Tropic of Violence

by Nathacha Appanah

Then on Monday, what do I hear, you’ve gone off with the white man in a gray car. Like, he opened the door and you got in, he didn’t even force you. He’s not a cop you know.

  You chose your moment didn’t you. Didn’t you know how things go on my turf, ON MY TURF? How long’ve you been here, hey? A year at least, didn’t you know you need my permission to leave Gaza?

  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday still no show. Nasse told me you were in Kani-Kéli with a white man, what the fuck were you up to in Kani-Kéli, for fuck’s sake? I shouldn’t’ve cared but I couldn’t let it go. When I thought about what you were doing with the muzungu it drove me nuts, were you his bitch? His favorite little black sousou? All my homies were hurting my head, La Teigne, Rico, Nasse, the youths, all looked at me the way you never did, waiting for what I’d decide, waiting with open beaks.

  And I could see they thought I was stressing too much about you. A king can’t give in to that kind of weakness. A king can’t allow things like that to happen on his turf. I had to take back control.

  On Thursday at nightfall I made a tour of the streets of Gaza, my homies handed over what the youths had collected, and told me they’d run out of spliffs, smokes, spice. Some of them were so withdrawn they were smoking mangrove leaves. Tss. I didn’t like that. Their eyes were tiny and dry, their mouths were puckered and they were all calling out Bruce Bruce leaping around me like starving dogs. I had all my stock brought down, there wasn’t much left but that calmed the crowd a bit. Stuff needed to happen, I wanted fire, noise, Gaza had been too quiet since the election. That night I decided to go pay a visit to the clubhouse. I took La Teigne and Rico with me.

  What a clown. He’d fixed it with a rotten chain and two padlocks. He thought he was safe, that the politician would protect him with his sweet talk but I’m the one here who decides who’s safe and who isn’t. We took it apart with a crowbar, making no noise, and spent two hours moving everything, all the equipment, without anyone bothering us. The TV, the overhead projector, the hi-fi, the computer, the DVDs, the CDs. We got the books out and I was going to set fire to them but I pissed on them instead. Rico and La Teigne took out their pricks and we gave it all a good watering.

  On Friday the political representative came for prayers in his posh metallic gray Nissan and I told him the white man had gone off with one of my friends. He stared at me as if I was speaking Chinese. I went up to him, he smelled of perfume and soap, he’d put on his white tunic, I had a sudden vision of my father in front of me but it didn’t last long. As I spoke he caught a whiff of my spliff-smoker’s breath, and blinked. I said They’re homos. He backed away, raising his hands level with his chest and said I don’t want any of that here. I smiled and murmured, I’ll take care of it boss. Politicians like it when you call them boss. That’s how slaves addressed their masters, did you know that, Mo? With a nod he laid his hand on my shoulder and went on his way dressed in his fine white tunic, hoisting it up a little because he didn’t want the mud of Gaza to soil the hem.

  On Saturday we sold everything, it was all good gear from France, no made in China, and in Gaza that evening there was chicken, Coke, grass, cigarettes, spice, beer, and more besides. After that we hung out near the Ninga, and waited until the sousous were leaving and flashed our cash. I found one, a girl from Madagascar with her hair tied up on her head who wanted to talk at first. She told me about her shitty life, how she came to Mayotte with a muzungu, how he dumped her three days later, just three days later, she kept saying, and she had a child and nothing to buy milk with and no papers and was forced to become a sousou. I let her talk because she was really beautiful and spoke softly and prettily. I was good, everything was good, out there Gaza was having a good time drinking and smoking, and I was fucking a beautiful, gentle girl, for once I was careful with her hair, I didn’t want her ponytail to come undone, it looked pretty like that, I was careful with her face, but all of a sudden, as I was fucking her, I thought of you and what you were doing with that muzungu with a dead man’s skin and it drove me nuts. I stopped being gentle, I stopped being careful with the whore and grabbed her hair with both hands and hammered her with all my rage.

  Stéphane

  They all keep telling you about it, yet mysteriously you still think you’re safe. They tell you how that pretty girl you’ve seen several times at parties was attacked on a beach and because she wouldn’t let go of her camera the thieves hit her with a coconut to knock her out. Now half her pretty face is paralyzed. They tell you about the places in the woods where illegal immigrants have been living for dozens of years. You read articles about violent sexual assaults committed by young boys under the influence of this new drug called “spice” and later when you’re talking to your friends about what you’ve read, they can even give you the first name of the guy who imported it into Mayotte and you say Fuck that’s scary but it doesn’t get to you where it ought to get to you. They tell you how during the holidays the muzungus are increasingly renting their houses to tourists for a handful of euros so they also act as caretakers. They point out the big dogs abandoned by departing muzungus, because where they’re going they’ll have no need of three German shepherds to guard their homes. They ask you if you’ve been on that small island of white sand and you tell them about that wonderful day you spent there diving in the most beautiful lagoon in the world, yes, now you’re sure of it, it’s the most beautiful lagoon in the whole world, since you’ve seen this emerald and opaline domain with your own eyes and, even if you know that hundreds of people drown there, you still say It’s the most beautiful lagoon in the world. They whisper that half the inhabitants of Mayotte are illegal immigrants, that all the infrastructure on the island has been designed for a population of two hundred thousand but that unofficially there must be almost four hundred thousand people here and you say But that’s not possible, it’ll explode and this remark of yours has been uttered thousands of times already. They say to you Look, he’s a Mahorian, he’s from Grand Comore, he’s from Anjouan, he’s from Madagascar but the truth is they all look the same to you. They suggest you take a trip along the minor roads that run across the island and you’re amazed at all the vegetable plots and houses on the hills. They tell you it’s the illegal immigrants from Anjouan who till the fields and the muzungus who live in the houses on hilltops. They tell you that if this goes on, and the French state does nothing, the Mahorians themselves are going to take their fate into their own hands and kick out all the illegal immigrants and delinquents. So you have a vision of hundreds of blacks coming down into the street with machetes and you no longer know whether it’s an image from Rwanda or Zimbabwe or the Congo and you say That’ll never happen in a département of the French state.

  Here’s what you’ve witnessed yourself, one day, when you’re waiting to cross the road to buy a new telephone card: two motorbikes collide. Three people fall to the ground in front of you. On the sidewalk side a man with gray hair, a checked shirt, black trousers, not wearing a helmet. On the street side a man in a helmet wearing green Bermuda shorts (the kind that have big pockets, inside which are average sized pockets, inside which there are little pockets) and a white T-shirt; behind him, fallen in almost exactly the same position, a little girl in a dress with pink flowers on it and cornrow braids running along the top of her head which can be seen because she’s not wearing a helmet. You stop in your tracks at the metallic clatter the bikes make as they crash and, very quickly, you see the helmeted man get up, leap onto his bike and ride off, revving his engine noisily. The little girl remains motionless on the ground. You see, but you don’t really get it. The emergency services arrive and the little girl is carried into the first aid vehicle. The man with gray hair is very upset and says He abandoned her! He abandoned her, just like that. When he says Just like that, he points to the ground with his hand and you see that his forearm’s all bloody. The flesh is pink, the blood’s red, the dangling skin’s black and you say to yourself that this is the first time you’ve seen a black man bleeding.
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  The next day, when you see Chebani you ask for news of that little girl and he tells you she’s been taken to the hospital. You ask if the little girl had any papers. Chebani stares at you as if you were an extraterrestrial. Of course she has no papers, she didn’t even know her age. And that guy who abandoned her didn’t have any papers either. He laughs and slaps you on the back and says Caribou, welcome to Mayotte.

  They tell you to be careful and give you the example of the firemen’s barracks on the other side of the main street which was broken into that night. They say to you All that gear in the clubhouse it’s like dangling chunks of meat in front of lions. They repeat You don’t know these youngsters, they keep drumming into you Don’t use your phone in the street, don’t go to the cash machine alone, don’t carry a shoulder bag. But you carry on with your life, believing you’ll be safe because you’ve been safe for the first twenty-five years of it and that’s all you’ve ever known.

  But then your life’s turned upside down when you come back from a week in the south where you’ve been working from dawn to dusk, where you got the impression, no, it wasn’t just an impression, it was the certainty that you’d not only been bringing a building back to life but also a young boy who didn’t talk during the daytime but who said things in his sleep at night and you listened so as to stitch together his words and piece together his story and when he stopped wearing his cap you had the feeling of knowing how it feels, well, to be a good man.

  All those books on the ground with buckled pages, you didn’t need to sniff them to know they’d been pissed on. You know the clubhouse has been wrecked and burglarized but you can’t manage to tear your eyes away from all these books on the ground and you don’t know why it makes you think of little mutilated bodies that you’re going to have to put into a pile and burn.

  Your life’s turned upside down when they come back to the clubhouse, rough you up and call you a pedophile, a homo. As they bear down on you, you’d like to be a solid and inviolable wall, but no, you retreat, you stammer, you have no strength in your arms. You stumble around on the books making a sound like dead leaves. You’re afraid, your stomach rises into your throat, it’s the first time you’ve ever been attacked and it’s not at all how you’d pictured it. You saw yourself facing up to it, standing firm, you saw yourself as taller, stronger, braver. Two boys hold you down on the ground with their hands and knees. They twist your arm a bit and lean hard on your stomach. You remember them smelling of iron and smoke. The two others surround Mo and he doesn’t protest, doesn’t weep, doesn’t even look at you. They take him away with them in the harsh light of this Monday morning and the ones who were holding you down go running off as well.

  You stay on the ground for a long time, you’re scared but a great feeling of relief comes over you. Their grudge wasn’t really with you. You stand up and go out into the courtyard to be sick.

  The same evening your friends come to see you and comfort you and you tell them your story the way they once told you stories and now they say Fuck that’s scary and this time it gets to you in the belly and it touches a part of you that’s as raw and red as the blood of the man in the checked shirt, a part of you that’s just been born, and is as tender as everything that’s just been born and you feel a pain in your stomach, you weep. You go out with them every evening, from now on you’re never alone and you can’t stop telling the story of what happened to you. One evening a friend of one of your friends offers you a pistol for self-defense and you take it. Now, and only now, do you understand.

  Moïse

  I’m thinking about that day still, I have to keep thinking about it, because if it hadn’t been for that day, I’d never have committed murder, I’d never have listened to Stéphane when he was banging on about the pistol he kept in his desk, I wouldn’t have had this black hole inside me that everything now falls into with a dull sound never to surface again. In this square cell where at times a draft of air comes in and strangely cools my brow, in this room where I seem to hear breathing and sighs that are not my own, I know, I feel strangely at peace. I now know that what happened that day and that night, and on all those days and nights that have brought me here, is much greater than my pain, my sorrow, my regret.

  I’m fifteen years old, my name’s Moïse, I was born on the other side of the water. My mother was afraid of me, my mother pitied me and herself. She wondered what she’d done to God and all the djinns to have a child with one dark eye and one green one. My mother handed me over, like an old parcel, to the first person who came along but I know now that it wasn’t her fault, I know now you need money to go on a kwassa-kwassa, you need courage to go on board these fragile boats. I know now what it looks like, that beach at Bandrakouni, with its baobab trees that resemble ramparts, I know you need to feel something else in your bowels apart from just pity and fear. I know you need a little love.

  When they came to fetch me, I didn’t protest. They have a way, Bruce’s homies, of walking along in a semicircle around you as if they were keeping you company, as if you were one of their own and I don’t suppose anyone who saw us in the filthy alleyways of Gaza that morning paid us any attention. No one pays any attention to five bad boys.

  We passed that same garage with the same light bulb in the ceiling, the one that smelled of gasoline and metal and that once more set my teeth on edge.

  A dense blue pool shining in the sun lay stagnant at the bottom of the gully. Bruce was upstream under the shade of the breadfruit tree. He sat on a black rock watching us approach. He was smiling, his white teeth gleaming. I wasn’t afraid, not yet. I knew he’d be furious that I’d gone off without telling him. I remembered one of the youths returning to Gaza because his mother, who had six other babies, couldn’t feed him. Bruce had tied him to a tree and for an hour every member of the gang walked past him and hit him on his thighs or his arms with a thin branch still in leaf. When the leaves had fallen off, someone went and picked another branch. I did it too, with a single blow, thwack, without looking him in the eye. Then he was sent back to beg from the muzungus coming off the ferry and for several months his scarred thighs and arms were a great success.

  I told myself that maybe he had something like that in store for me, even if, for my part, I never actually brought anything in for him. Me, Scarface Mo, the nutjob, the mute, whom he’d branded already. Maybe he’d tie me up for a whole day and command his homies to pick branches with no leaves, ones that prick and scratch? As I walked up toward the breadfruit tree that morning that was my way of preparing for the worst.

  Bruce beckoned me to come up to him, sent my cap flying with a blow of his hand and brought his face close to mine. He smelled of bitter, dense spice smoke, his breath was heavy but his teeth were milky white.

  He drew his index finger lightly along my scar and I didn’t move. And said That’s soft.

  Then he crooked that same index finger and this time drew his nail along my scar as if he meant to scratch it. I started shaking. Making his voice shrill he asked Had a good time in Kani-Kéli with your darlin’ did you?

  The others around him roared with delight, their coarse laughter erupting as if from the throat of one man and from the depths of my memory, I don’t know why, the words came to me from that book I so love, “Then all the beasts stirred. It was the awakening.”

  I’m no longer afraid, now. Bruce is dead, I killed him this morning in the woods, he won’t come back.

  In Bruce’s banga my hands and feet were bound with a rope.

  On the TV screen men and women were fucking.

  I was getting a hard-on in my shorts and I was so ashamed. The homies pointed at my prick and laughed.

  On the TV screen men were having dogs and dogs having women.

  The music went rap rap nigga nigga fuck fuck.

  My stomach was churning.

  On the TV screen, men were fucking men who were fucking women who were fucking dogs.

  In the banga the homeboys laughed then moved fast.


  Around me a stink of bitter sweat.

  I was able to bring my legs up to my chest and the feeling of my own knees against me was very comforting.

  They crushed pills, piled up mangrove leaves, emptied cigarettes, drank beer in front of me.

  On the TV there were rap tracks fuck fuck fuck went the rappers in thick, heavy voices and women flaunted and shook their asses as though they had a life of their own.

  I don’t know how much time it went on for.

  Bruce came in and there was this silence, even the TV went quiet or maybe I’ve imagined it. He said Come here my darlin’. I felt a hot liquid wetting my thighs. Someone said He’s pissed himself but Bruce repeated Come here my darlin’.

  But all that’s nothing compared to the time that slowly passes by moment by moment and what you hear and see. You hear your dog and picture him breaking down the door and biting Bruce just as he’s thrusting his prick into your flesh. You imagine Bruce yelling not because he’s king of Gaza and is taking possession of you the way he takes possession of every speck of dust here, but because a dog has just leapt at his throat, gripping it right around the Adam’s apple and won’t let go, no, he won’t let go, Bosco.

  You hear horses and you know there are no horses but you hear the clip clop clip clop coming closer and soon a stampede will crush the banga and everything in it.

  You see a slipper and it’s so white you wonder whether it isn’t brand new and you dream up a whole story about this new white slipper that’s so perfect, while La Teigne or Nasse or Rico or whoever are thrusting other things into your flesh.

  You see a panga propped against the door and in your head you list all the names for this tool, beginning with coupe-coupe, chombo, machete, billhook, big knife, Chinese knife, cutlass and this brings you back to the throat that your dog has now ripped out and drops at your feet as an offering.