by Edem Awumey
“Grey... Grey! GRREY!”
“Grey! Did I hear you say grey?”
“Light black. From pole to pole”
Black. In our heads, our neighbourhoods.
Very often, in the middle of the night, there would be a power outage. Gueule de Bois would light candles. The computer’s battery allowed us to continue for two short hours.
“Did you ever think of one thing?”
“Never.
“That here we’re down in a hole.”
Our hole. It’s possible to get out.
12
Ito Baraka has the feeling that the train, instead of carrying him forward, is taking him down under the ground, his suddenly heavy body plunged deep in a well, the very one that was in the middle of the yard at the first house he lived in with his parents. He again sees the bare earth around the well, the well itself, and the tall mango tree in what remained of the yard for the kids’ games. He again sees the big pots of boiling water on the terracotta or wrought-iron charcoal stoves in front of each of the one- or two-room dwellings. The parents, who had nothing, would boil water all evening to make their children believe they would have a supper. And the pots would continue boiling until, overcome by fatigue, the kids would fall asleep on the laps of their sad, crushed mamas.
The train arrives in the Montreal station. There are no more connections to Ottawa. Ito Baraka heads outside to De La Gauchetière Street. His Quebec City hosts have reserved a room for him not far from the station in case he had to wait till morning for a train to Ottawa. At the hotel, the solitary receptionist at the desk makes short work of the formalities of registration. Once in the room, Ito takes a shower and lies down on the bed. He tries to reread the beginning of his story, but sets it aside. He grabs the remote control from the bedside table. Two or three hours flipping from channel to channel, a tour of a world that seems increasingly foreign to him as he withdraws from it. He gets up from the bed, thirsty. After serving himself from the minibar, he goes back and collapses once again. The features of the room become mixed up with those of a distant universe, and in his head, thousands of roads and faces come together.
Seven o’clock in the morning. Ito Baraka is saved from his foundering by the ringing of the telephone. He had asked for a wake-up call. Did he sleep? In the street, the cold chills him to the bone. At the station, he sits down on a bench in the main concourse. Employees are cleaning the tile floor of the huge building. Ito Baraka takes out his notebook again and tries to continue his story. He is advancing quickly despite the unavoidable slowness of his movements, the disease that is gradually stiffening his muscles and the joints of his fingers. His pen slips from his fingers again and falls at the foot of the bench. He has always written in notebooks. Early in their life together, Santou, his former companion, would type the texts on the computer in the straight, resigned posture of a secretary in some obscure suburban office. Ito Baraka bends over his page and goes back to scribbling.
***
We huddled together in Gueule de Bois’s little office and composed our leaflets until dawn, discussing the best terms, correcting, revising and in the end printing them out on the coloured paper that Gueule de Bois gave us for free. And when we asked him, “Why coloured paper?” the answer was obvious, our leaflets had to attract attention. And Gueule de Bois added, “For a change from grey.” And the following nights we went out and distributed the leaflets, or to be precise, left them in specific places in the city—on the doorstep of the main post office, on the seats of university lecture halls, at intersections, on the beach, and in many other places where passersby couldn’t miss them—at night, naturally, to reduce the risk of being spotted. We spent a whole week at it, and when we had left our packages untied in a given place, we would never go back there the next day. On the curbs, we would kneel as if to tie our shoes and put down the little squares of the leaflets, the knot of fear returning to our bellies when we saw car headlights coming towards us that could flush us out. At the university, it was easier, we would wait to be the last ones to leave the lecture hall after class and then distribute the papers. The next day, our classmates could talk of nothing else.
We continued distributing the leaflets in the dimly lit alleys of our city, carrying bags of the coloured papers slung across our shoulders. We had been at it for about a week when we got scared like never before. Because there was a story going around that more and more people were talking about. They were saying a group of young men, mainly students, had been arrested and transported to the office of the intelligence service on the outskirts of the city. There was little variation in the versions of the story, which meant that it must unquestionably be true. The boys had been putting out leaflets, and they were picked up in their homes in the middle of the night, roughed up, and taken to dark rooms, where information was wormed out of them with pliers and pincers, even if it meant ripping off their toenails, their nipples, their balls, and the rest. At sundown, the media confirmed the story, the black sheep were suspected of distributing subversive leaflets inciting, and I quote, “the army to revolt.” Many people in the streets of the city knew what they were talking about, those pieces of printed paper where they read “things we were thinking quietly to ourselves, things that were burning our bellies,” as Gueule de Bois would say later, “things that stabbed you in the stomach, and then you had no choice but to shit out the thing that was itching your guts.” In the houses and the streets, they called the leaflets adomenou, which meant guts, those disgusting tubes inside the belly. The official communiqués stated that the purpose of the leaflets was to destabilize the regime and undermine the peace and security that had been established. They spoke of plots and a coup d’état, saying the adomenou were garbage, and any son of the nation who wanted to preserve the gains of the revolution had a duty to burn them. For the first time we were able to glimpse what the shit from our guts could represent, set out on sheets of paper.
And I imagined the sergeant with the Uzi trembling before those pieces of paper, the stinking tubes chasing him, trying to capture him, and him running, out of breath, in the corridors of his huge national palace with the adomenou on his tail, the guts that would tie him up and toss him into the lagoon, where he would be slowly swallowed up by the mud. In his bunker, the sergeant looks for a hiding place, he runs, stumbles, gets up, hides for a moment behind the frame of a huge photograph of his horrified face, slobbering on his colonial soldier’s medals, won, as he has recounted, at Diên Biên Phu, in Alsace, and in Algeria.
In our maquis, we tried to imagine the lovely time the detainees must have had in the intelligence offices and we were scared stiff. A joking writer had said, “Speak up, they won’t do anything to you!” Wali asked the question, “What are we risking?” We had thought we were the only ones distributing leaflets at night, and now we’d discovered that there was very likely a structure that was more organized and more serious than ours. It hadn’t been a game for those boys, whose balls were undoubtedly being subjected to cruel caresses while we were talking.
Wali asked his question again: “What are we risking?” And the next day, we rushed to get rid of our remaining pink papers. I called Gueule de Bois’s sister, and she told us in tears that he had been picked up the night of the roundup. Terror. A live flame burned my back and I recalled the inscrutable smile Gueule de Bois always wore. He must have been enjoying the all too lyrical quality of our leaflets, because there was nothing poetic about the shit from his own guts on pieces of paper. I cut short my phone conversation with his sister. My friends, in a circle around me in Beno’s little room, were trembling like a person sick with malaria. We told Beno’s father, who said sarcastically, “I could give you some quinine to calm your nerves, you impulsive little shit disturbers. But I can see only one thing to do, hide, and watch your step until the storm
passes.” For two weeks, we holed up with some colleagues of his and with an old priest who did not disapprove of our action, who said that it was bound to happen. Later we learned that there were about fifteen detainees, including our friend Gueule de Bois. It was a scorching August for us.
13
Aromas of coffee and fresh fruit surprise Ito Baraka on his bench. An old lady, who must also be waiting for a train, has come and sat beside him with her breakfast. Ito Baraka wonders in what morning market the old lady has bought her fruit. He remembers that, back home, the fruit merchants were the first ones to set up their stalls at Hanoukopé Market. He sees the market again, with the movie theatre in the middle. It was bounded by a lagoon that every evening sent down on people’s heads an army of disciplined and lethally effective mosquitoes. There were open-air sewage ditches running alongside the houses like veins carrying bad blood under the skin of a stoic, dying man who doesn’t give a damn. There were scrawny trees spreading their bare branches, beetles tickling the naked bums of the hordes of kids in front of the concessions with their bleached wood gates opening onto yards, each one with the indispensable well in the middle, the sole water supply for the tenants of the houses lined up on either side. And in a corner farther away, surrounded by a low, crudely built cinder-block wall, the sanitary facilities, two shower stalls on the greenish ground and a latrine, yes, a single one for the whole concession. So there was always a line of people waiting while you emptied yourself of all your frustrations, and sometimes someone pounding on the door to put pressure on you or clearing their throat to signal their painful presence and ask for a little compassion. Yes, that’s the way it was, and Ito Baraka imagines it’s still that way, the laterite dust and the smell of the gaping sewers hanging over everything like a sinister circus tent, the shine of tin roofs in the sun, the bars on the single window of the two-room apartment his parents rented. Bars, as if they were in prison, trapped in that working-class neighbourhood that at least wasn’t in the slums of the outlying districts, bars that gave them a view of a striated, saturated sky. The sun beat down, making it unbearably hot in the houses, with their low roofs and no ceilings, and the tin nailed directly onto the palm-wood rafters scorched the skin.
That scene was where his mother would be, hawking ice water in the market. At the height of the tropical heat, that might bring in a few small coins. His mother among the wooden stalls and stands of a market along a railway line, “Ési, ési, de l’eau, de l’eau,” a plastic pail hanging from her right hand, and in the pail, a big chunk of ice. At the public tap on the edge of the market, she would pour water over the ice and begin her round, “Ési, ési . . .”
His mother’s dream was that Ito Baraka would get out of what she called their quagmire. He was not unhappy, but his mother, who had her own idea of happiness, had decided his destiny should be different. She thought that school, knowledge, would save him from the margins and give him a place at the centre of the world. That was also the credo hammered home daily by Baka the teacher at the Franciscan school where Ito Baraka began his quest for knowledge. “Learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, succeed, become an accomplished person!” Baka would repeat. Many years later Ito would say to himself that the issue wasn’t mastery of numbers and letters, it was something else. The question to ask yourself was rather this one: “Of what night of the world are you the fruit? The one in which love, in the scent of a woman, gives you wings, or the one that keeps your eyes constantly fixed on nothingness, a hell long ago deserted by Eurydice and everything that has the face of tenderness? How, with what words, do you explain your night?” And it was to flee that confrontation with his hell of the night that Ito Baraka got into the habit of wandering the night streets, hanging around the streetlamps that push back the darkness. Alone or in the company of other insomniacs, he’s a squatter on the streets of night under the light. He wanders aimlessly under the streetlamps, sensing in the sewers beneath his feet the hell populated by rats, and that’s what he refuses to be, a rat crushed by the weight of the city and the centuries. Under a streetlight, he sits down on a bench with cold metal legs, turns the collar of his coat up, and closes his eyes. He closes his eyes and opens wide his depressed rat’s ears, because, in spite of his refusal, that’s what he is, a sinister, sad rat. He closes his eyes under the light and hopes for a miracle. The miracle of a trip through the air outside his complicated, tortured body. But he knows very well that rats don’t fly.
The old lady sitting beside him in the station has finished her meal. She’s wearing a dress of incredible whiteness. Ito Baraka likes white. It reminds him of the floor dusted with corn and millet flour at Abdul’s mill on the corner of a street back home. It also reminds him of pagnes, the wraparounds worn tied around the waist by Voodoo priestesses doing their shopping in Hanoukopé Market. And white is the image of a miraculous peace, which soothes him.
So, to his relatives, Ito Baraka had to leave. And perhaps come back to them again one day, whether they were dead or survivors, palpable or fleeting shadows gathered in an airport lounge to welcome the revenant. His little cousins would be grown up, and his aunts, their mouths toothless and wrinkled in comical expressions, would demand kisses on their withered cheeks. If they hadn’t croaked by then. Like his father, long since dead and buried. But Ito Baraka is one of those who don’t go back. Poor wretches with dead eyes, frozen limbs, and backs plastered to a curb in Manhattan or Rome, their beggar’s caps in their hands. For him, it will soon be the last act, the doctor confirmed it to him in his precise, methodical, rigorously impersonal voice: “Mr Baraka, let’s say a few months at the most, but you never know. Above all, avoid tiring yourself out.”
And now, he examines with a distant eye his life spent on the roads since that night in September twenty years ago when he left the country, the sober goodbye at the airport surrounded by his four brothers and sisters, who encouraged him with little pats on the back, pushing him into the Roman arena for a test of courage. A tear in the corner of his mother’s eye, his father, after hugging him, standing back, apart from the group, already absent, as if he had decided to break the thread between himself and the others, to remove himself from the dim lights of the departure lounge. And one year later, Ito would get a phone call from an uncle: “The old man is dead.” He didn’t remember his father being old and sick, just the man with his body slightly bent from carrying his surveyor’s tripod on worksites or bending over his maps and orders for house plans all day long.
14
The Ottawa train station, two hours later. His bag slung across his shoulders, Ito Baraka heads towards the bus platforms outside. Twenty minutes to wait for the 95 to the Rideau Centre, where he’ll make his regular stop at the liquor vendor, who must know him well by now, who must be used to his quick grab for the bottle of Martinique rum, always the same one, like a little boy snatching a favourite toy. While he waits for the bus, Ito Baraka rereads what he scribbled on the ride from Montreal to Ottawa.
***
I have quite a clear memory of that month of August when those students, the presumed leaflet makers, were arrested and locked up at the intelligence office. We spent the following days trying to assess the seriousness of their alleged actions and their consequences. Sika was constantly snivelling, Beno and Wali maintained the obstinate silence of hunted animals, and we spent the time while hiding out with the old priest trying to relearn our lines in Endgame. However, a few days after the media had announced the arrests, the majority of the detainees were released. Two of them were formally charged with distributing subversive leaflets, and rumour had it that they were not among those who had been released from the intelligence office. People who swore they had seen the released detainees said they were weakened, frail, mute, with empty eyes, as if they had spent their time in captivity drugged. I just remember that when we saw Gueule de Bois again, he appeared different, absent, bizarre. He didn’t say much about what he’d exper
ienced, but he told us a group of police officers had been very inventive with their torture techniques, coming up with all kinds of innovations. I think, rather, that the torturers’ methods were traditional and brutal and refined. Gueule de Bois said nothing more about this, and a month later, the two accused were handed over to the city court for a first trial, which was quickly postponed because of a procedural error discovered by their lawyers.
The second trial took place two weeks later, in October, on a Friday morning. There was a crowd at the courthouse and dissent was in the air in the courtroom, which was packed with students, teachers, civil servants, merchants from the old market. The most enraged were brandishing slates denouncing this political trial. The women from the market were also there, they had distributed water to the crowd of onlookers who’d come to support the two accused. Outside, the human mass grew, and my father, who was surveying on a curb downtown, had to abandon his task and fold up his tripod, jostled and finally carried away by the tide.
My father would in spite of himself be immersed in history again that Friday when the echo of a chorus reached him from the courthouse. The crowd had begun to sing the forbidden former national anthem, which a lot of people had not forgotten, as would have been expected, since time had passed and a good part of the crowd around the courthouse had not known that song of fervent patriotism that the military had traded for a banal incantation calling on the people to reject troublemakers who undermined national unity. The crowd was convinced that the judges had been ordered to discipline the young miscreants, and everyone expected a speedy trial that would send the two rascals to the dungeons of the nation, where their parents would once a month bring them rotting fruits, since, as rumour had it, all fruits of the revolution were suspect. And my father, too, standing in the sun outside the courthouse, carried away by the general excitement, took up the old anthem. The electrified crowd, its volume increasing by the minute, was going to storm the courthouse and try to free the two accused.
