by Edem Awumey
During his teenage years in the alleys back home, Ito Baraka always wondered, “How can a person die because of the sun?” However, little by little, he added up the children and the old people and the more vigorous ones who had died trying to cope under the sun, added up all those indifferent skies under which the bullets whistling from the Kalashnikovs of the people’s army would turn you into a sieve, or a bazooka would rip off a shoulder with the arm still holding a begging bowl. The sun, that ogre that eventually burned up fruits and memory. He would read that later in something by a Cuban poet. He hasn’t forgotten, back home when the wily sky refused them rain, the sun burned the earth and the shoots of the beans and peanuts in the little field behind their house, and the ice melted in his mother’s pail in Hanoukopé Market and the water that had become tepid could not slake thirst.
Koli Lem didn’t like the sun either. He had a list of arguments showing the sun was to blame for the rotten luck and degradation of most of his kind, their tragedy. There was something seductive in the biblical clarity with which Koli made the link between the rough, chapped, prematurely furrowed faces of the prisoners in their camp and the merciless sun over their heads. However, Ito Baraka knew that his friend only half-believed that. You couldn’t attribute everything to the sun. Koli didn’t really believe it, as Ito could read in his friend’s half-smile and ironic tone, the attitude of one who, after giving up on finding the cause of everything that has gone wrong around him, tries to provoke a reaction from the person he’s talking to, who he believes could help him see things in a new light where he hadn’t been able to discover any logic or explanation for their disaster, their dark night. And it must be said that Ito had never really contradicted his friend’s attempts to shed light on the causes of their misfortune and solve the complicated equation of their tropical tragedy. The most important thing for Ito was that Koli should continue to fill their cell with his low, slightly rusty voice, with his urgent need to pour himself out. There was a tacit agreement between them, roles that they had naturally taken on. Koli Lem possessed the words of a fallen oracle and Ito Baraka—who at that time had limited experience of the treachery of life—had only to follow him.
And in the hope of making Ito loathe that nasty sun, Koli Lem told him the story of how, in 1884, a German explorer, Gustav Nachtigal, landed on the coast of the country and was welcomed by the locals, though they were suspicious at first. And very quickly, he signed a protectorate treaty with King Mlapa III of Togoville, and the country was entrusted to the Prussians, who soon had it surveyed from one end to the other. The warriors in the North, the Konkomba and the Chokosi, resisted fiercely for a time before laying down their arms, their archers vanquished, and the Germans burned their bows and arrows. And soon there were niggers lined up on both sides of a path that, little by little, would be made wider by their picks, the whips burning their dark backs, the railway taking shape, that line of metal that would cross a good part of the country, from the coast to the village of Blitta, the niggers digging the earth, lined up along the route, and hauling the ties and iron rails with their bare arms. And the Germans, helmets clamped on their heads, hitting and beating, “Raus, schnell!” “The colonists had their heads covered but our heads were bare, exposed, and that’s how the sun gradually ate away our brains and our will,” said Koli, “and we became docile, helpful little lambs of the good Lord. And in 1919, when Germany lost the war, the hand holding the crop became English, ‘Go on! Move your lazy arses!’ and later French, ‘Allez, you bunch of lazy baboons, get a move on!’” We had thought they would supply us with ridiculous straw hats to cover our nappy heads, but nothing. And the sun continued to soften us, and you understand,” continued Koli, “why I can’t love the sun. Why I’m fine where I am in my darkness.”
22
Outside, a girl wearing headphones prances along the curb. Ito Baraka likes to imagine the rhythm she’s moving to. A few days ago, he had an idea, to take Kimi Blue dancing. But obviously he can’t. Dancing, nostalgia, what back home was called a bal poussière, a dance in the dust. At night, in the lighted yard of a concession, between a mango tree and a table holding a cassette player. The ambianceur, the old version of a DJ, would play the music. And all those students, in a daze, would boogie all night until dawn in the tropical city, at a time when there wasn’t yet a curfew, when the first love, the first breast stroked under a flowered dress, as Ito would read in a poet from Fez, felt like it would be the last. Love born in the night of bodies that touched and electrified each other, when the dance steps raised dust from the dance floor, which was rarely cement. Here in this distant north, there’s none of that red dust with its hot smell that stuck in your throat and on your clothes. Ito Baraka would have liked to give Kimi a dance full of dust and the trembling of nervous thighs that end up opening onto that humid night in violent coitus.
That was what they did there, that was how Ito would sometimes enjoy himself with his friends in their house in the suburbs. Have things changed since? He knows in any case that his parents’ house has begun to look like a ruin. The last time he called home, he got his cousin Sefa, who told him that the house was no longer what it had been. Part of the fence had collapsed after the last rains, exposing the structure to invasion by petty thieves. The walls of the building had begun to explode, cracks zigzagging up from the foundation, making their way between the bricks they revealed, their threadlike patterns reaching right up the wall to the reinforced concrete lintels above the doors and windows, which stopped the upward progression of the disaster. But then the cracks started again, attacking the roof. The floors of what remained of the bedrooms were also cracked, and the windows were exposed to the winds, having long ago lost the ridiculous plastic mesh that protected them from voracious little creatures and the debris and dust from the weather that was getting worse and worse. The hallway door that had led to the backyard—where they used to dance—no longer existed, and some angry, undisciplined bats had invaded the premises and made their nests under the roof, between the rafters. And the sheet metal that served as an awning over the terrace in the front was now hanging dangerously to one side, where the teak column had been ravaged at the base by termites. Not sure you could still go to a dance there.
Ito Baraka sees the bus coming from his seat in the café facing the street. He hurries outside. His notebook under his arm and his bag thrown carelessly over his shoulder, he climbs into the vehicle, which immediately pulls away, as if the impatient driver had only been waiting for him to get moving again.
23
The bus advances through the heart of the city. Ito Baraka has trouble believing that twenty years have gone by since that dull day in June when he arrived in Quebec, thanks to a writing grant, and took a bus straight to Hull, because an old buddy he had gone to university with in the Gulf of Guinea lived there. The patron who had bestowed the grant had continued to support him for months after the end of his contract, because Ito was curious about this northern land and had decided not to return to Africa immediately. Five years after setting foot in this country, in a park on the shores of a waterway where ducks were shaking water off their backs, he met Santou, who had come there to find a bit of the atmosphere of her native island in the Caribbean.
Six months after they met, he moved in with Santou, because he sensed in her something like a reckless trust in life that she refused to question too much. Santou: smiles, songs, and a beaming face, living in the present without asking for anything more. And Ito thought that a little bit of that childlike joy might pull him out of the tunnel that his own life had become. The first months of their life together seemed to bring the promised peace. At night, he would lay his head on her generous bosom in that narrow space of flesh and velvet between her breasts, he would close his eyes, and he’d wake up surprised at having slept, no longer feeling his own body like a weight in the sheets.
After six months of living together, they had
begun to argue over trivialities or because, in reality, something, some indefinable note, was not right in their relationship. Obviously, it was he, Ito, who was not right. Santou wanted a child, while he was convinced that they were fine as they were, he was fine with his head buried in the saving sweetness of his girlfriend’s skin. Why have a child? he would repeat. A kid he could only give what he called a legacy of anxiety?
They lived in the apartment, the burrow, that Ito has kept to the present day, in the basement of one of those run-down buildings in Old Hull. To make ends meet, he gave French classes to immigrants from Yunnan, Chile, Ukraine, and Libya in Ottawa and Hull. It wasn’t literature, that bourgeois lyricism that allowed him sometimes in his basement to imagine he had the reflexes of an aristocrat while exercising his plebeian lucidity. He was supposed to teach them what was called a second language, the basics and the exercises needed for boring everyday conversations. He tried stoically to devote what he could of energy and enthusiasm to it, using textbooks and cassettes on which rigorously professional monotonous voices carefully articulated the words, and he issued a litany of instructions to his aging students, whose dentures fractured the syntax.
While he became more and more weary, in his head was an unfinished scene in the manuscript of a play, a hypothetical situation in which he had left his characters in the middle of the night to finally sleep for a couple of hours beside a sulky Santou. He would get home about six o’clock, have a bite, and sit by himself in a corner of the living room, joining his characters where he had left them in the early morning. Santou would stand at the window carrying on a dialogue with the deserted street. But in the middle of the night, a strange feeling of guilt would come over Ito Baraka, he would get up and go find his companion in bed sleeping restlessly, her dry lips murmuring a chant of depression. Under the sheets, he would run his hands over her body, tense like that of an embittered nun, and after their mechanical lovemaking, his face turned to the mildewed ceiling, he would understand that they were not in love. They had simply tried to unite their solitudes. There was no longer anything of the passion or the candid sweetness of the beginning of their story.
However, at the end of their first year of conjugal partnership, Santou got pregnant. Warily, Ito Baraka began watching the development of his companion’s belly. When he came back from his classes, he would pass a curious hand over it, and Santou would smile, the child was going to close the gulf between them, transform the geometry of love. During this propitious pregnancy, Ito worked compulsively and finished two plays, which never found a publisher. And Santou began to complain, “You have to get a move on, my friend, we’re not going to raise the child in this hole. Finish your thesis, find a job at the university, and you won’t be so bored any more. Make an effort, my friend!”
And the child was born in the hospital in Hull on a clear night when his father was unable to hide his uneasiness. They returned to the basement and Ito went back to his hermit’s life, not much disturbed by the inconvenient bawling of the newborn, nor by Santou’s exasperated shouting over it, “We’re not going to rot in this basement! You’re trying to bury us alive, Ito. I don’t want this! If I didn’t have to look after the kid, do you think I’d be hanging around here all day long? You’ve lost your enthusiasm for your thesis, so do something else, look for a real job, become a civil servant, and you’ll write when you have the money to buy yourself some time, because you’re using our time to make up stories that are of no interest to anyone, and that’s not what we need right now. It’s money, my friend, to be brutally frank!” And one evening, she became even more bossy, and gave him what sounded like an ultimatum, “I won’t stay with you this way for long, dear friend, I want to breathe fresh air, not the mildew and stale air of this hole! I want a real house for the kid! Don’t you find that he coughs a lot? Because of the damp in this place and a crazy father bent over a rickety table scribbling page after page. A house for our son isn’t too much to ask! And if you could look after him, I’d go out and hustle, but no, monsieur has no time, he’s even cut down on his class hours so he can devote his precious life to scribbling, swearing, tearing off the page and throwing it in the wastebasket, and here we go again, scribbling, crossing out, screwing up. I’ve had it, Ito Baraka! We have to get out of here! I want a home, a properly heated apartment where we won’t have to wear heavy sweaters and slippers all the time, a real kitchen, and furniture, not these shabby pieces of wood and leather we got for fifty bucks at Emmaus, and faucets that don’t drip, and a bed, not this mattress on a box spring that squeaks the rare times you screw me, and you think it’s me coming!”
Ito Baraka kept his cool and conceded that she was right. He added that as soon as he finished the play he was working on, he would make some changes. And she continued, vehement, “How many times have you promised me that? How many?” Then Ito got annoyed, and he called her materialistic, saying she put too much weight on things that shouldn’t matter, and she said, “You’re wearing me out. What doesn’t matter, what’s superfluous in the life we’re leading? I should have realized you’re a lost soul, one of those lunatics with a terrible curse over them, I’ve learned that it’s not just an idea or concept, you really are a poète maudit, the proof is that no one understands what you’re doing, and when the publishers send back your manuscripts, what do they say? ‘Sir, in spite of the undeniable qualities of your writing, it is difficult to enter your world.’ I should have suspected it, when I met you, you were reading Verlaine for the tenth time and you were talking about leaving for Ethiopia, for Harar, to follow in Rimbaud’s footsteps. And when you came to this country, you rushed to buy all the Nelligan books you could find, and the rare times when we manage to copulate, Nelligan, Baudelaire, Artaud, and Vigny are peering at us from your bedside table, your arm knocks over the books, they scatter on the carpet, and your dead writers cough because those voyeurs want us to get it on! I can’t take it anymore Ito, get a grip and let us live!”
24
Ito Baraka returns to his burrow with its damp, silent walls. He drops heavily onto his couch as if he’s undergone an endurance test, he’s a marathon runner whose body snaps at the finish line with a crack, like dead wood assaulted by the wind. And because, soon, the dead wood will be buried in earth and oblivion, Ito Baraka amuses himself by giving it a final task, so that his body is useful for something before the collapse, he amuses himself imagining an action, a remarkable feat of which his body will be the site. He could, he thinks, do himself in in some luminous action, an explosion followed by sparks. Or he could simply immolate himself in the middle of the city in front of the buildings where the politicians work, with a sign hanging around his neck urging the government not to forget poets, mad people, outsiders, or Kimi Blue and the junkies on the margins of our great story of progress and victory. That way, Ito Baraka’s body could be useful for something, could set the tone of the revolution of the beggars and others shunned by our society, why not? But he knows, as a madman once said, you very often end up being swallowed up by your own revolution. The fire you’ve lit, through a cynical whim of the wind, turns against you, it pursues you and manages to catch you and burn your belly, your face, or your ass. Then Ito Baraka smiles, it certainly wouldn’t be worth it to immolate himself. Or maybe it would. And if he did, what would happen? He’d mess up his spectacular suicide and there he’d be, disfigured, his face a repulsive ball of tattered flesh, smooth as the skin of a drum in some places, crumpled in others, a surgeon with his scalpels would do his best to give him back a human appearance, he would end up with, in place of his ears and nose, the bizarre orifices of some prehistoric animal, with more holes on the squashed potato his head would have become, and the rest of his body, don’t even talk about it, one huge scar with folds and red blotches and furrows. His burned toes would resemble those of a leper forgotten in front of his hut in the back country in Mozambique, his belly a hideous patchwork of various mismatched tissues.
And burned like that and cut off from the world, he would be able to start his revolution again, as revenge for the past in the country where everything had fallen to pieces, as in Hervé Bazin’s book about an arsonist who, at night, sets fire to houses to take out his frustration and rage, sets fire to everything that to him represents and promotes injustice.
25
On the sofa, Ito Baraka feels the tips of his fingers hardening. He’s cold. Ice creeps insidiously under his skin. He shivers and beats his arms. Outside, night is falling. Ito Baraka stares at the latest pages he’s written in the notebook. Perhaps the last ones. It is becoming more and more difficult for him to go on. Grimacing, he walks to the bedroom and comes back with a thick blanket over his shoulders. He hobbles to the window, not a living soul outside, the streets deserted and silent. To fill the silence in the apartment, he invents a song, couplets carried by a chorus of birds and agitated clowns.
The cold seems willing to give his fingers a little respite and they regain a semblance of mobility. Ito Baraka goes back to the sofa. The notebook on his lap, he grabs his pen and opens the bottle of rum he had set down at his feet. He drinks. On his tongue, a bitter taste. The alcohol eases the fire of the blood in his veins, which are warm now. Ito immerses himself in his half-full glass so as not to feel the weight of his worn-out muscles and bones and the knots in his joints. He tries to regain the illusion of freedom in his movements. His nervous fingers grip the pen and he continues his story.
