In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  “Think of it, Gray,” I said. “We’re closer to the birthplace of Christ than ever before, only a few thousand miles to the east.”

  “We could be two of the three kings, bearing gifts in our trusty pickup.” Gray began to sing, “We two queens of Orient are…”

  I skirted the southern end of Gorom Gorom, about four blocks long, and found the house and courtyard of the British Save the Children. Theirs was a medical project at Gorom Gorom’s regional hospital. Three women and two men came out the gate to greet us. One of the men was their director, Mr. Know-It-All himself, Philip. T other man, Jon, and three women, Sheila, Marilyn, and Wendy, all nurses, welcomed us, and in the best of British tradition, offered us tea. In the cool of late December, relieved not to be hopelessly lost and spending the night on a sand dune, we sipped the sweet, hot liquid. It washed the dust from our throats and tasted delicious.

  Late afternoon, as Sheila and the rest did their rounds at the hospital, Gray and I browsed through the maze of people and stalls in the Gorom market, Gray humming, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

  People filled the market square: Toubacous in slacks and T-shirts, Fulani men in loose boubous, women in batik skirts, tops, and head wraps, and a blue-robed Tuareg here and there, heads wrapped in black cloth.

  Milling among the crowds, we passed silver colored steel pots stacked three and four high. On the opposite side of the narrow market alleyway, leather pillows and sandals with green, red, and black geometrical designs lined a wooden table, and small purses with neck cords and long tassels hung from a wooden beam; the famous leather goods of the Tuareg. Farther down, meter lengths of cotton cloth in batik patterns hung neatly folded over wooden poles.

  Afternoon wore into evening. The air grew cooler, and the sun dipped toward the western horizon to set around 6:30, thirty minutes earlier than it did June through August.

  At 7 pm, the whole lot of us went to the small missionary church at the edge of town for an evening mass under the stars. Mostly visiting expatriates filled the courtyard. Gorom Gorom’s small Fulani population was Muslim. The Tuaregs who came and went had never accepted Islam, keeping their own ancient beliefs of nature as god and goddess, loyal to the god of their creation.

  But Doondari grew lonely so he created a being almost like himself, using stone, fire, water, and air. Doondari gave this new being force, sway, and beauty. “Take the earth,” Doondari said to man. “You are henceforth the master of all that exists.”

  The Tuareg and Fulani were still the masters of the Sahara, a place few others could survive in. The toubacous, a few soldiers, and Voltaique hospital staff were the only Christians. I was probably more Tuareg in my beliefs than Catholic, but I chose to honor my childhood tradition and attend mass.

  As the priest mumbled the familiar words of the Catholic celebration, I looked upward. How wonderful to have the sky as a cathedral ceiling. I had always found nature more spiritually inspiring than the inside of a church. The North Star, particularly bright in the cool night air, shone above the horizon. Cassiopeia and the seven points of Orion shimmered among a galaxy of heavenly hosts.

  The little bell of the mass rang small and clear, and I imagined the Christ child swaddled in a manger with Mary and Joseph, a donkey, a cow, and several sheep looking on. Shepherds, kings, and a bright star.

  Beyond the courtyard wall, someone greeted someone else, “Allah hoké jam.” Allah give you peace.

  Christians and Muslims—all of us praying for peace. The two religions and their two prophets, Jesus and Muhammad, were not so different.

  Mawlid al-Nabi, the feast of the Prophet’s birthday, would come in a few weeks during the Muslim month of Rabi al-Awwal. Like Jesus, there were stories of Muhammad’s birth and childhood. Facts embellished into legend. Like the angel visiting Mary, Muhammad’s mother, Amina, heard a voice telling her she carried a prophet. When Muhammad was born, his grandfather had a dream where he saw a tree grow out of his grandson’s back. The tree reached the sky and its branches grew east and west, and from this tree came a great light.

  When they grew to be men, Jesus became a carpenter, Muhammad, a merchant. Both ordinary men until Jesus, at thirty, went forth to preach the words of his Father, and Muhammad, at forty, was visited by an angel and began to recite the words of the Qur’an. Both men wished to unite their people into a compassionate community where the poor were taken care of and all were treated as equal children of the One God. Christ was denounced by the Pharisees and crucified by the Romans. Muhammad was driven from Mecca to Medina by his own Quraysh tribe. Each persecuted for upsetting the status quo.

  The priest raised the host, the bell rang again, and I wondered why great ideas had to be turned into religions. I agreed with John Lennon, imagining no countries, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too. Had Jesus preached for a new religion or had he simply wanted more compassion among God and men? Muhammad had prayed his revelations would unite the people of seventh century Arabia under al-Lah, the One God, just as Judaism and Christianity had united the tribes of the Byzantine and Persian Empires. All three sibling religions, sharing the one God of Abraham—Christians, Jews, and Moslems—a brotherhood of man.

  Proud of his sway, his power, and his beauty, because he surpassed the elephant in wisdom, the leopard in cunning, and the monkey in malice, the first man grew arrogant and wicked.

  I did not believe that Jesus or Muhammad wanted their teachings used as excuses for oppression, war, and plunder. Over the past 1500 years, had not both religions done more harm than good? All in the name of God.

  The priest asked us to greet one another in peace. I hugged Gray and shook hands with those around me, wishing everyone a Happy Christmas. I recalled the Christmas before, when I had been home in Idaho. Back from Liberia only a few months, I had been restless and tormented by the frantic commercialism of the American holidays.

  Aside from the glow of the altar candles and kerosene lanterns, the courtyard was in shadow. The silence of the desert’s edge reached past my ears and into my soul. Here, so near to the land of Christ’s birth, the commercial noise of the Western World was quieted; no TV ads, no strings of blinking electric lights or plastic Santa Clauses, no shopping day countdowns. In the hushed courtyard of a predominantly Muslim land, among the bowed heads of so many nationalities, black, brown, and white, I found a Christmas peace more profound than any I had ever known.

  It was full dark when the mass ended. We strolled back to the house for a dinner of goat meat brochettes and wine. When everyone had gone to bed, Gray donned her Santa hat, and we snuck out to the courtyard and filled a cotton sock for each of us with Chicklets, hard candies, figs, and small trinkets from the market. We lined up several bottles of French champagne and tied them with red ribbon.

  Christmas morning, everyone was delighted that Santa had somehow found us so far from home. We drank champagne and opened stockings. After a midday feast of imported turkey, boxed mashed potatoes, canned carrots and peas, cookies, cake, cigars, brandy, and a long sieste, we went to a party at a Dutch volunteer’s house.

  Every toubacou from miles around attended—English, French, Germans, Scots, Norwegians, Dutch, with Gray and me as the token Americans. Conversations in five languages filled the living room, hallways, and kitchen. Red tinsel and plastic mistletoe hung in the corners and over the doorways.

  “We get the money machine going, do the projects, and send good PR reports back home to ensure more money next year,” a man with a heavy Scot accent said over a bottle of Sovobra. “It’s too easy to get sloppy. We need to question these projects, make sure they don’t cause more problems.”

  I’d had the same discussion with Kate the week before. Though the harvest had been successful this year, the women hadn’t reimbursed the seed loans. They had considered the loan a cadeau. We had not included the women in every step of the project—the organization, the purchase of the seeds, the development of repayment schedules and procedure. The women had held onto the
handout mentality and heard the concept of loan as cadeau. We wouldn’t make the same mistake next year.

  I threaded my way through the crowd and into the kitchen to snag a beer. Another circle of people stood conversing near the kitchen door.

  “I heard it this morning,” the Dutch volunteer who lived in the house said. “Iran offered to release the hostages for twenty-four billion dollars.”

  Twenty-four billion dollars. My God.

  I wiggled into the circle and several Dutch, French, and Germans looked my way. “Don’t mind me.” I smiled. I’m just your local ugly American.

  “They got themselves into this mess,” a Brit working for OXFAM said. “America has a bunch of idiot oil men dictating their foreign policy.”

  He sounded just like Philip. I wondered which crowd he was gracing his menace with at the moment.

  “You’re a collector of myths,” a voice spoke into my ear.

  Groan. It was Philip. Standing behind me, he was just tall enough that his mouth was at the level of my ear.

  “You’ve heard of the Fulani god, Doondari,” he spoke so that only I could hear. “Doondari created man, but man was too vain. In our case, let’s say man was Anglo-Saxon.”

  “If I recall,” the Dutch volunteer said to the Brit from OXFAM. “British oil companies were the ones that were nationalized by Mossadeq. And British agents organized the riots that allowed the CIA to reinstate the Shah.”

  “Man was too vain with his ideas of race superiority and Manifest Destiny,” Philip whispered. “So Doondari created blindness. In our case, man was blinded by his own greed.”

  “Yes,” the Brit continued. “But the CIA got the Shah to turn Iran’s oil fields over to American companies in exchange for training the Shah’s death squads. The same thing they did in Nicaragua and El Salvador.” The Brit turned to me. “Using your tax money.”

  “Hey, just because I’m American doesn’t mean I agree with CIA covert operations,” I blurted a little too loudly. “You know, covert usually means without the knowledge of Congress or the American people.”

  “Yes,” a German volunteer said. “And if Americans just keep their heads in the sand, they won’t have to see the mess they’ve made.”

  I felt like a punching bag.

  Philip bent closer. “When blindness became too proud, Doondari created sleep. The great American media put us all to sleep with TV and movies that showed Americans as only one thing—the hero. Americans still refuse to consider they could be anything else.”

  I raised my hands in surrender and fled the kitchen. Another group sat in a clutch in the living room.

  “…and sells arms to rogue armies to fight their wars for them,” a French volunteer said. “It was on Radio Français this morning. U.S. special forces have armed Islamic groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight the Russians. The same thing is happening in Iraq.”

  “When sleep became too proud, Doondari created worry.” Philip was at my ear again.

  I turned. He wasn’t wearing his typical sneer, just an intense glint in his glass-green eyes.

  “With the rise of Communism,” Philip said. “We began to worry. We started a Cold War and sent out the CIA to overthrow democratically elected leaders in Iran, Zaire, and Chile. Anyone who had the balls to accept help from the Soviets.”

  I turned away from him, and a few people looked our way.

  A German spoke in heavily accented English. “The U.S. sells more arms to developing countries than any other country in the world.” He turned to the French volunteer. “I believe France is second.”

  “When worry became too proud, Doondari created death,” Philip whispered. “The CIA took American worry and turned it into death squads.” He raised his voice so the whole group could hear. “The U.S. supports a government in El Salvador that has tortured and killed more than nine thousand of its own people in the last year alone.”

  I turned and left the living room. As I passed through the kitchen, I asked the Dutch guy where I could find the latrine.

  He pointed to a flashlight hanging on a nail by the kitchen door. “Out that door, follow the path.”

  Once out the door, I walked in circles for a few minutes, clenching my jaw and fists so hard it hurt.

  “God, I hate that man!” I walked more circles, swearing in the dark. I wanted to scream and pull out my hair. I pressed my fingers to my face. My cheeks burned. It had all been there, in the back pages of newspapers and tucked away on library shelves. I had seen bits of it in Liberia. All the volunteers had been furious over the wages Firestone had paid the Liberian people who worked on the rubber plantations. I had read about Chile and heard about Zaire. But I had hoped they were aberrations—mistakes we had made and wouldn’t make again. I had been raised with a fairy tale, taught to keep my head in the sand.

  An ignorant American was an ugly American.

  I clicked on a flashlight and followed the dirt path to the outhouse. I opened the wooden door and swung the light inside. Most outhouses in Africa were places a person didn’t even want to enter, let alone hang out in, but this one was deluxe. My outhouse in Dori had a hole in the ground the size of a dessert plate. This one had a two-foot-high mud-brick base built around the hole with an actual, true-to-life toilet seat on top. After shining the flashlight across the ceiling and in the corners to check for King Kong spiders and scorpions, I tapped the toilet seat a few times to dislodge any cockroaches from underneath and sat.

  I hid in the outhouse for a bit, needing the solitude and imagining ways to deck Philip. Lily had sent a Christmas card saying she had finally learned to control her anger and frustration just by recognizing it and stopping. She had found greater harmony with life and talked about both of us striving for wisdom, compassion, love, truth, and beauty. I wished she were with me. I was getting a good dose of truth, what I needed was wisdom and love. I sat there until the urge to pull out my hair subsided.

  On my way back up the path, the windows of the house glowed with the light of kerosene lamps and candles. Waves of muted conversation and laughter escaped through the screened door and windows. I paused, not yet ready to return. My head buzzed from the morning’s champagne and the evening’s beers. The treetops reflected silver starlight off the face of each leaf. The air rested cool against my cheek and carried the sweet fragrance of wood smoke. I took a deep breath and stretched my fingers to the sky. If I ran far enough away, could I escape what it meant today to be an American? I imagined myself rising into the sky away from this point on the earth. In the night, there would be a vast ocean of darkness for hundreds of miles. How could I get much farther away than this?

  How could I ever go back? I flashed on the bumper stickers of so many cars and pickups at home—“Love it or leave it!” I had left.

  Iran, the Congo, South Africa, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador. When we sowed so much death, how could we not expect to harvest it?

  I thought good intention would be enough. Drabo had compared aid workers to the story of Okonkwo’s wives who polished the outside walls of Okonkwo’s compound with red ocher and painted beautiful patterns, while inside the huts, Okonkwo beat his wives and bullied his children because his fear had turned to anger.

  My hands dropped to my sides. I remembered the I Ching and asking Lily if I could make a difference. How naive that all seemed now. How vain.

  Philip stepped out of the shadows that cloaked the kitchen door.

  I was suddenly cold and very tired. “What do you want, Philip? Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  He came toward me and grasped my upper arms. “I want you to wake up. And then I want you to be able to stand up and shout, ‘Fuck it!’”

  The tears that blurred my vision made me furious. “I don’t want to be like you, Philip.”

  I jerked away from him and went back through the kitchen door. I wanted to find Gray, go back to the nurse’s courtyard, and wrap myself in my sleeping bag. Gray was in the living room with Wendy who had her arm around Caroline.
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  “Why did he go there?” Caroline said. She was crying.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered to Gray.

  “We just heard John Lennon was killed in New York.”

  “How?”

  “Somebody shot him.”

  Chapter 9

  Greed

  January/Rabi al-Awwal

  Chinua Achebe had moved into my “best author” spot since I’d found his book, Things Fall Apart. It was a favorite of Drabo’s, where he’d discovered the tale about the tortoise and the feast in the sky. Like Drabo, the hero of the book, Okonkwo, believed himself to be a strong man. Okonkwo’s father had indulged himself in life. Whenever he saw a dead man’s mouth, he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime. But Okonkwo denied happiness to himself and his family. Okonkwo’s life fell apart because fear and anger chose every path he set his foot on.

  Not so with me. I agreed with Okonwo’s father.

  Propped on an elbow, I explored the smooth skin of Drabo’s chest with my palm. The moon cast a pale light across my bed. My skin reflected the light, while Drabo’s absorbed it. I was a ghost. Drabo was one of the shadows that made up the night. Together we were a play of light and dark.

  “There was once a great serpent who lived in the ancient city of Wagadu,” Drabo said, his voice like water rushing over gravel.

  “Another story?” I kissed him.

  “Stories explain to us the meaning of our lives.” With his fingertip, Drabo drew a line down each side of my face, as if marking me with the tribal scars of myth. “This snake was called Bida Bida and he lay in seven great coils before the southern gate of Wagadu. Tradition dictated that the King of Wagadu give Bida Bida ten young maidens every year, and in exchange, Bida Bida let it rain three times a year.”