by Edem Awumey
The demonstrators pressed closer and closer around the courthouse, shouting and raising fists, placards, and rocks, and my father thought that at least at that particular time on that special Friday, fear had set sail across the stormy sea. Only the judges and the police were afraid. People said that was when the state prosecutor called for more police and soldiers. The crowd was now wild, and when the reinforcements arrived, they fired into the packed mass of people, emptying their clips into the forest of gleaming bare skin, reloading and firing again, opening breaches into the mass of flesh, and leaving rioters on the ground. The official media releases spoke of four dead. My father, with his tripod, found himself running away as fast as he could. The crowd scattered into the neighbourhoods, and there began a period of insurrection, pitched battles taking place in the streets between the police and the protestors. We joined the rioters in the heart of the city, where there were tires burning at the intersections, and later I learned that some police stations had been set on fire and so had the intelligence headquarters and some government vehicles, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was a hell of a mess. Columns of fire rose at the intersections and young men, bare-chested, threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the army vehicles, something that had, of course, occurred at other times and places.
A springtime born of a few words printed on pieces of paper, and some people had been killed and others had disappeared. In the streets of insurrection, against a backdrop of rising smoke, some stones landed on the windshield of an army jeep. Behind the jeep were three other vehicles, paddy wagons. Men in fatigues jumped out and surrounded us. A girl who had thrown a last rock at them was shot in the knee. I had lost sight of Beno, Wali, Sika, and my cousin Sefa, who sometimes joined our group, and who very often was more caustic in his diatribes against the government than we were. The soldiers shoved us into the paddy wagons, and while we crossed the raging city, more projectiles landed on the vehicles. We were held all night in the courtyard of an army camp in the city outskirts, sitting in the sand with no clothes but our underpants, under the watchful eye of a Kalashnikov that frequently poked us in the neck. I was cold. And at dawn, they threw us some old clothes, loaded us into jeeps, and hastily blindfolded us. We were driven away, and I assumed they were not taking us home.
15
Once I’d gotten out of the military jeep, the guards took the blindfold off, and my eyes fixed on a grate in the middle of a long cement wall. The air smelled of bird shit and fresh dung from an unseen cow. After passing through the grate of that dreary entrance, we tramped through wet grass. That’s my first memory of the camp, the smell of grass and earth wet from the morning rain, grass for about fifty metres before a barer area, more dirt than vegetation, with buildings on either side of the path we were following. And right away, along both sides, I saw the shine of barbed wire under a timid sun, its strands twisted and nailed to wooden stakes, its sharp knots discouraging any attempt to escape. But what would dissuade prisoners the most was not so much the wire and the sharp points as the armed guards sitting under the acacia trees along the central path, cigarettes dangling from their lips and rifles slung across their chests. I recall that one of them spat as we went by, a thick, heavy brown glob that landed in the middle of the path, and later I realized that he and the others must spend their time chewing kola nut, smoking, and drinking the ubiquitous millet beer out of small gourds. They were drunk and nervous, and we were afraid they could shoot at us at any moment, just to give their weapons some exercise.
I counted three of them on each side of the path, watching the prisoners without batting an eye. In the yard on our left were the older prisoners, about fifteen of them, I observed later. On the right, the younger ones, silent, resigned, barely turning their heads as we went by. I heard a sort of scream from the old people’s side. In front of us, bushland, above which you could make out unfinished cement walls and tin roofs, two identical buildings that must have measured about fifty metres by twelve. I forgot to mention that there were fewer young prisoners than old ones, a dozen at most. Our guards shoved us from behind and we went around the two buildings to a less shaded area where there were some tiny structures of the same cement and tin, twelve cells set randomly on the bare earth, four smaller ones in back and eight others in front. We walked between them, along the corridors of an absurd topography. I was pushed by the shoulder towards the one furthest from civilization, and beyond it I could feel the wind and the bush. A bird flapped its wings violently and fled into the fields, and I barely had time to notice that the cells at the back had no windows when I found myself in the dark, and the metal door closed, heavy and creaking. The dirt floor was warm, and soon it would be baking in the sun.
My watch and my shoes had been confiscated in the jeep, and in any case there would have been no point in knowing the time, since time was going to stand still. I surveyed the cell, two metres by one, no more, and when I stood up straight, my head touched the burning tin of the roof. That’s where I spent the first three days of my incarceration, in isolation, and I would later discover that this was a classic method used in detention facilities: isolate the prisoner and break his resistance. There was nothing special about this treatment, except that I had to make do with two square metres of living space. I lay down on the ground and immediately fell asleep. I slept for a few hours before the afternoon sun began to play tricks on me. The uneven surface of the dirt floor was imprinted on my ribs, and in the stifling heat, I realized I was thirsty. I turned onto my back and the overheated tin assailed my face, so back onto my side again, my knees bent against the cement wall, which had also heated up. I closed my eyes, trying to find sleep again, and I thought about our house, cool in the shade of a wild mammee tree. I thought about it, and I understood that I shouldn’t do that anymore. I opened my eyes, my thirst still intense, and tried to swallow nonexistent saliva. I stretched my neck to try to get rid of the feeling of dryness. It was no use, and faced with the hopelessness of the situation, I panicked for the first time since my incarceration. I banged my forehead against the wall, but the unbearable longing was still there, and it didn’t diminish until the next day. Many years later, when I read Kertész’s Fatelessness, I had to agree with him that the first hours of thirst are the hardest. After that, it changes to a different sensation.
That heavy afternoon I remained lying down, holding my head in my hands, and after a period of time that I had difficulty estimating, there was a rustling sound against my cell. I started. Outside, a loud laugh, footsteps circling the cell two, three, four times, then stopping, the laugh again, silence, immediately followed by the sound of someone pissing on dead grass. I pictured the yellow liquid cascading onto the ground, and that had the effect of diminishing my thirst for a brief instant, as if the awareness of a source of water on the other side of my wall could satisfy me. The sound continued for several minutes, and I plugged my ears because it wasn’t funny anymore and I could no longer find any consolation in it. It went on for a good quarter-hour, the long piss that must have come from a mythical giant, and later I understood that it was part of the program for new residents, the aperitif before the menu of torture.
And little by little, it was as if the water outside had put out the fire on the roof of my cell. It must have been dusk already. I tried to fall asleep again but was soon awakened by more laughter and shouts. In the bush, there were stamping and rustling sounds, and later I learned that this was the time of day when the guards could do whatever they wanted with the prisoners. In the high grass, they could shove anything they wanted into the bodies of those unfortunates, including themselves. It was before dinner, when they would serve us the inevitable maize porridge, hard as a rock and with no sauce, or if it was a special day, with a little bit of chili pepper. You had to behave yourself with the guards. The rape outside lasted a good hour, soon followed by a new silence and a song, I mean the racket of the mosquitoes that came to brighten our evenings. I slapped
myself when the first one brushed my cheek, and as if I had offended the creature, the whole company of them came after me. I pulled the collar of my shirt tight, its sleeves seeming too short now, but I couldn’t do much for a good part of my body. Strangely, night came quickly. I heard something like barking, and later, moans echoing. It was the time of day when game trapped by hunters on the savannah would die after a long agony, a paw torn off by the teeth of the trap. I shivered like a real weakling for a good part of the cold night, and I finally fell asleep.
I found myself in the middle of a desert, in a world of sand dunes that went on forever. The camp around me was swept away and my cell was becoming more and more isolated. Outside, the sun was drying up corpses that were lying on the ground, or it was liquefying them, the heads gradually melting, then the necks and shoulders, the sand swallowing the liquid as black and viscous as tar. I had a tiny window from which I could see this scene of the end of things, and I had no choice but to remain in my prison. To stick my nose out would mean running the foolish risk of liquefaction, and under my feet I heard the sound of that dirty water that runs in the bowels of cities and the movement of rats in the sewers. I was living in a world of rats. And that word would be the favourite insult of our guards. “You dirty rats!” they would yell time and time again.
16
In his head, Ito Baraka runs through the names of the revolutions of the current century and preceding ones. Revolutions with unforgettable nicknames: the Red, the Orange, the Carnation, the Arab, the French, the Castroist, the Quiet, the Pink. And the “pots and pans revolution” of the previous summer in Quebec, with kitchenware used as drums by the discontented students, whose sound and fury almost destroyed Ito Baraka’s ears and his weary heart. Striking names and dramatic actions. There were people who carried out attacks, their bodies transformed into bombs blowing up the hearts of cities, those who occupied the streets and the big squares with war chants and clamour, those who shot or decapitated emperors and kings, those who, one day in the spring of 1989 in Beijing, stood up to fearsome tanks and the huge mouths of cannons, and those who bared their chests and their asses to protest idiocy, injustice, the clergy, corruption, and everything.
The 95 bus shows its chrome-trimmed red face. The driver stops and Ito Baraka takes the only free seat, in the back beside a homeless man who’s drunk and enveloped in an aura of sewage and solitude. The man spits on the floor at their feet, blood. Two guys in the bus are dying—one doesn’t care, and the other has a debt, a story to be told to a greasy, dog-eared notebook. Holding the notebook on his knees, Ito Baraka isn’t bothered by the frequent stops of the bus, its bucking like a wild horse, or the conversation around him, or the other dying man spewing his bile. Ito writes, like an assiduous scribe or a resigned student trying to solve a complicated math problem.
***
The day after I was incarcerated, I woke up at dawn with a horrible ache in my neck, although I had slept on my side. I tried to stand up and stretch my body. With the heat, my thirst came back, and my second day in my cell went by like the first one, with the sound of water on dead grass in the afternoon when the thirst became unbearable, rape in the fields before dinner, the guards’ exquisite appetizer, the mosquitoes, the wild animals in the middle of the night, my hallucinations, another morning. I wasn’t able to get up because I simply had no more strength, my vision was blurry, I couldn’t crawl to the slop pail in the corner of the cell. I must have fallen asleep again after that, or maybe I fainted. I came to when I felt a burning light on me and someone pissed on my face after throwing me a piece of bread, which hit the dirt floor with a thunk.
Very soon, night returned, a third one, with the echoes and the torment of the animals on the savannah. I couldn’t sleep because of a brutal backache. A fine rain pattered on the roof of the cell. I sat up and tried to bite into my piece of bread, the crust scraping against my teeth. I crushed the hard bread with my heel, took the powder in my palm and swallowed it. Later, I learned that they put treacherous little pebbles in the bread. I kept my eyes open in the dark and thought back to blind Hamm. Like him, I was in a kingdom of shadows and I wasn’t wondering whether I was going to get out, and I recalled some of Hamm’s lines, which I spoke out loud. Then, like Hamm, I made capricious demands of my servant, Clov, asking him to take me to the window to sense the sky and its smell and a boat in the distance raising anchor. I repeated the lines I remembered and I laughed very hard, I applauded myself, and at dawn, when the darkness in the cell became less dense, I had to abandon Hamm and his refuge from the eternal lazy night. Later, when it was hard to bear the screams and the scenes of torture, I would try to borrow from Hamm that night that takes away the sight of many things one doesn’t want to see.
Hamm left and the cell door opened to a huge, heavy guy. He shouted, “Stand up!” and I just looked up at him because I couldn’t get up. For an instant, I thought he was going to give me my dog or take me to the window to see the waves and the caravels leaving the harbour. He reached his big bear paw into the cell, grabbed me by the shirt collar and dragged me outside, my toes raking the ground and a carpet of thorns I had trouble getting rid of. He threw me into the yard with the young prisoners, a dozen withdrawn, taciturn boys who hardly glanced at me. The sun rose very quickly and I stayed lying in the yard. At breakfast, the guards threw us slices of boiled yam over the barbed wire. They must have been a good week old. I ate, it was better than the gravelly bread. We got a little water after that, in two pails filled to the brim, with two little gourds floating on top. I rushed over to them and drank half a pail, and I revived a little. I looked at the old prisoners in the other yard. Most of them were sitting, their backs bent, their heads lowered, reading some complicated message in the sand. They had very dry skin, like the bark of dead trees. An old woman in the flock was clutching the barbed wire, she was crying like a baby that had been taken from its mother, and her hands were bloody. An armed guard went over to her and gave her a slap that threw her into the dust, face down. Two more guards arrived, and they all went into the yard through one side that they had hastily unlocked. They ordered the old people to lie down with their faces to the ground, pulled down their pants and started whipping them with leather belts. Needless to say, the prisoners screamed like flayed animals. They had welts on their buttocks and strips of skin torn off. And the guards yelled, “Gang of sorcerers!”
And the next day, when the prisoners in my group became less silent, they explained to me that the old people were all accused of sorcery. Most of them came from surrounding villages where there had been unexplained deaths, disappearances of children, and too many sterile women, and they were blamed, they were surely the ones who had eaten the children, burned the fathers’ souls, and messed up the women’s wombs. There was evidence . . . they barely left their huts on the edge of the village, they were solitary, and dogs were afraid of them and didn’t dare approach their homes. The village mutts, which could sniff out a sorcerer within a radius of ten kilometres, ran away from them, their tails between their legs, and tried to take refuge in the middle of the river. And that was the sign that they had identified a sorcerer. And it was said that the old people looked too satisfied when they met children, as if they were already tasting their blood, and that there was always a little more rain around their huts, filling their jars while the rest of the village barely received a few drops, only enough to wet the tips of their tongues. Sorcerers. And they were shut up in the camp where their bodies were subjected to an assortment of tortures designed to drive out the evil spirits and purify the soul. Water only once a week, a beating every three days, immobilization—meaning they had to stand for two full days like tree trunks in the landscape—as well as the sun torture.
The whipping that morning lasted a good quarter of an hour. The guards came back and sat down under the trees along the path, satisfied that they had done their duty, and helped themselves to millet beer. Then the one who wa
s giving the orders and seemed to be the leader called someone over, and a little later, a rather thin, ageless man came with a broom and set about clearing the dead grass from the trail. Koli Lem.
Before I saw Koli again, I spent another week when my cell door would open in the middle of the night and the guards would drag me outside under the dark vault of midnight as in a ritual of some cult, a special initiation reserved for a chosen one. And with my head plunged in a bucket of dirty water or urine to simulate drowning, I kept thinking about Koli.
17
After our first encounter that day when Koli Lem was sweeping up dead leaves, I saw him again about ten days later. He was doing the same chore, staring vacantly like an automaton. I remember his spindly arms and their mechanical movements. A sweep to the left, a sweep to the right, as regular and precise as a rower, his neck straight and his eyes empty. And that same evening, I found myself with him in a cell bigger than the one I had occupied the preceding days, wider and with a window, if you please, with barbed wire on it, of course. I was to share my prison, because that was the custom. New arrivals, after a period of isolation, would be put with the older ones—not the sorcerers, but the other older prisoners, who, early in the morning, would go to work in the millet and yam fields near the camp. Because novices like me had to spend several weeks with our elders at the height of their decrepitude and madness. We had to live with those human wrecks so we would get a precise idea of what we, too, were going to become. I was supposed to share my evenings with Koli and watch him croak, as in a movie of what would be my own end.
