news? To your health, Fidel! Communism or death, long live Havana, its ruins and its half-starved people!” He drinks with those rebels of history, whose teeth chatter in the dark of the room, their jaws knocking together like those of puppets enraged at their irreversible state as powerless objects that can’t do anything to change the decline of the world. Then he hugs the flask to his belly, rubs his eyes, and tries to sleep. The deep, cold night sucks him in. Then he feels a need to piss. He gets up and heads to the bathroom. He pees for a long time, his eyes half closed. He goes back to the bed, stumbles over his bag, loses his footing, falls over in the darkness and touches a cord, turning on a switch. The lamp on the bedside table lights up the room. He turns it off and lies down again in the fetal position, which gives him the feeling of having some control over his dying carcass, the feeling of being reborn in the tension of the muscles, the cracking of the bones and the dispersion, the explosion of his whole being. Heavy eyelids closed, he begins his negotiation with sleep, a hopelessly difficult task.
10
Ito Baraka runs a weary hand over his face. The passing of time has caused his silhouette to shrink and splinter. His face is a rectangle distorted by the premature wrinkles of suffering. He is forty-five years old, his skin sallow, his nose dwarfed by the Borsalino he has been wearing since he began to worry under the frequent dark clouds. An uncontrollable grimace twists his lips periodically, like a reaction to some inner jolt. In a few hours, he says to himself, he will be with Kimi Blue again. In the evening in the sheets, his hands will linger on her skin and the contours of her breasts, their disquieting fullness, the sheen of the nipples sculpted of the most precious wood.
The train jerks and pitches. The movement jostles Ito Baraka’s hand, and he makes an unwanted line in the notebook. Ito Baraka doesn’t know where he is. His face close to the window, he tries to peer into the night landscape. Beyond the snow-covered roof of the little station where they have stopped, raw nature, February and its evergreens with their frozen arms, the conical silhouettes barely trembling in the gusting wind. Ito shivers because of that other storm, the turmoil of the blood beneath his skin. He closes his eyes, opens them again, and picks up the notebook once more.
***
With Wali sick, we suspended our rehearsals of Endgame and started thinking about making leaflets with bits of dialogue selected from the play. And there was that day when Sika showed up with the story she said her old father had told her, about the Fidelista students in Cuba during the revolution, who designed odd leaflets that instead of the usual slogans and political rants consisted of quotes from the poet José Martí, little phrases that sparked the interest of the people in the barrios of Havana better than pamphlets would have. Sika continued, “What do you think? What if we did the same thing and put our José Martí on bits of paper?” At first we didn’t take her seriously. But she kept bringing up the subject, while I combed the library in vain trying to verify the story. And since we knew she wouldn’t stop hounding us with her proposal, we finally said yes, if it worked for the young Cubans who loved José Martí, why wouldn’t it work for us, too? And that’s how we made our decision, essentially out of a crazy desire to identify with the Fidelistas, because for all our arrogance we had no confidence that we could change the course of things with our little pieces of paper. We knew the system was solid. This was an experiment that would either captivate us or quickly become boring. We didn’t have any of José Martí’s writings at hand, but we had our dog-eared Beckett.
And because, in any case, all the risks we considered in this mad undertaking led to a knot of fear in the belly—my visit to Ma’ame Kili at the brothel hadn’t changed much—we took the plunge. We went to see Wali’s cousin “Gueule de Bois”—”Hangover”—who lived in the Bé neighbourhood, which was an island of diehard rebels where the automatic rifles of the army were often heard. In an office in the back of his house, Gueule de Bois had a computer—a rare privilege at the time—which no one was allowed to touch. He wore Rasta dreadlocks and smoked profusely, in order, he said, to burn away the doubt and fear in him. And we spent entire nights there writing our weird leaflets.
11
We composed our leaflets, with Gueule de Bois at the computer while we chose our quotations. Sika had her copy of Endgame open on her knees, and before we plunged in, Gueule de Bois asked us for the hundredth time if we were ready. He warned us that if the wind turned violent, we would have to hang on tight. We couldn’t begin to comprehend what we were risking. We looked at each other. Wali, still weak, had come to join us. Gueule de Bois smiled and said he’d never done “anything like this.” I asked, “Like what?
” He smiled again, “Leaflets like this.” And we started putting together our fragments of dialogue. Today when I pick up Endgame, it amuses me to find the words with which we set out to make war on that nebulous enemy we called The System.
Our leaflets:
“How are your eyes?”
“Bad.”
“How are your legs?”
“Bad.”
“But you can move.”
“Yes.”
Impossible. Here, we can’t move.
The lines were Clov’s and Hamm’s, and the last part came from us.
“I look at the wall.”
“The wall!” And what do you see on your wall? . . . Naked bodies?”
“I see my light dying.”
The light is in us. Endgame for the sergeant and the boots!
Gueule de Bois burst out laughing, “It won’t work! It’s harmless poetry!” “You’re wrong, Gueule de Bois, poetry has never been harmless,” Sika replied.
“What’s happening, what’s happening?”
“Something is taking its course.”
The discontent, the spring is taking its course.
The eyes of the friends shone in the darkness. Gueule de Bois filled the air with smoke.
“What’s the weather like?”
“As usual.”
“Look at the earth.”
“Look at the earth.”
Our land is consumed with stupidity and our earth is stained with blood.
We carried on, euphoric.
