For almost an hour we turned the possibilities over in our heads, but then the sound of shots broke in the air. Vehicles again flew along the open road, an army man at every wheel, rifle butts stuck out of the car windows. One car slowed down and turned onto the road toward the hotel. A man wearing a gas mask gave us his slow regard. Another small truck followed, a bazooka rifle sticking high out of the back window. Kwesi and I looked at each other. Should we return to our room or head for another part of town? We sat frozen by the road, wanting to appear unbothered, until a man we recognized from the hotel passed hurriedly in his uniform.
“Are things okay inside?” I asked. “Is it safe?”
“Cool,” he replied in studied French. “They dropped some men off at the bar and moved on.”
We went back to our room and hurriedly packed our things, anticipating that we would need to leave, and then we went to the bar and ordered a meal. As we dined, I thought about my folly. How was I to carry this heavy load of cloth and pottery? What was my stubborn need to have it all and to take it all with me? The army men, sitting drinking, seemed somehow innocuous, as if this were an everyday affair, despite the sound of shelling in the distance and their weapons parked against their chairs. An Ivorian woman sat at the next table in a French-cut skirt suit with a Chanel bag beside her, eating in silence with her companion. She patiently ate her rice from the blade of a knife; the staff had mostly left and the bartender was making do, with no time to wash dishes. Kwesi and I looked at each other with the same thought: There was something wrong with Ivory Coast, with all its Parisian pretensions. If this were Ghana, she would eat with her hands. And still be a lady. Afterward we laughed about it, but in the back of my mind I thought, I’m just like her; I’m unable to give up the ghost of the things I hope will fill me with meaning.
The television whirred; then the screen came to life. An army man announced that there was widespread looting in the city, and several banks had been robbed that morning. A curfew had been imposed; everyone was required to be indoors by nightfall.
At seven o’clock they broadcast a presidential address. President Guéï said the forces in the street were members of a breakaway army. The government would settle with the army; negotiations were under way. In the meanwhile the status quo would continue: the borders, banks, airport, and news channels would remain closed until further notice.
As the hours passed, the bar filled with more men in military uniforms.
Back in our rooms I packed and unpacked, so that I had different combinations of what to leave behind and what to bring along. I settled on bringing the cloth and three of Koua Aya’s pots; I unloaded most of my clothing and books. But still my bag was heavy and cumbersome, and I felt ashamed of my desire for these things.
That night we slept uneasily, with Guéï’s words in our heads.
Early the next morning Kwesi and I walked in the already-blazing sunshine away from Les Deux Plateaux, a swank, mostly residential district, toward Le Plateau, the city’s center. We saw growing movement in the streets; I wanted to believe the city had restored itself, but the voice of the woman I’d spoken to at the U.S. embassy stayed in my ear: “The situation is still too fluid. There are too many factions to understand which way things will go. So we advise that you lie low and keep in close contact.”
When we reached the highway, the gleaming tower of the famous Hôtel Ivoire, the tallest point of Le Plateau, loomed before us. I was desperate to be back indoors. What strange figures we cut, the “half-caste” American woman and the younger “South African” man, walking alone on a highway, with travel bags and a cumbersome box, not on their heads, but uncomfortably in their hands.
We worried about each vehicle that passed, with its inevitable uniformed driver. The army men hung cavalierly off trucks and halfway out the doors and windows of buses; they seemed not to notice us, but how easily that might change. Ahead of us on the road others walked with purposeful steps, like a caravan, in a single line along the meridian. It took some time for me to register that everyone was moving in the opposite direction from us. I went in circles in my mind about what to do. Should we continue to the Hôtel Ivoire, a five-star hotel with its own ice rink, restaurants, and shops, where we might get a bank and would be among the expatriate community and other elites who could afford protection? Should we return to Les Deux Plateaux? Or go straight to the embassy? Should we pay money to a man we’d met at the hotel bar who offered to deliver us to a less trafficked northeastern border, where we might bribe our way into Ghana?
Soldiers at the makeshift checkpoints on the road and others passing in cars offered us rides or a resting place, but we moved on, surprised by their gentlemanly posture with the soundtrack of intervals of gunfire. We walked for many miles that day, on to Cocody and then to the near end of Plateau, from the Hôtel Ivoire to the embassy, past groups of French soldiers manning the gates of banks and the shattered windows of the highest-end French designer boutiques—the vestiges of a city with an unusual cosmopolitanism now pitched into chaos and fear. When shots began to ring closer to us, in rapid bursts, we decided on the gleaming tower of the Hôtel Novotel, a low-key, friendly, French-owned refuge with a good pool and good food. I sometimes sought the hotel from the same chain in Accra, when the city dirt and lack of privacy became overwhelming. We arrived dirty, with my worn cardboard box, after nearly fifteen miles of walking, and booked a room amid other worried travelers hunkering down for another night.
The next morning, viewed from the balcony, the city appeared utterly normal. A gas station was servicing cars driven by civilians; traffic flew along the highways; pedestrians walked in their finery, with a different purposefulness, toward offices and the shops.
The official word was that the borders were reopened, though the curfew was still in place. Kwesi and I anxiously dressed and headed for the bus terminal, hoping to make it to Accra by nightfall. We got seats in a Peugeot wagon next to a thin, wizened civil servant from Senegal en route to Benin; a Cameroonian student going home from Conakry, Guinea; and an Ivorian woman whose huge body was made even more voluminous by her boubou and multiple scarves. She talked unceasingly, seeming to take all the air out of the car. Our driver was a mad fellow, abusing us all, talking endlessly about our extra bags, especially my offending box, and promising to collect more money for “overweight” or leave us by the roadside. I calculated in my head: How much would I pay before I would abandon Koua Aya’s pots? How much before I let go my cloths? I heard Eurama whispering, “My dear, please, suppose it is life, a human being, then you hold it like an egg, but not things, things, things.”
Not long out of Abidjan you meet miles and miles of plantations and rice fields; the rich, furiously green land is like no other along the hundreds of miles of coast I’d now traveled between Porto Novo and Abidjan. Everything everywhere else has been extracted and left to spoil, but you escape into this paradise, wanting to forget that it is the domain of French conglomerates and a few elite Ivorians, and that the making of this beauty is the making of the crisis you are escaping.
In the moment of escape I looked inward. With Kwesi, I was lugging these pots and cloths—literal fragments or remakings of a past. Not the thing itself. I faced again the crisis of the collector. What price ownership? Whose heritage was I collecting—my own? That of my ancestors? My ancestor the heroine of indigo folklore? I wondered about this intense passion in the midst of a violent, modern remaking of a nation. Koua Aya’s pots, the new Baule cloth, and the bark cloth were all so fine but seemed to represent both our quest and our folly: my own and Ivory Coast’s. I found myself answering Eurama: “These things are life.”
Ten miles before the border at Elubo, a tire exploded. We were alone on deserted roads; we had not seen another vehicle for many miles. It was nearly sundown, and the border would soon close. A few days ago Kwesi and I had managed to have a short phone conversation with Eurama by renting someone’s cell phone for the call. “Why can’t they open the borders for
you people, at least? Ask them!” she had demanded. To keep ourselves going for the past few days, Kwesi and I had been laughing about it.
Now Kwesi delivered the punch line to me before I could even joke: “We will! We will ask!”
Our driver had announced he would only go as far as the terminal at the frontier; he would sleep there tonight and return to Abidjan in the morning to make another run. He couldn’t have cared less about the border, several miles farther, in a desolate frontier encompassing the separate Ghanaian and Ivorian posts. Now he acted helpless about the tire. Then Kwesi took over and won the argument about our extra load by changing it for him. I was as anxious as the rest, but standing in the thick of the bush, a glorious land bathed in the light of sunset, I pulled the small piece of bark cloth from my bag, held it to the sun, and saw the depth of a blue morass. It seemed a comment on the futility of our quests, on human nothingness.
Our driver dropped us off without ceremony where he promised. We quickly hired a car to take us to the Ghana posts, which a man announced would close in less than a half hour. Before us at the Ghana customs station was a long line of women in blue-black funeral cloth, Ghana’s very singular weekend ubiquity, that appeared like a refuge.
“What kind of girl is this? Hei! Shopping through military action? You are completely mad!” Eurama said, pinching my arm sharply as I hung my new cloths on her clothesline to air out in the sunshine.
In Accra we learned that the crisis in Ivory Coast had been an attempted coup. It was the precursor to the civil war that would wrack the country for the next decade. I often thought of Koua Aya, her studio now at a rebel front line.
Eight
The Beautiful One, Ghana
I woke at five A.M. in my room in Osu to the sound of exhortations, so loud they rattled the shutters on Sister’s beauty shop, which was too closely butted against my room. If I hadn’t heard “Jesu Christo” in every refrain, I would have mistaken the noise for a drunken rant. I put on a dress and went to the veranda, half-expecting that Eurama had sent her church sisters to save me from myself. It was the third week of area funerals. First a twenty-two-year-old boy who became a father post-death. His family said he had died of food poisoning, but the rumors swirled: Maybe his friends had killed him? Was it envy? He would have been leaving for the United States a month later. No one missed the poetry of his being buried in the suit he bought to travel in. Then came the news that a mother and her two children had eaten a dinner of tainted tinned corned beef and were discovered dead in their room the next morning.
Now my landlord’s family was preparing to bring another tenant, Alhaji’s, body to our yard.
A few weeks before, I had come home at nightfall and walked across the courtyard and past Alhaji’s room, aware of an absence. His wife was usually sitting on a stool outside, bare-breasted, shelling beans. She was a bean seller; making lunches of palm oil and beans and plantain. But she was not there that evening. She and Alhaji had quarreled loudly the night before, and that morning she’d packed off noisily.
His door was propped open and the curtain that hung in the doorway was blowing so that as I passed, I could see his feet. He was at his usual post, sitting in his chair under the whirr of the TV. The insects had begun their flights, drawn to the glow of fluorescent light—I wondered why he hadn’t shut the screen door. Later that evening a visitor came to the gate and asked the kids playing in the yard to fetch Alhaji. They called to him again and again but couldn’t wake him, still sitting in his chair.
Alhaji had pierced his foot at a construction site. He had hobbled around the compound on a foot stained with gentian violet for several days. He was not a drinker, but when I last saw him waving and shouting odd garbled curses at a wandering goat, I assumed he was inebriated. In fact, he’d been dying slowly of tetanus.
The exhorters—my landlord’s wife and her church sisters—were there for his wife. His wife was neither Christian or Muslim; she was an Ewe woman from far away, a “stranger” whose family no one knew. She was a “bush girl” who had the bad taste to sit naked in a Christian house. She had left Alhaji in an hour of need. And tetanus? This kind of death was not common and was surely witchcraft.
I dressed and went outside to the veranda to watch the scene but just as soon, Lady Diana appeared at the gate, beckoning to me.
“Maa Eurama said you should come.”
Eurama greeted me with a story: Aunty Mercy had pulled up at the shop in her pickup truck the evening before, wearing only a brassiere and a wrapper, her wig tilted on her head, her gold sunglasses askew. She had handed Eurama a head wrap of fine woven Yoruba asa oke in three shades of indigo, with a prized magenta raw silk ikat running through it.
“Give this to Catherine and tell her she owes me. Oh, never mind, I’ll take it in buttons and thread, and she can pay you.” Aunty Mercy had then stuffed a large plastic bag with what she needed, a can of sardines and a Guinness from the fridge. Eurama had held her tongue.
Now she held the asa oke out to me between two fingertips, her face curled up. “It’s fine-o, but see how it is smelling! She took the thing right off her own head, I’m sure. See how she came dressed like she’s from her bed, only to steal from me! You cannot pay her for this dirty thing. I’m going to collect my debt, kra!” She chuckled. “Anyway, this is not why I called you. Someone is inside. I’ve given them their breakfast, and they are waiting for you.”
In the yard I saw the little girl who lived down the road. Kwale was four years old, slim, the color of dark butterscotch, with a broad face and a high, square forehead—classic Ga beauty marks. Each morning she walked gracefully along the gutter in only a pair of worn panties, presenting coins for tiny sachets of milk powder, sugar for a family member’s tea, or for a sliver of soap. Her reddish hair was thinning and patchy, the telltale signs of kwashiorkor, a disease caused by acute protein deficiency.
Kwale looked like an angel, but she would smile and then insult you. “You, your mouth is sharp like a Makola woman’s,” Eurama would tell her. One day as Kwale walked away, mumbling about how we resembled monkeys, I called her back and offered her a hard-boiled egg. She ate it hungrily.
“You see! The girls needs protein. And a vitamin shot,” Eurama said. “But her mother has at least seven kids, and I don’t think she can care for any of them.”
Every morning Kwale came, the panties eventually exchanged for a small, worn dress. Sometimes she brought her friend Mamounia, her age-mate, who roamed the area and sold charcoal from a head pan while her mother tended a stall at the junction. I fed them from the shop, and they smiled at me, then ran away laughing, passing insults between them.
“This girl came here this morning crying. She said she is hungry, and when she asked her mother for food, she told her ‘Go and see your obruni. she is feeding you. Let her be your mother!’
“So take this your cloth. I told you proper indigo will come to you. You know it is a custom to get a blue cloth when you get a baby. They are both dirty things, you see, but they are what your spirit is telling you that you need. You want beautiful things, but beauty comes from caring. So get ready! Go and wash them both. You are a mother now. This child is going to sleep in this house from now on. She’s your darling; everyone knows you care for her. I’ll feed her and you can find a school for her and manage her school fees. Even when you leave finally for New York, you can send twenty dollars every month.
“We are burying our Alhaji, too, today. One comes, one goes. It’s life-o! Life. Isn’t life what you are searching for?’’
Nine
Mothers of Ash, Nigeria
Àdùnní’s house in Oshogbo is alive with works of the seen and unseen. It is a Yoruba house. Inspired by the distinctive two-story, boxy, stucco-faced style of the Amaros—men and women who had been enslaved in Brazil but returned to Nigeria seeking a Yoruba motherland beginning in the 1830s. It rises far above the close-knit, single-story houses that surround it. The gates and facade are adorned with elaborate fig
ures and Yoruba spiritual iconographies fashioned from concrete, mixed with ritually prescribed amounts of red earth from the sacred groves of Osun, the goddess of intimacy, beauty, wealth, and diplomacy. They are overrun with bougainvillaea. Goats laze on the long stairs.
A woman meets me on the front steps in a wrapper and blouse, made of indigo adire cloth like the professor’s, a purple-blue gele tied at her head. She is the hard-faced gatekeeper, one of Àdùnní’s many adopted children. I tell her about my search and that I’ve come to greet Mama, the master artist, the great Iyalaro, the Mother of Indigo, literally the Mother of Ash, the agent of wizardry in the dyer’s pot.
She listens to me with an air of boredom. I am one of many, and a latecomer. Long ago many others came to her, in search mostly of the refuge she had created of the sacred groves of Osun-Oshogbo. Some were worshippers of Osun, hailing from Brazil and Cuba, the United States, Europe—wherever Yoruba and Yoruba-derived religions lived. Many were students and acolytes of the legendary New Sacred Art movement. In the 1960s Àdùnní had helped spawn the Oshogbo School of Art, a community that radically reshaped aesthetics and understandings of African art in Africa and in the West.
The woman ushered me into the house. Its inner shell conjured Russian Art Nouveau, with its decadent, undulating banisters, its wide stairs, the clean lines of the arches high above, pale walls, and high ceilings. In the rooms upstairs, we walked through a wonderful labyrinth of metal and wooden and stone forms—furniture, carved doorways, posts and sculptures, lacelike metal curtains, pots for offerings, plants—all illuminated by bright bursts of sunshine and patches of soft filtering light. It was an Austrian-Yoruba world of the pantheon of Yoruba gods and goddesses. Bright plastic prayer mats, a kettle for ablutions, and a few household items were scattered here and there. I was left in an anteroom, overcome by the feeling of the place that despite its art felt strangely, obversely stark, spare, and intensely calming. I waited for nearly an hour, lulled into dreams by the room’s meditative quiet. Then the woman reappeared and told me she’d bring me to Mama, but that I could stay only to greet her.
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