TROPIC OF VIOLENCE
Also by Nathacha Appanah in English translation
Blue Bay Palace
The Last Brother
Waiting for Tomorrow
Nathacha Appanah
TROPIC OF VIOLENCE
A Novel
Translated from the French by
Geoffrey Strachan
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2016 by Editions Gallimard
English translation copyright © 2018 by Geoffrey Strachan
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
First published in the French language as Tropique de la violence by Editions Gallimard, Paris, in 2016. First published in English by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus, London, in 2018.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
This book is supported by the Institute Français (Royaume Uni) as part of the Burgesse programme.
Published by Graywolf Press
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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
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Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-024-6
Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-122-9
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2020
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949950
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: SUPERFLEX, Kwassa Kwassa (film still). Used with the permission of SUPERFLEX and 1301PE.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The action in this novel takes place partly in France, but mainly on the French island of Mayotte, also known as Mahoré, which lies among the Comoros Islands in the Mozambique Channel. The principal city, Mamoudzou, is situated on the main island, Grande-Terre. This is linked by a ferry to the lesser island, Petite-Terre, where the town of Dzaoudzi is situated. Politically, Mayotte is a département of France.
In her French text, Nathacha Appanah uses a number of words from the local language, Shimaore, which I have retained in this English translation, including kwassa-kwassas, the name given to the frail vessels that bring refugees to Mayotte; muzungu, a foreigner; banga, a corrugated iron hut; bacoco, an old man; bweni, a woman; sousou, a prostitute; mourengué, the traditional style of bare-fisted fighting; cadi, a Muslim judge; and caribou, welcome.
To convey a further flavor of the language of some of the young people on Mayotte who appear in this novel, I have borrowed a few words from British-English slang, for example “Don” or “Daddy” for gang leader, “homeboys,” and so on.
The original French text contains a number of quotations from and references to the book L’enfant et la rivière, by Henri Bosco, first published in 1953, in which the narrator, Pascalet, rescues and befriends Gatzo, a boy held captive by gypsies. A spirited English translation by Gerard Hopkins, The Boy and the River, was published in 1956. Where Nathacha Appanah quotes from Bosco’s original text I have borrowed some sentences from this translation.
I am indebted to a number of people, including the author, for their advice and assistance in the preparation of this translation. My thanks are due in particular to Nathacha Appanah, Georgia de Chamberet, June Elks, Pierre Sciama, Simon Strachan, and Susan Strachan.
G.S.
“There?” I asked.
“There,” he answered. “It’s a beautiful country.”
Henri Bosco, The Boy and the River
TROPIC OF VIOLENCE
Marie
You must believe me. In the place where I’m speaking to you from, lies and pretense are pointless. When I look into the depths of the sea, I can see men and women swimming there with dugongs and coelacanths, I can see dreams caught up in the weeds and babies asleep there, cradled in giant clam shells. In the place where I’m speaking to you from, this country looks like a handful of incandescent dust and I know it will only take some little thing for it all to go up in flames. I can’t remember everything about my life for all that subsists here is the edge of things and the echo of what no longer exists.
Here’s what I remember.
I’m twenty-three and the train’s coming, blue and dirty. I’m leaving the valley where I grew up, where I was a frail, lost little thing, overwhelmed by the mountains. I’ve had enough of seeing the winter darkness flooding in over houses and faces. I’ve had enough of the musty smell of the morning air, I’ve had enough of my mother who’s losing her mind, and never stops talking and spends the whole day listening to records of Barbara.
I’m twenty-four and I’m still just as frail and lost. I finish my training as a nurse in a big city. I share a vast flat with three other students and on some nights the noise, the light and the talk are like a black hole swallowing me up. I have lots of lovers; I fuck like a woman I don’t recognize, who rather disgusts me. I’ll go with one, leave him, then go with him again, and no one says a thing. I choose to work nights at the hospital. Sometimes I’ll lie down on beds that have been stripped and are still warm, trying to imagine what it would be like to be someone else.
I’m twenty-six and I meet Chamsidine who’s a nurse like me. The first time he speaks to me something odd happens. My heart, the organ firmly located in my chest, sinks down into my plexus, and starts to beat right there in the middle of me, at my center. Chamsidine has broad shoulders and can carry an adult man in his arms without batting an eyelid. When he smiles I have to take deep breaths so as not to go weak at the knees. When he utters his great peals of laughter I feel my vagina opening like a flower and I clamp my legs tightly together. All the female nurses are a little besotted with this big black man who comes from an island called Mayotte, but I don’t know why I’m the one he chooses one night when we’re on duty. I’m shy with this man. I’m twenty-six and I fall. He talks to me as if he’d been waiting for me for a long time. He tells me stories and legends from his homeland, talks about things that happened to him when he was little, times when he did this and when his mother told him that and I just listen in rapt silence. It seems to me as if Cham’s life has been spent on an island of children, green and fertile, an island where all is play from dawn to dusk, where all the aunts, cousins, and sisters are just so many kindly mothers. When I’m getting up in the morning amid the hubbub of the city I think about that country.
I’m twenty-seven and I marry. I don’t remember my dress but I remember my mother waiting with me outside the town hall. The wind’s so strong that it’s blown over the box shrubs in pots set out across the paved courtyard. Chamsidine’s late. My mother says to me Watch out Marie, men are all the same. Then Cham appears, running and laughing.
I’m twenty-eight and I’m living on Mayotte, a French island tucked away in the Mozambique Channel. We rent the first floor of a house in the commune of Passamainti, a few miles from the capital, Mamoudzou. I work as a night nurse at the district hospital. Chamsidine works in the hospital at Dzaoudzi, across the water on the island of Petite-Terre. Every morning when I come off duty at six o’clock, whatever my night has been like, howeve
r hard that spell of duty has been, I walk slowly, lightly, very lightly, into the morning. I walk down the hill and I know the little girl will be waiting for me. She’s covered in copper-colored dust, her hands and feet are sturdy, like those of a workman, her hair dirty and gray. She waits for me with a smile. Before going off duty I’ve picked up something lying about at the canteen, a package of cookies, an orange or an apple. Since I’ve been working here a strange relationship has grown up between her and me. I stop in front of her, she smiles, and I give her what I have to give. She never says anything to me, no good morning, no thank you, no au revoir. She holds out her hand quickly, I sense that she doesn’t want to look as if she’s begging, and besides, she looks me in the eye, never at what I put in her hand. She closes her fingers around it at once and puts her hand behind her back. Her smile grows a little broader. This is a tiny bonus to match the trifle I’ve given her. I don’t know if she understands French. I’ve never told her my name and I’ve never asked for hers. Maybe she lives in the corrugated iron shack I can glimpse among the stunted trees, up on the hillside. Maybe she lives hidden in the woods like many of the families of illegal immigrants. Maybe what I give her will be shared among several people. Maybe. But I don’t think much about all that. I do what I do, it costs me nothing, it doesn’t oblige her to be grateful, it hardly takes thirty seconds, and I go on my way, forgetting the little girl. I slow down in front of the motley crowd waiting for the offices of the administrative center to open. The talk seems desultory, the sun is still barely visible. The flag with its bands of blue, white, and red floats on high. In front of the closed gates there’s still time to have hopes of taking a numbered ticket that will entitle you to see an official, to explain your case, your life, the whys and wherefores of it all, to hand in the form requesting permission to remain, to ask for a receipt, to enquire about a temporary residence permit, to hope for a renewal, a hearing, an extension, an open sesame.
On the other pavement, more or less across the street, is the other motley crowd, the one for the clinic. A hundred tickets a day are issued there and some people have been waiting since four o’clock in the morning. Here, too, it’s still calm. As I walk by, the two groups are almost touching. I’m in the middle and I wonder how many of them, either those on my right, or those on my left, arrived in kwassa-kwassas, those makeshift boats into which illegal immigrants coming from other Comoros Islands are crammed.
That’s what I remember: weaving my way discreetly between the two groups, just as I might slip between two sharp knife blades and, once beyond them, I can’t help taking a deep breath with a feeling of relief.
I keep walking right down to the landing stage: on the way I buy bananas, peppers, tomatoes. I inhale the smell of this land that I love, I peer into the depths of the water, I admire the women. I like watching the children as they come and dive into the harbor. They take off from the concrete jetty, their black legs as thin as sticks scampering nimbly along. When they reach the end they hurl themselves into the ocean, lifting their knees high and flinging their arms out wide, shouting for joy.
When the ferry, the blue-and-white vessel that makes the crossing from Petite-Terre to Grande-Terre, comes alongside, I spot Cham from a long way off, more handsome every day, more unreal every day in that he belongs to me.
We go home, we sleep, we make love, and we wake up in the middle of the day. When I’m not working, I like looking out into the night from our balcony. It’s blue in some places, black in others. Hundreds of stars are massed together in the sky. I like hearing the wingbeats of the flying foxes. Out on the expanse of the sea little yellow dots move like fireflies. These are the lights on the fishermen’s boats, they go out with oil lamps attached to their masts to attract the fish.
I have such a longing for this country, a longing to take it all in, gulping down the sea in long drafts, consuming the sky mouthful after mouthful.
I’m twenty-nine and you must believe me. Every day the waiting intensifies, every day buoys up the hope of having a child. For me the months slip by with dreams, laughter, and cuddles. Nursery rhymes come back to me from my childhood as if by magic. Turn turn little mill clap clap little hands and my head is a gourd filled with things that seem to be within reach but nevertheless elude me. There are so many children here, so many pregnant women, all these babies held in so many arms, why not in mine? All these babies born without anyone even wanting them, while I’m praying, begging. When the hot blood comes in my underwear every month I weep and curse all these mothers I see in the hospital who don’t have a clue, all these illegal immigrants coming to give birth on this French island so as to get papers and I hold myself back from asking them Did you really want this baby or did you just want to come to Mayotte and get your papers?
I’m changing. I’m filling out, but there’s nothing more on me than bad fat, my head’s in a spin and my words are turning sour like milk. Every morning all the poor wretches waiting for their papers as well as the others waiting for medical treatment irritate me, there are too many of them, they’re too noisy, too this, too that. You must believe me. I’m going mad, I’m no longer myself. I’m reeling.
I’m thirty and that’s all I do: wait and weep.
One day at dawn, when I’m about to complete my tour of duty at the hospital, the blood comes. I’d worked it out the day before, six days late and in my head, oh in my head if you only knew what was going on in my head, I had a baby, I had a name for it, I had stories for it Fly fly little bird swim swim little fish in the water, I had a lovely christening, I was a maman in traditional Mahorian dress and all Cham’s family were paying their respects to me for this mixed race baby who’d have a good djinn to watch over him all his life.
I walk carefully, I tread lightly, I say prayers, I go to the little church in Dzaoudzi and light three candles. I pray so hard that there’s a buzzing in my ears. But at dawn the thick, sticky blood comes trickling between my legs and I go home, I don’t pick up any packages of cookies, no apple, no orange, and when I get to the corner I see her, but I don’t really see her, all I can feel is the blood between my legs and I’d like to stitch up this vulva of mine with thick black thread to stop it flowing. I walk past the little girl without a glance and hear Hey! Hey! I turn and she smiles at me, holding out her hands like that, empty.
You must believe me, I’ve turned into a madwoman. I pick up a stick and start running at her, yelling I can’t remember what, maybe Get lost, yes maybe that’s it, and it’s as if I were driving away a mangy dog. She bolts away swiftly and I can’t follow her up the hill amid bushes and filth. I throw the stick at her back. She yells and so do I.
I’m thirty-one and Cham has left me. He already has another woman, from one of the Comoros Islands. I don’t know where he met her. The whore. She wears brightly colored clothes that I call clown costumes and a sandalwood mask which gives her the face of a clown. She’s a whore of a clown. She has prominent buttocks, her skin’s yellow and black. So do you fancy a taste of black meat now? Fucking little illegal immigrants? My mother was right, you men are all the same. Nice is it, fucking blacks? That’s what I ask Cham as the thick red blood flows between my legs and his hand smacks my cheek. At that moment, you must believe me, I wished he’d hit me again and again, and drive the woman uttering such horrible things right out of me!
Sometimes at night when I’m alone in the house, I long to hear once again, the moist sound our bodies used to make sliding back and forth against one another, I long to hear the wingbeats of the flying foxes outside, and to fall asleep lulled by Cham’s gentle snoring.
I long to lie watching the blades of the electric ceiling fan turn as we made love. When I’m alone and frail and lost yet again, I pretend to clasp Cham’s body, inhaling his scent, licking his sweat. I’m washing away those wounding words with my tongue, I’m swallowing all my rage, I’m polishing the surface of our love with my body, so that it is smooth and silky once more.
But Cham no longer loves me, he looks
at me with dull eyes and a wry grimace on his lips, and demands a divorce. I refuse him. He disappears for days on end and then tells me he’s got married in a religious ceremony and I badmouth him again, but I still don’t want a divorce. I’ve lost all reason. My rage, my frustration, my bitterness take over and no one can save me. He announces that his whore of a clown is expecting a child. I loathe this country.
I’m almost thirty-three. Sometimes I happen to pass Cham’s whore pushing a stroller through the streets of Mamoudzou. She has no papers and every so often I long to denounce her the way people used to during the war. I imagine all it would take would be a phone call to the border police and then I could quietly wait outside her house and watch them kicking out the bitch, winkling her out, putting her into their jeep Bye bye clown whore, back to Anjouan the one way ticket’s free. But the red stroller stops me because not so long ago, I too had dreamed of pushing a stroller like that through the streets of Mamoudzou. So I go on my way.
I’m almost thirty-three and that night, May 3, I’m working. It has been pouring rain for several days, there are not many people about and I’m in the nurses’ room, alone, reading a book: I have no friends anymore, I no longer see the ones who knew me when I was with Cham. In any case I no longer have any inclination for things like that, moonlit evenings, endless chats about this country, poverty, and decay. These days Patrick, the nursing assistant, is the only one who still talks to me. Sometimes when I see him with his flowery shirt, his belly like a globule of oil, when I notice his roving eye lighting upon the young black women, I try to picture the Patrick who came to Mayotte fifteen years ago with a wife and children. Back then did he smell of cigarettes, sweat, and eau de cologne as he does now, had he already closed his heart and mind, did he dream of spending his Friday evenings at Ninga disco, enthroned like a nabob, surrounded by those young women from the Comoros Islands and Madagascar who perfume their vaginas with deodorant? Had he tried to resist at least or, once he’d understood the power a white man has here, did he just go with the flow? But I don’t judge him, this country crushes us, this country turns us all into beings who do wrong, this country clamps its pincers around us and we can no longer get away. The telephone rings and I’m told the emergency services have just taken in the people from two medical kwassa-kwassas. I put down my book and take a deep breath. Those are the ones I fear the most. Those medical kwassa-kwassas bring in sick people, the elderly, pregnant women, disabled children, people who are badly injured or burned, or mad. They make the crossing between the island of Anjouan and Mayotte to receive treatment. I’ve seen women with cancers that are so far advanced that in mainland France they no longer exist outside medical textbooks. I’ve seen badly burned people, their skin totally rotted away, babies dead for several days but still in their mothers’ arms, men with their legs bitten off by sharks.
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