O, Africa!

by Andrew Lewis Conn

  “Ah, Mr. Grand,” Keneally says. “I see you made it for the evening’s entertainment. You know, there’s a movement afoot at present to bring democracy to the Dark Continent. But Blighty’s not about to give up her interests on account of a few X’s showing up on some ballots, is she? No, your brother seems to’ve landed on just the right solution,” the officer says, eyebrows lifting like drawbridges. “Bread and circuses indeed!”

  Those with tickets pass Talli and gain entrance to a great barren field, where they sit Indian style on mats and begin passing around rations of dried lentils and legumes that they eat from wicker sacks and hollowed gourds. Drums are brought out, and music—whirling, sinister, never-ending tribal percussion—begins to fill the valley.

  “I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it an overture,” Keneally offers. “Perhaps what you Yanks might call some pre-show tunes.”

  Africa, at least what she’d seen of it, had come as an unhappy surprise to Rose. Faced with the bleary, beer-drenched depredations of Belgian Congo and the poverty and illness she witnessed in Malwiki, Rose struggled to preserve the continent’s symbolic strength for herself as homeland and cradle. She accomplished this task by putting distance between herself and her surroundings, worryingly there and not there. It troubled her, too, that barring a few individuals she’d encountered so far—the gentle-spirited Mtabi, a Bundini village woman who had braided and plaited her hair, a child of maybe five or six years old who delighted in following her around all day, head permanently cocked at a protractor’s forty-five-degree angle—she viewed the Malwiki monolithically; their fantastically black skin, pervasive near nudity, plain starch-filled diet, and strangely singing language, subjects of remotest fascination to her rather than a portal to some deep understanding.

  That, and her feet hurt. She’d brought along ruinously wrong shoes for the trip: heels that ground away at her corns and calluses and open-toed sandals with which an ingrown left foot toenail was conducting daily losing negotiations. Since the miscarriage she experienced regular dull stomach pains—she was always hungry but couldn’t bring herself to eat—and limp-noodled Micah hadn’t touched her with more than brotherly affection in weeks. The sun was doing her no favors either, alarmingly darkening her color from that of light coffee to newly wet sand. In her haste she had brought along neither cocoa butter nor moisturizing lotion, and her skin was suffering from dryness and ash.

  She wished she were back in their familiar city, but didn’t wish to return. These weeks had been the longest time they’d spent in each other’s company, and for all her complaints it had been some kind of idyll. That first morning in the bush with the Bundini, upon waking in the cool hut, Rose created a little routine for herself, the better to normalize the unfamiliar situation. She walked around the perimeter of the village square, careful to respect the men and women bathing in the meager lake. She brushed her teeth with their private stash of clean water. She put a kettle on to make coffee. She wrote a few lines in her journal. She prayed.

  These normalizing routines helped keep her pieced together. I live here. I work there. I’m from the other. I’m married to that one. I sleep with him. All factors in the equation that makes her Rose. But were those variables fixed or interchangeable? Were those things heavy cables that bound her or ties that could be severed as easily as snipping a price tag from a blouse? Even her boldest attempts at passing seemed to her now pinched, puny, preordained, the equivalent of an atheist’s insistence that there is no God—the very position of being against something predicated on a bedrock acknowledgment of something worthy of denial.

  More and more, Rose resigned herself to the notion that home isn’t something you return to or a place you hold in memory but something you forever build. More and more, Rose was beginning to believe that identity isn’t something you’re born with or that is ascribed to you but something you make for yourself, something you earn. “You look far away,” he says to her. “What’re you thinking about?”

  “My feet.”

  “They’re swell.”

  “They’re swollen, not swell.”

  “Stop complaining. My everything’s swollen.”

  “Not everything,” she says, eyes drifting crotchward, her chin dimpling like an old lady’s. “You think he’ll be all right?”

  “Izzy? I don’t know. I think he’s still in shock.”

  “He’d found his prince.”

  “Yeah,” Micah grumbles, “we should all be so lucky.”

  “What happens now?” she asks indeterminately, but meaning between the two of them.

  “Well, Mtabi’s made radio contact with Späten. The boat will be here in three days, and Izzy will be on it if I have to knock him flat.”

  “What about the Malwiki? Who’ll be left in charge after we leave? Talli?”

  “Talli? Talli’s worse than the Brits.” Micah relays to Rose the whole sad story as he’d heard it from Mtabi, how following King Mishi’s sacrifice the Iago-like lieutenant convinced the prince to hang himself, how he had encouraged the tribal council to desecrate the prince’s corpse, how the man had transformed the king’s semi-sacred compound into a trading post, a bartering station for all kinds of Western goods and contrivances, occult objects of no use to the Malwiki. “No, whoever takes the reins needs to be someone close to Mishi, someone they’ll trust, someone who can be counted on to rule well.”

  “Sir,” interrupts Mtabi, reaching the pair. He is out of breath, his blue suit smeared with dirt, a small shovel held firm in his hands. “If you concur, I believe I have found a dignified spot for the prince’s burial plot.”

  Overhead, the sky darkens, descending a chandelier of stars. The drumming reaches a crescendo and comes to an end, ushering in a great quiet that sweeps over the flat, the hush of an assembly prior to the beginning of a religious ceremony. At Izzy’s signal two able-bodied young men rise from the audience, gather the ends of a couple of coiled cords, and begin working a rope-and-pulley system. A curtain of white, perhaps twelve feet tall and twenty feet across, is raised incrementally, jerkily climbing two wooden poles in spurts. Up the screen goes like a ship’s sail, the very definition of white.

  “Albeit a bit bent, he’s ingenious, your brother,” says Keneally, “rigging up all this claptrap.”

  Micah marvels at the makeshift theater. “How long’s he been at it?”

  “Ever since he arrived. All those images, reflected back onto themselves. Of course, we’ve an important official presence, but for all intents and purposes, so long as your brother keeps running that bloody filmstrip each night, his is the real law around here.”

  A rumble like the sound of a leviathan rising and breaking to the surface calls Micah’s attention to a bluff in the distance where Izzy fumbles with a Liberty Motors power generator. Cast in shadow behind the ancient, immense movie projector, winding the filmstrip around the take-up reel, Izzy resembles a child playing train conductor, hands working a dozen valves and knobs at once. The screen bristles in anticipation, gathering animistic force, and Micah is reminded, forever reminded, of the religious function of movies. Sabbath’s theater. The secular and vernacular sitting around waiting for revelation. The resurrection of the dead. Signs and wonders by other means.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Izzy hollers, his strangled voice filling the valley as the carbon arcs of the projector meet, ignite, and the filmstrip flies its loop. “I give you … your king!”

  And there, on-screen, full of lip and noble of brow, appears King Mishi. He is dressed in finest ceremonial robes and stands many meters tall, sealed in silvery monochrome, surveying his subjects. Large as a hut, raised from the crypt, understandably bleached of color, but having gained the wisdom attendant upon time spent in the shadow valley, King Mishi is bigger than any man. Far away but brought close, details of the king’s face emerge that his subjects have never noticed before: the irritated skin of his freshly shaven cheeks, the tree-trunk rings circling his eyes, a familiar scar over the right eyebrow tr
ansposed by magic to the left. In unison a mass exhalation, a roar of approval that sounds like volumes of water cascading over a great falls, is let up into the heavens. Then people. Trees. Water. Giraffes. Insects. The ingredients of their daily stew elaborated upon and made magnificent, all seen in flashes as they might appear in a nighttime dream pageant. The insistent materialism and heroic amplification of the simplest deeds. The actual instantly supplanted by the gigantic evidence summoned before them. The locket of time sprung, the dead resurrected, the sacred shellacked from the surface of things for some unknown purpose.

  Mtabi stares spellbound at his first motion picture. “Is this the product of our earlier cinematic endeavors?”

  “Afraid so,” Micah moans.

  “From their postures and expressions, they take this to be the oracle prophesied from days of yore. They wait daily upon its instruction.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “Looks no different from bondage. Slavery by other means.”

  “Fucking hell,” Rose concurs.

  Mtabi turns away, stricken. “The selfsame story of peoples exploited without restraint.”

  Each night Izzy would play different fragments of the film, reaching deep into the village’s imaginative magma for his project of memory retrieval, recutting and rearranging sequences by day so King Mishi could provide fresh instruction by night. Awaiting these visitations from their king, the villagers spent their days in a suspended state of numbness, in the absence of the film falling into grief and inactivity like prisoners tumbling onto cots. Like nocturnal animals, the Malwiki were now capable of functioning only at night, eyes wide and senses peeled. In their collective stupor, each day they bade farewell the reality of lived experience and each night reawakened to have Prometheus’s wound freshly ripped away.

  Tonight Izzy experiments with running certain sequences in reverse. Accompanied by a live sound track of wild drumming and rattles, the image of the sacrificed bull confronts the audience, the animal’s slab butchered and butterflied on the ground, disassembled and scattered, stewing gore. Slowly, a severed leg reattaches itself to the torso’s hindquarters, the appendage stitching hair and skin together like a seamstress fixing a child’s doll. A broken hoof mends itself. A machete flies away from a chop deep in the animal’s midsection, and the carcass instantly heals, eyes opening from eternal sleep to a flash of wild-orbed terror. And there the king appears, a spray of arterial blood whiplashing away from his face and chest, the blade binding the animal’s neck together as it withdraws Hebraically from right to left. Cheers go up from the crowd as Mishi resurrects the slaughtered beast, his power made manifest by this visual proof.

  Next come a series of abstractions: the jungle canopy as seen from below, its latticework of leaves a lace curtain of whites and grays. Then a close-up of tree bark, as expressive as the lined face of an old, sun-shrunken fisherman. Then shots of water, multitudes of them, from all times of day, puddles and ripples and waves reduced to gray and black and silver bands that look like electricity or thought made visible.

  It takes time for Micah to decipher the next sequence. A smattering of matter, like a cloud of engine exhaust preposterously slowed. Then pieces of skin and viscera and skull stuff centripetally winding themselves up like a ball of string, whirlpooling out of the muddle to form a familiar human face.

  “Dwarf!” Micah cries, tears pulling from his eyes at the sight of his friend Spiro, alive and standing before them once again. The blast darts back into the muzzle as if on a dare, and there is Cri in his princely handsomeness, shock of confusion reversing itself into the easiest of smiles, the prince delivered to happiness again.

  Micah is reminded of the first photographic record of real violence he had ever seen—five or six years before viewing the staged carnage of Birth of a Nation. It was an incredible image of the attempted assassination of Mayor William Gaynor, taken moments after the politician had been shot in the throat. The picture had been banned from newspapers when the incident occurred in 1910, but reproductions had circulated among photography enthusiasts, and Micah and Izzy’s father had gotten hold of a copy. The picture seemed dangerous to them when the boys first discovered it in their father’s desk drawer, and they quickly passed it back and forth between them like a hot potato, not wanting to burn their fingertips by laying hands on the photo for too long. Though it was nearly twenty years ago, Micah could still recall—in ways he could not remember the details of losing his virginity or his wedding day or the births of his sons—the mayor’s dark bowler hat, his white beard spackled with blood, and his startled look of arrest, as if caught standing at the entrance of a surprise party. Recalling it even now, Micah believed that photo had everything to say about the medium’s aimless aestheticization of horror. But there isn’t time to consider these philosophical concerns too deeply, as the picture unfolding before them leaves Spiro standing sturdily in his captain’s uniform, securely pinned to the present tense, and moves on to the next sequence.

  It is a Dantean vision of flames, lashes of fire bursting from huts and waving like flags, then retreating, burned cinders reconstructing themselves. Villagers that began the scene crawling on all fours before white men in helmets and shiny black boots are restored to upright dignity. Soldiers retreat beyond the frame, beyond the village, beyond the hills, beyond the reach of history, and leave the village in peace.

  “Why is he punishing them so?” Mtabi asks.

  “I think he’s trying to return things to the way they were.”

  The translator tsk-tsks. “No, sir. This only sows seeds of confusion. The Malwiki are now like a boat without an oar. All this cine-film can do is lead them to ruination.”

  “He’s right, Micah,” Rose agrees. “All this watching isn’t healthy.”

  SIX

  Since Izzy’s return and the commencement of his nightly wielding of wizardly black magic, the Malwiki trod around him as if he were some kind of demiurge. A fearful figure of strangeness, Izzy related to no one, ate his meals in isolation, and spent his days in the king’s underground quarters carefully editing and rearranging the trove of footage, burrowing deeper and deeper into the soil and muck of time.

  The return of the rooster-haired brother did not bode well. Even absent an interpreter’s tongue, one could observe that the siblings’ conflict centered on the dream material and their intent to put it to different purposes. That first night in the dahtkam, no one knew what to expect until the strange, two-wheeled machine rumbled and a spray of light flew from its tip out over the flatlands to the net across the way. A new kind of vision, it didn’t describe, it was. It asked not for interpretation but absorption. The stories we tell each other, the dreams that paid nightly visit, stretched before them all in unanimous agreement. The rest was delirium and soul-sickness. Once they had drunk from the fantastic well of images, the tribespeople were forever thirsty.

  Nothing could compare to this blinding world in duplicate. With harvesting work and daily chores and lessons for children the Malwiki grew impatient. The true instruction began when the sun dipped over the horizon and retired for the day. It seemed the very soul of the tribe was being bartered between the brothers, and ultimately the Malwiki longed for the time prior to their visitation, when they were led by the strength of their king, when stories were told by firelight and received by the stars, when the image world would gently beckon and enter the ear and nose and mouth during sleep. When waking life and dream life were not so confused. The last images splash like silver coins across the screen, and all goes black. “They need to be rid of it,” Mtabi says.

  “Copacetic,” Micah says flatly. “We’re leaving with the film, for sure.”

  “No, it needs to be destroyed.”

  “Can’t do it, pal. Too many competing interests back home.”

  The villagers have begun abandoning the dahtkam, abuzz with the messages King Mishi has imparted. “No,” Mtabi says with finality. “We need to destroy it. Otherwise this image world threatens t
o drown them all.”

  The suggestion that he destroy the work is insupportable to Micah. Apart from his professional pride in what is surely the best work he has ever done, and the footage being a pillar of Marblestone’s legacy, there is a Harlem-based queen and her chosen prince awaiting this product half a world away. Stranded in a Gethsemane of his own making, Micah finds himself asking if there isn’t some other cup he can take up.

  Winded by the time he reaches the projectionist’s promontory, Micah finds Izzy leaning against the cool machinery, exuding the triumph of a ballplayer who’s just pitched a no-hitter. Seen from the perspective of the villagers down below, pressed against the immense night sky, the brothers appear like giants.

  “It’s time to go back,” Micah says, speaking rapidly as he inhales through a cigarette. “You’re not helping things here. You’re confusing them, you’re infantilizing them.”

  “We’re moviemakers,” Izzy says. “This is what we do.”

  “It means something different here. Look, listen to me for a second, will you, Itz? You didn’t discover anything new out here. You got laid, okay? And you could have done that any night of the week on the Bowery. You should have done that on the Bowery.”

  “Really? And what about you?” Micah’s line of attack lighting up Izzy’s switchboard of jealousy over his sibling’s surfeit of worldly love. “What exactly are you doing out here? Why’d you bring her?”

  “It was a gesture of good faith.”

  “You really haven’t figured out that this is the only place you can be with her?”

  “That’s not true, Itz. Rose and I are fine in New York.”

  “Where she plays at being white and you play at being married?”

  “I didn’t come here to talk about my marriage or my sex life.”

  “And never the twain shall meet.”