Grandmother said this and asked maman to pray. Maman dried her tears and prayed with grandmother.
The day my arm got grilled, maman cried and cried and her throat and her chest were all swollen with sobs. My grandmother and father showed up and they both lost their temper and yelled at maman.
‘This is simply another ordeal which Allah has sent you (an ‘ordeal’ is ‘a severe or trying experience intended to judge someone’s worth’). If Allah has ordained that you be miserable here on earth, it is because he has reserved some greater happiness for you in paradise.’
My maman dried her eyes, swallowed her sobs and prayed with grandmother. Then maman and I went back to playing chase.
Balla used to say no kid ever leaves his mother’s hut because her farts stink. Maman’s smells never bothered me. The hut was full of all kinds of stink. Farts, shit, piss, the infected ulcer, the bitter smoke, and the smells of Balla the healer. But I didn’t even smell them, so they didn’t make me puke. Maman’s stink and Balla’s stink smelled good to me. I was used to them. It was surrounded by these smells that I ate and slept best. It’s called a natural habitat and every animal has one; maman’s hut with her smells was my natural habitat.
I think it’s a pity we don’t know how the world was before we get born. Sometimes, I’d spend the morning trying to imagine what maman was like before her circumcision, the way she sang and danced and walked when she was a young virgin before her excision. Grandmother and Balla always said she was pretty as a gazelle, pretty as a gouro mask. I only ever got to see her lying down or crawling around on her arse, I never saw her standing, but I knew she must have been charming and beautiful, because even after thirty years of shit and stink, of smoke from the hearth and suffering and tears, there was still something beautiful about the lines on her face. When the lines on her face weren’t brimming with tears, her face shone with a kind of glow. A bit like a lost blemished pearl, (‘blemished’ means ‘marked by imperfections’). Her beauty was decaying like the ulcer on her leg, but the glow just shone right though the smoke and the smells of the hut. Faforo! Walahé!
When maman was pretty and charming and virginal, people used to call her Bafitini. Even now when her body was all fucked-up and rotting, Balla and grandmother still called her Bafitini. I’d only ever seen her at her worst, in the last stages of her multifarious, multicoloured decay, but I called her Ma. Just Ma. African people would say it came from deep in my insides; French people in France would say it came from my heart.
Grandmother says maman was born in Siguiri, one of the hundreds of shit-holes in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone where miners and rock-breakers dig for gold. Grandfather was a big gold trader. Like all the other filthy rich traffickers, he bought himself lots of women and horses and cows and big starched bubus (a bubu is a long tunic worn by Black Nigger African Natives). The women had lots of babies and the cows had lots of calves. Grandfather needed somewhere to put all the women and the kids and the cows and the calves and all his gold, so he bought lots of houses and lots of concessions, and when he couldn’t buy more, he built more. Grandfather had concessions in every settlement where there were fortune-hunting gold miners.
Grandmother was my grandfather’s first wife and maman was one of his first children, that’s why he sent grandmother to the town to look after the family business. He didn’t want her hanging around some mining outpost full of bandits and cut-throats and liars and gold dealers.
Besides grandmother had to stay in town so maman didn’t die of her heart stopping dead or the ulcer rotting her completely. Maman used to say she’d drop dead from the pain if grandmother left her to go out to the gold-mining camps where grandfather did his business and where there were cut-throats lying in wait for women.
Grandmother really loved my mother, but she didn’t know what date she was born, or even what the day of the week it was. She was far too busy that night, the night my mother was born. Balla says it doesn’t matter what date you’re born, or what day of the week you’re born, seeing as how everyone has to get born some day or other, somewhere or other, and everyone has to die some day or other, somewhere or other, so we can all be buried in the same clay and rejoin our ancestors and discover the ultimate judgement of Allah.
On the night maman was born, grandmother was far too busy on account of the bad omens that were happening all over the universe. There were lots and lots of bad omens in heaven and on earth that night—hyenas howling in the mountains, owls crying on the roofs of the huts. The omens signified that maman would have a life that was tremendously and catastrophically catastrophic. A life of shit and suffering and damnation, etc.
Balla said he and grandmother offered up sacrifices but they weren’t enough to undo maman’s terrible fate. Allah doesn’t have to accept sacrifices and neither do the spirits of the ancestors. Allah can do whatever he feels like; he doesn’t have to acquiesce to every prayer from every lowly human being (‘acquiesce’ means ‘agree to’). The spirits of the ancestors can do what they like; they don’t have to acquiesce to all our complicated prayers.
Grandmother loved me. Me, Birahima. She treasured me. She loved me more than her all her other grandchildren. If anyone gave her a lump of sugar or a ripe mango or a papaya or some milk, she would save them for me and no one else. She wouldn’t eat a single bit. She’d hide whatever they gave her in a corner of the hut so she could give it to me when I got home sweating, tired, thirsty, starving like a real street urchin.
When maman was young and a virgin and pretty as a jewel, she used to live in the mining camp where my grandfather did his gold business. The place was crawling with cut-throats and gold dealers going round raping uncircumcised girls and slitting their throats. That’s why maman didn’t stay there. At the very first harmattan (‘harmattan’ means ‘a season marked by hot dry easterly winds’, according to the Glossary), she was sent back to Togobala for the ceremony of excision, where girls are initiated every year when the north wind blows.
No one in Togobala knows where in the savannah the excision will be performed until it happens. At cockcrow, the girls come out of their huts and in single file (‘single file’ means ‘one after the other in a line’), they walk in silence into the forest. They get to the place of excision just as the sun appears. You don’t have to have been to the place of excision to know they cut something out of the girls. They cut something out of my mother, but unfortunately maman’s blood didn’t stop, it kept gushing like a river swollen by a storm. All her friends had stopped bleeding. That meant that maman was the one who was to die at the place of excision. That’s the way of the world, the price that has to be paid. Every year at the ceremony of excision, the djinn of the forest takes one of the girls who has come to be initiated and kills her and keeps her for a sacrifice. The girl is buried there in the forest. The djinn never chooses an ugly girl, it always picks one of the most beautiful, one of the prettiest of the girls to be initiated. Maman was the prettiest girl of her age, that was why the djinn chose her to die in the forest.
The sorceress who was the excisor was one of the Bambara (an ‘excisor’ is a woman who performs female circumcision). In our country, the Horodougou, there are two peoples, the Bambaras and the Malinkés. People from families like Kourouma, Cissoko, Diarra, Konaté are Malinkés, we’re Dioulas and Muslims. The Malinkés aren’t from here; they came from the valley of the Niger long, long ago. The Malinkés are good people who heed the word of Allah. They perform the five daily prayers, they don’t drink palm wine or eat pork or any game killed by kaffir obayifos like Balla (an obayifo is a shaman or a grigriman). All the other villages are Bambaras, pagans, kaffirs, unbelievers, animists, savages, shamans. Sometimes the Bambaras are called different things like Lobis or Sénoufos or Kabiès. Before people came to colonise them, they didn’t wear any clothes. They were called the naked peoples. Bambaras are true indigenes, the true ancient owners of the land. The woman who was performing the excision was a Bambara named Moussokoroni. Whe
n Moussokoroni saw my mother lying there bleeding and dying, she took pity on her because maman was still really beautiful back then. Lots of kaffirs who know nothing of Allah are completely evil, but some kaffirs are good. Moussokoroni had a good heart and worked her magic and she was able to rescue maman from the clutches of the murderous evil spirit of the forest. The spirit accepted Moussokoroni’s prayers and the sacrifices and maman stopped bleeding. She was saved. My grandfather and my grandmother were happy and so was everyone from the village of Togobala and they wanted to give the sorceress a reward and pay her lots of money; but Moussokoroni refused. She refused to take their reward.
Moussokoroni did not want money or cattle or cola nuts or millet or palm wine or clothes or cowries (a cowrie is a type of shell that originally comes from the Indian ocean which plays an important role in traditional life, mostly as a kind of money). Moussokoroni thought maman was beautiful, so beautiful that she wanted my mother to be her son’s wife.
Her son was a hunter, a kaffir, a shaman, a pagan animist. A pious Muslim girl who reads the Qur’an like my mother is not allowed to marry a kaffir. The whole village refused.
My mother married my father on account of how he was her cousin and the son of the village imam. So Moussokoroni, who was a shaman, and her son, who was also a shaman, got really, really angry. They cast spells on my mother’s right leg, an evil spell called a koroté (a venom that acts on the victim from a distance, according to the Glossary) and a really powerful djibo (which is an evil curse).
After maman was married and was in her confinement on account of being pregnant, a black dot, a tiny black dot, appeared on her right leg. Maman was in pain from the small black spot so they lanced it, they made a small cut to lance the spot and put medicine on the cut. But the cut didn’t heal—it started to gobble up maman’s foot, to gobble up her leg.
Straight away, my father and my grandmother went to see Balla, they consulted grigrimen and marabouts and shamans and everyone said that maman didn’t get better because of the koroté, the evil spell that Moussokoroni and her son had cast. They went to the village where Moussokoroni and her son lived but it was too late.
Moussokoroni was already dead, good and dead from old age and good and buried too. Her son, the hunter, was an evil man; he refused to listen, refused to understand, refused to confess. He was completely evil, a genuine kaffir, an enemy of Allah.
Maman gave birth to my big sister. By the time my sister was walking and talking and going to school the abscess was still eating away at maman’s leg, so she was taken to the district hospital. This was long before independence. At the hospital, there was a white doctor—a toubab—with three stripes on his shoulder, a black doctor with no stripes, a male nurse who was a major, a midwife and a bunch of other black people wearing white coats. All the black people in white coats were civil servants who were paid by the colonial government. Back then, if you wanted a civil servant to treat you properly, you had to bring them a chicken. That’s the custom in Africa. Maman gave chickens to five different civil servants and they all treated maman properly and took good care of her, but even with all the bandages and the permanganate, her ulcer still didn’t get better, it just kept bleeding and rotting. The toubab doctor said they were going to have to amputate maman’s leg, cut it off at the knee and throw the rotten bit out for the dogs at the rubbish tip. But luckily one of maman’s chickens had gone to the nurse who was also a major and he came in the middle of the night to warn her.
The nurse said that what maman was suffering from was not a toubab disease, it was a Black Nigger African Native disease. A disease that the medicine and the science of the white man could not cure. ‘Only the grigris of an African healer can heal your wound. If the captain operates on your leg, you will die, absolutely die, you will die like a dog,’ said the nurse who was also a major. The nurse was a Muslim and could not tell a lie.
Grandfather hired a donkey driver. In the middle of the night, by moonlight, the donkey driver and Balla the healer went to the hospital and kidnapped maman like a pair of bandits. Before dawn, they took her deep into the forest where they hid her under a tree in a dense thicket. The toubab doctor was furious and came to the village in his military uniform and had his guards surround the village. They searched for maman in every single hut but they didn’t find her, because no one in the village knew where in the forest she was hidden.
After the captain and the guards left, Balla the healer and the donkey driver went into the forest and brought maman home where she went back to moving around on her arse in fits and starts. Faforo!
Now, everyone was convinced that maman had a Black Nigger African native disease that couldn’t be cured by toubab doctors, it could only be cured by the native remedies of a shamanic healer. So the villagers collected some cola nuts, and took two chickens—one white and one black—and a cow, to take as sacrificial offerings to Moussokoroni’s son who had helped cast the evil spell, the koroté, on my mother’s leg because he was jealous that he couldn’t marry her. They were going to ask the kaffir for mercy, ask him to rescind the djibo, the curse. Everything had been prepared.
Then, early one morning, they were surprised when three old men from Moussokoroni’s village suddenly showed up, three genuine old kaffir shamans wearing filthy bubus—as filthy and disgusting as a hyena’s anus. They had been chewing cola nuts for so long that two of them were, as toothless as a chimpanzee’s arse. The third kaffir was almost toothless as well, except for two green teeth on his bottom jaw for grigris. They had chewed tobacco for so long that their beards were as red as the rat in maman’s hut, not white like the beards of old Muslim men who perform the five daily prayers. They walked slowly, hunched over their sticks like snails. They had brought cola nuts, two chickens—one black and one white—and a cow. They had come to ask for mercy, because Moussokoroni’s son, the evil kaffir hunter, was dead. He had tried to shoot an evil spirit in the form of a buffalo deep in the deep forest. The buffalo had run him through with its horns, lifting his body off the ground and then throwing him down and trampling him completely to death with his intestines and his insides all mashed up in the mud.
The death had been so terrible, so strange, that the villagers consulted grigrimen and marabouts and shamans and everyone said that the evil djinn in the form of a buffalo was an avatar of my mother Bafitini (an ‘avatar’ is the manifestation of a spirit in human or animal form). What they meant was that it was my mother’s spirit that had changed itself into the buffalo. It was maman’s spirit that had killed Moussokoroni and her son by devouring their souls (according to the Glossary, a devourer of souls is one who kills by consuming the lifeforce of his victim). It meant they believed that my mother was the most powerful sorceress in the whole country: that her magic was stronger than the magic of Moussokoroni and her son. She was the leader of the soul-eaters and all the sorcerers in the village and every night she and the other sorcerers would devour souls and she would even devour her own ulcer. That was why the ulcer never healed. No one in the world could ever heal her ulcer because every night my mother devoured souls and devoured her own rotting leg, so it was her own fault that she had to move around on her arse in fits and starts with her right leg permanently stuck up in the air. Walahé!
When I found out about all this stuff, when I found out that my mother was a devourer of souls and was even devouring her own rotting leg, I was so astonished, so sickened, that I cried. I cried and cried all day and all night for four days. On the morning of the fifth day, I left maman’s hut forever and decided that I was never going to eat with maman ever again. That’s how disgusting I thought she was.
That’s when I became a street kid. A proper street kid that sleeps with the goats, and nicks stuff to eat from fields and concessions.
Balla and grandmother found me living rough and brought me back. They dried my tears and tried to placate me (‘placate’ means they tried to calm my feelings of anger and hurt), they said that maman wasn’t a witch, that she co
uldn’t be a witch, because she was a good Muslim. They said the Bambara kaffirs were barefaced liars.
What Balla and grandmother said didn’t really convince me, it was too late. Once a fart is out of your arse you can’t put it back. I was still a bit suspicious of maman, with misgivings and qualms in my belly, like Africans say, or in my heart, like French people say. I was scared she’d devour my soul. When someone devours your soul, you can’t keep on living so you die of a disease or an accident. You die some kind of terrible death. Gnamokodé!
When maman died, Balla said that it wasn’t because her soul had been devoured. He knew because he was a marabout who knew all about sorcery, a feticheur with the power to detect soul-eaters. My grandmother explained that maman had been killed by Allah with just the ulcer and all the tears she was always crying. Because Allah up in heaven can do whatever he likes; he doesn’t have to be fair about what he does here on earth.
That was when I realised that I’d hurt my mother, hurt her really badly. Hurt someone who was crippled. She never said anything to me about it but she died with all the hurt in her heart, and now I was cursed and damned and I’d never do any good here on earth. I’d never be worth anything to anyone on this earth.
I might tell about maman’s death some other time. But I don’t have to and you can’t make me. Faforo!
I haven’t told you anything about my father yet. He was called Mory. I don’t really like talking about my father. It makes me sad in my heart and in my belly. On account of how he died without ever growing a wise old man’s white beard. I don’t talk about him very often because I never really knew him. I never really spent any time with him on account of how he died while I was still crawling around on all fours. Balla the healer was the person I spent all my time with, he was the person I loved. Fortunately, Balla the feticheur knows lots of things. He knows magic and he’s travelled all over the place hunting in Côte d’Ivoire, in Senegal, even in Ghana and Liberia where the black people are Black Americans and where the indigenes speak pidgin. Over there, that’s what they call English.
Allah is Not Obliged Page 2