O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  This internal reengineering was accompanied by a physical transformation: Izzy had become leaner, his posture improved, his skin now glazed and coppery with lines of seriousness sun-inscribed across his brow.

  “You have become less a shadow,” King Mishi observes during one of their private meetings, “more a man of solidity.”

  Izzy treasures these visitations. Once the king granted his consent for the crew to begin filming and their work began in earnest, the monarch asked little of them apart from regular progress updates from the cameraman.

  “Your brother has traits of natural leadership, it’s true,” the king observes. “His light is great, though he could benefit from shining it inward more often. However, I am curious about you, Hiding Feather. How have you been enjoying Malwiki hospitality?”

  Izzy wishes he could draw for the king a picture of himself stepping out of a too-tight suit or smashing a set of iron castings that had bound him, so grateful is his dancing heart for being a guest in the court of the king.

  “I am very happy here.”

  “And the buggery?”

  “King?”

  “A long tradition among the Malwiki. From the ripest shit there often blooms the most fragrant flower. You have been enjoying such private moments with the prince, correct?”

  The cameraman looks at the ruler like an astronomer who’s stared too long into the wrong end of a telescope.

  “A king has many eyes. You have brought other eyes to the village,” Mishi says, nodding toward the camera hanging from a strap around Izzy’s neck. “A phenomenon I noted visiting theaters and museums during my student days in the West—people are often happier to watch than to participate. I find your personal role in this endeavor intriguing, too: serving as watchful eyes to your brother’s mouth. Perhaps your time among the Malwiki will help right this imbalance.”

  “I think so.”

  “Yes, it is clear that each day you turn over new topsoil of the self. Do not forget, however, even during your time of great unbinding, the Malwiki experience deep suffering.”

  “The drought, Your Highness?”

  “Yes,” the king says, still bristling from the failed ceremonial sacrifice of days before. “The drought.”

  It was true: The foraging expeditions to dig new wells, with tribesmen traveling through dangerous territories as far as two hundred miles from the village, had yielded nothing. The granaries were in good shape—the year’s harvest of dura had been a strong one—but with each passing day food supplies diminished further and word would come of another cow or boar expiring from malnourishment.

  Sensitive to these conditions, the members of the company were diligent about limiting themselves to their rations. Till was first to fall ill, the star laid out in the village infirmary under the care of a red-eyed, wild-haired witch doctor and declared out of commission as a diarrhetic epic wormed its way through his system. It took just a week before the crew had gone through most of its water supply and began dipping into the village’s reserves. Everyone was suffering. Skin blistered and peeled like whitewashed fences; limbs were fabulously scratched and bleeding from pointillist bug bites; windpipes frayed as dried cornstalks left in abandoned fields. In sum, the company looked like a discarded set of dolls in an orphanage: worn, filthy, torn, impossible to imagine having once been clean and bright objects of adoration.

  Though the place had helped Izzy shatter the old dichotomies—good/​bad, beautiful/​ugly, civilization/​primitivism—as his senses adjusted to the undifferentiated jungle, he had to admit that much of what he encountered stank of death. Even here, on his long walk to the king’s underground chambers, Izzy had noted in the corridors smells of decay, lifeless trees and ribbons of dead and deliquescent roots, clouds of flies and maggots wriggling over rocks. What unnerved him was his fascination with it all. Izzy sensed how freeing it must be to live inside physical or moral wreckage—how embracing the abject thing, the disgraced thing, the unwanted thing, would relieve one’s life of meaning and responsibility. He marked with disquiet his attraction to this kind of abandonment and the danger of aligning himself with such a proposition.

  “I have not seen the land so hungry for drink since I was a boy free of whiskers,” King Mishi continues. “Many men, many kin, perished then.”

  “What can we do to help? Micah promised we’d arrange to send for supplies once we get home, and he meant it.”

  “This proposal is generous and most welcome. But if the earth is truly in revolt, she will swallow these gifts much like a boa devouring a pig.”

  “Surely there’s something we can do!”

  “I wonder if the solution does not rest,” says the king, pointing a muntu-heavy finger toward the camera swinging from Izzy’s neck like a clock pendulum, “with that.”

  NINE

  “Your village is being destroyed!” Micah booms through the megaphone, at last the military leader he had dreamed of incarnating, responsible for the movement and deeds of great blocks of men across distances of space, fields and faces made real. “Your village is being destroyed!” he repeats over and over, his voice growing more strangled and constricted as he goes. “Your village is being destroyed! Your village is being destroyed! Your village is being destroyed!”

  They are filming a massacre, the ransacking of a nameless West African village and the taking of its people into bondage, fifty of King Mishi’s most able-bodied men and women relieved from work details standing in for ten million. Early and Izzy had pieced together a tracking system with some long poles and electrical tape, a rig they use for the first shot of the day, one that took several hours to stage. It is the longest tracking shot they have ever attempted, an uninterrupted, two-minute-long take of all fifty Malwiki villagers lined up side by side, hands and feet bound in chains, the camera registering each of their faces in turn after they had been rounded up by traders, then panning to the slave ship, a matte painting that would be added during postproduction back in New York.

  “Your village is being destroyed!” Micah repeats, walking down the line, the camera wheeling along beside him, eliciting grimaces and tears as Mtabi translates the terrible words. On the first take, an older tribesman, upon hearing the news, breaks free from his chains, springs from the line, and goes running in the direction of the village. So convinced is he of the literal fact of the white man’s words that when he reaches the empty village and recognizes it to be still intact, it is this imagined paradise, this familiar heaven on earth that he believes to be the fantasy. Only the children, accustomed to games—to the establishment of and adherence to rules that require standing in patterned formation—immediately recognize this as some higher form of play.

  “Why is he smiling?” Micah asks Mtabi upon reaching a cat-faced seven-year-old boy whose toothy grin ruins a take. The director hovers over the boy, casting him in shadow. “Why is he smiling?”

  “He finds it amusing that even the elders are playing along.”

  “Ask him what’s his favorite toy.”

  The translator relays that the boy’s flute is his most prized possession.

  Micah picks up the nearest stick he can find. “Tell him when we get back to the village, his flute—your flute?”—snapping the stick in two—“is like this! Now, back to your marks. Let’s do another take.”

  And once again Micah delivers the terrible news, only this time when they reach the flute-loving boy, he is weeping uncontrollably, each facial orifice transformed into a delivery system for snot, tears, and wails. “Your! Village! Has! Been! Destroyed!” Micah bellows in the heat, repeating the words so many times the phrase becomes an abstraction, a kind of bleating Morse code, no longer recognizably a proper English sentence, the terms of the deal recounted phonetically, syllable by syllable, blip by blip, which only increases the ferocity of Micah’s delivery.

  From behind the camera, Izzy recognizes the dark magnificence of what is unfolding before them, a sculpture in time, the creation of a spatial and temporal ev
ent that even in its present unfolding is somehow archetypal, found, a record of faces never seen before that promises to become instantly familiar. Faces. A mother weeping, her face slick as a birth scene. A boy looking down at the dry ground with studious incomprehension. A girl, hair arranged in fantastic tight braided patterns, staring beyond the clouds. An old woman, the puckers and flaps of her face like a folded umbrella forgotten in the corner of a restaurant. A man, his face riddled with the record of some ancient lunar acne. A rabbinically bearded elder, facial hair thick enough to store a comb or pocketwatch. A teenage youth, Early’s age, a cartoon wisp of fuzz penciled across his upper lip, looking defiantly ahead, eyes narrowing into the sun. A middle-aged man who could pass for a Harlem building superintendent, one nostril snarling upward as the camera makes its pass. An old crone, whose chin boasts the sharpness of a second nose. A young wrestler who betrays no emotion across his slightly lopsided face, product of a difficult delivery. A girl looking down at her cuffs and weeping, not knowing how long the enforced immobility of her quick-moving hands might last. Cri, at the exact apogee of the lineup, the prince’s normally expressive features blank. Talli, the king’s adviser, looking saurian and severe, a single cocked eyebrow the fig leaf covering the depth of his displeasure.

  A cherubic-cheeked child, eyes bright and clear as marbles. One of the village’s most fearsome wrestlers, face flat as a nickel. A mannish-looking woman, with shorn hair and a giant beaded, looped ring through her left nostril. Another woman with a fantastically long face, like a piece of pulled taffy or a funhouse-mirror reflection. Yani, his posture and bearing the very definition of the dignity of athletic accomplishment. A perfect boy, handcuffed hands ingenuously brought to his cheeks, just below the eyes, like a child playing peekaboo. An aristocratic-looking woman of perhaps thirty whose profile wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of the New Yorker. A boy with almond-shaped, Asiatic eyes. A centurion guard, an unsmiling figure standing outside Buckingham Palace. A thin farmer with long, exposed horse teeth. A seventy- or eighty-year-old man, his expression heavy-lidded, worldly-wise, and reminiscent of one of Micah and Izzy’s uncles. One of the queens, unaccustomed to labor of any kind, visibly hot and impatient over being taken away from her cool underground chamber. A hunter with jangly limbs that look assembled from Lincoln Logs. Faces, one after another, a generous enough human sampling to make them question how many faces there are in the world really. Faces.

  “How’s it look?” Micah asks after the third take.

  “Good,” his brother answers, troubled over how the re-creation of something horrific can be so aesthetically pleasing.

  Micah turns to Early, who’s been pushing the dolly and has the best sense of whether or not the shot will be usable. “How’d it feel?”

  With a flat palm, Early slices a horizontal loaf of air. “Smooth, no bumps.”

  “Okay, let’s wrap the shot.”

  The crew begin breaking down the rigging for the next setup. Going about their work, they are oblivious to the disorientation that lingers around them. Most of the tribespeople remain fixed, standing in line rictus-mouthed, or wander around still shackled in prop chains, afraid to look behind them at the destroyed village center, confused about what to do next.

  “You think it looked like this?” Early asks, lighting a smoke and tossing the pack to Micah, whose head is in need of a good throat clearing.

  “What?”

  “In olden times, the roundups?”

  “Well, if it didn’t,” Micah answers, feeling bolstered by the cigarette packaging’s crisp, cellophane-wrapped rectitude, “it does now.”

  It had taken days to erect the hut. Since they would have just one chance to destroy it on film, this sequence had been especially well planned. Izzy circles the structure with the camera like a prop plane corkscrewing during a bailout, in rehearsal laying out his marks on the ground with Dixie Cups. Castor is dressed in a white uniform with sparkling gold buttons and red piping, his beefy gut and gin blossoms a caricature of imperialism. His face is red and hot in the noonday sun, sweaty wisps of white hair atop his balding head lending him the look of a poorly poached egg. Castor steps into his mark.

  “I’m to go here?” he asks, a hint of aggression in his voice. “Like this?”

  “Yes, that’s correct, Benny,” Micah answers, plucking from the air the note of opposition in Castor’s voice and turning it over in his head, determining how to either quickly derail it or use it to his advantage in the scene.

  “Because I’m having some difficulty puzzling out what we’re doing here.”

  Micah squints into the light. “Just worry about hitting your mark and we’ll be fine.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” Castor says, breath sending waves of honey and cherries and black olives wafting in their direction, his face green-tinged and froggy, misery packed into his cheeks.

  Early consults a light meter. “The light’s really good. We should start.”

  “Okay, let’s do a take of this thing.”

  Spiro ignites the gasoline-doused, rag-wrapped end of a torch, sending barbecue smells sparking in all directions. He hands the living thing to Castor, who attempts to set the roof of the hut ablaze. A feathery breeze frustrates his efforts, the torch’s flame flicking and whipping about like a washcloth on a clothesline. While some individual spokes of straw blacken, the dry thatch is slow to catch fire, and Castor, as he goes about this difficult business, holds in his face the dispassionate expression of a banker sitting for his portrait.

  “Okay, N’golo!” Micah calls through the megaphone. First the tribesman chosen for his wonderfully hangdog expression, then the village women portraying his wife and daughter, emerge from the burning building. They have been instructed to crawl out of the hut on their bellies. They are not natural actors, and despite Mtabi’s many explanations, they inch across the dead grass with all the emotion of a restaurant patron trying to recover a lost earring by feel.

  Frustrated at the roof’s refusal to cooperate and his acting partners’ lack of attentiveness, Castor goads his director. “Any pearls for me, boss?”

  “Yeah, Benny, pretend it’s me down there.”

  “Now, why would I do that, old boy?”

  “Because, old boy, you know why you’re out here? You know why I brought you along?”

  The thatch catches at last, ribbons of smoke beginning to curl around his face. “No, pray tell.”

  “Because I wanted to keep someone around who’s a bigger bum than I am. I needed someone here I’d feel better against by comparison.”

  “I’m afraid you’re getting perilously close, Micah, to crossing a line.”

  “Play nice, fellas,” Spiro suggests from the sidelines. “We have just one chance to get this right.”

  “Sorry, dwarf, I was under the impression I was working with adults,” Micah says. “Everyone knows Benny’s a drunk and a failure. My hope, at least, was that this trip might put something back where his spine used to be. But how does a man who’s halfway talented just give up? That’s what I want to know.” And here Micah begins to catalog all of his colleague’s deficiencies: the debt, the default on the family business, the infidelities and marital distress, the inebriated lost years and squandered professional opportunities, the commonplace, unforgivable shame contingent upon being a bright and flawed human being.

  A captive audience member of this unfortunate biographical recitation, Castor looks from one man to another, his face engorged like he’s just taken an unmanageable drink of something and doesn’t know whether to spit or swallow. Each of the crew members looks away, all occupying themselves with pieces of technical business. Castor looks down and begins to pantomime kicking N’golo in the stomach, over and over again, pulling his boot just short of connecting each time as the women claw at the earth and weeds and as the walls of the hut now finally come ablaze, sending triangular licks of flame up behind them. Once Micah taps into this wellspring of violence in Castor, the scriptwriter seems
to grow larger, inflated, an emboldened physical presence. Hatred flows from him easily, in cresting waves, as Micah continues egging him on.

  “You’re not even better than that man on the ground there.”

  “You go to hell, you good-for-nothing no-talent,” Castor says, kicking at the prostrate African again and again, sending up billows of dust that mingle with the belching smoke and flame, obscuring the figures in painterly thickness. “You and that black bitch of yours.”

  “All right, Benny, now’s your chance to let rip,” Micah coaxes. “Out here where no one can see!”

  As Castor kicks at the man over and over and over, the women playing N’golo’s wife and daughter let loose great yawping wails, authentic cries and howls that balloon up into the African sky. They hurl themselves between Castor and N’golo, clinging to the officer’s heels, imploring him, their faces bright with tears, to stop.

  “It’s a good lesson, Benny,” Micah goads. “All the way here to find we’re no better than a bloody wog crawling along on his stomach.”

  Castor raises his prop rifle and, leading its aim a foot to the left of the African’s head, fires into the earth. Terrified by the loudest, most disruptive sound he’s ever heard—one more wrathful than thunderclaps—N’golo freezes and flattens himself, arms outstretched like glider wings. On camera the action registers as a point-blank shot to the head.

  Izzy looks up from the viewfinder, a monocle raccooned around his eye. “Fucking hell.”

  “And … cut!” says his brother, charging into the frame, the space sizzling with sinister vibrations. Helping N’golo to his feet, Micah presses both sides of the man’s face with flattened palms and stares straight into his dilated eyes while Castor remains off to the side, shrouded in smoke and shame.