by Peter Boehm
For Verlaine, he was “the man with soles of wind”. Rimbaud, on the other hand, considered himself “a French gentleman, most respectably connected, of superior education”, advertising in The Times for a job as a “private secretary and travel companion”.
Rimbaud now really wanted to get away. He therefore set about seriously implementing his programme. He joined the Dutch colonial army as a mercenary, but deserted in Sumatra after just two weeks, travelled to Alexandria on the off-chance, found a job as a foreman in Cyprus, and eventually ended up in Aden, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
There, he found work with a French trading company. It mainly exported coffee to Europe, but also animal skins, acacia gum and ostrich feathers, and supplied the locals with fabrics in return. It was by pure coincidence that Rimbaud was soon sent to Harar as the company’s representative and that it was there, in the south east of today’s Ethiopia, that he finally found his “hot countries”. He could just as easily have ended up in Zanzibar, Panama, India, China or Japan – those places he had always longed for, and which he wrote about in his letters from Harar when he yet again didn’t want to be here/there.
But he stayed. For a total of five years between 1880 and 1891. The rest of the time he was in Aden, at the trading company’s headquarters, or he was organising a caravan, with armed guards, from the coast to Ankober, the Ethiopian capital at the time.
Already nearing death, he returned to France for the first time at the age of 37, where he died, alone and forgotten by the world.
Whereas elsewhere in Europe Rimbaud is considered a rather interesting French poet, he is an icon in the French and English-speaking worlds. Virtually the whole of French modernism saw him as the herald of “free freedom”, a pioneer. And for Bob Dylan or Jim Morrison, he was a kindred spirit, who lived what they had always dreamed of.
If Arthur Rimbaud had lived a century later, he would probably have become a true rock star or an intellectual James Dean, who consistently refused business when he began to become famous. When, during Rimbaud’s life, his poetry had already become the sensation of the Parisian literary salons, no-one knew where he was. He hadn’t said a word to his friends and business partners in Aden and Harar about his first life as a poet, and he didn’t answer journalists’ letters inquiring about him. He was thought to be missing or dead, and after he’d then returned from Harar to his French hometown, actually seriously ill, the only people at his graveside were his mother, his sister and the priest.
That’s why there’s something for everyone in this short life, lived constantly on the edge. Rimbaud’s rebellion against the tepidness of bourgeois life, his restlessness, his hunger for life which is so easy to relate to, and his consequent refusal to fit in, make him virtually predestined to be a symbolic figure who can be called upon to prove that there is something else besides a well-tended front garden, a pension plan and two weeks a year in Mallorca.
That was the situation when I travelled to Harar, in search of Rimbaud’s tracks. The town is well located, on the southern side of the East African Rift Valley, on a plateau almost 6,000 feet above sea level. The climate is tolerable, and the environment fertile, but today’s Harar is almost nothing like the city of Rimbaud’s time.
Although it’s still considered the fourth holiest city of Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Cairo, visitors have to be made aware of Harar’s Muslim past. Harar apparently has 99 mosques, but 99 is a symbolic number in Islam. It’s the number of names for God in the Quran. You can still see the old city gates, the narrow alleys in the old town, the whitewashed walls and houses, but otherwise Harar has become a perfectly normal Ethiopian provincial town, with cafés and pubs, and a gloomy cinema.
When Rimbaud arrived in Harar in 1880, Europeans were only just able to visit the city without being in danger. The first Christian who visited the city and returned in one piece was the British orientalist Sir Richard Burton, 26 years earlier. At the time, Harar was still one of the many sovereign Arab Emirates on the East African coast, which had existed since the 12th century. The town made a good living from the slave and coffee trade and from controlling the caravan routes between the coast and southern Ethiopia.
Harar had lost its independence just five years before Rimbaud’s arrival. It was occupied first by Turkish-Egyptian troops and then, in 1887, by the future Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II.
As Rimbaud is so well-known, such an icon, there is real Rimbaud tourism in Harar today. A Rimbaud house was created in the old town in order to offer the tourists something. There’s just one problem with this – the fact that Rimbaud very probably never lived there and that, in his day, the house probably didn’t even exist. The three houses where he really lived have since been pulled down, built over or have disappeared for some other reason. That was why they just took the spacious house of a Greek trader and renamed it Rimbaud’s house.
Since the British writer Charles Nicholl had proved, by careful detective work, that the house claiming to be Rimbaud’s couldn’t have been his, the very smarmy guides also have to admit this. So I had a brief look around and went on my way. And now, if I really wanted to sense something of the atmosphere of the Harar of Rimbaud’s day, I had to set off on my own.
And after a while I thought I’d found something. In the evening, a pleasant stillness descended over the old town. You could probably best experience the atmosphere of the lost Harar after the last of the audience had streamed out of the provincial cinema, and once you walked down the steep Machina Girr Girr
I left behind the last of the electric streetlamps. The mechanical sewing machines, the whirr of which had given the street its name, had been put away and a solemn silence had descended in the Maghala gudi, the large marketplace. During the day, Oromo women had been selling kindling here, which they’d brought by donkey from their villages nearby. The Oromo farmers live on the outskirts and only come to the city in the daytime.
This was the same in Rimbaud’s day. The women wore dirty dresses, which had certainly been imported from Europe, and simple moulded plastic shoes. Their hair was done in the traditional style, in narrow braids. I saw the Oromo men selling razor blades and matches. They looked warlike with their wraparound skirts around their legs, and the small sickle on a stick over their shoulders. This serves as both a gardening tool and a weapon. They, too, still had traditional hairstyles. They’d just replaced the wooden comb in their afros with a plastic one.
Now the market was empty. Just here and there some charcoal was still glowing in earthenware pots, over which the remaining people were cooking a simple meal. Long shadows darted across the marketplace and disappeared into the makeshift tents, made from plastic sheeting, cardboard and branches at the edge of the market. The shops in the little alcoves, where you could buy anything from shampoo to chewing gum, were closed, and the khat-chewing beggars, who spend the days lying on the ground in their ragged clothes, succumbing to the green twigs’ addictive juice, had escaped the cool evening air and moved into their holes in the city’s mud walls. The streets now seemed quiet and homely, and the narrow alleys invited you to linger.
It could have been just like this when Rimbaud had an evening walk, after the day’s work was done – but it wasn’t. In 19th century Harar, you see, no-one went out for a walk in the evening. At this time of day, the city’s narrow alleys were the domain of wild dogs or hyenas. The city gates were closed in the late afternoon, and then the dogs were set free, the idea being that they, in turn, would control the hyenas which fed on the scraps and waste.
So there we are. It wasn’t like this. But of course I didn’t give up that easily. I engaged a guide – Mr Endalle. He was Amhara, not Harari, but he’d been born in the city and knew everything and everyone. Mr Endalle led me through the city, across marketplaces, through courtyards full of nooks and crannies, and narrow alleys. He had a response for all my journalistic questions and, at the end, also took me to Hotel Mekonnen on the Faras Magala, the former horse market.
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He suddenly stopped here. He cautiously indicated a narrow, two-storey house with a hotel sign on the façade and a small terrace leading onto the street. He advised me not to look at the hotel too obviously, and I wasn’t allowed to take any photos either – evidently because he would otherwise have to give the hotel proprietor a share of his fee.
But to make up for this, Mr Endalle had good news for me. Rimbaud had never lived in the Rimbaud house. As if! He’d actually lived in this very hotel.
In a conspiratorial tone, he confirmed this not insignificant piece of information by quoting a French journalist who had discovered it. Of course, at the time this house wasn’t yet a hotel. It looked quite nondescript, slightly worn with age, single-storey, with sky-blue shutters at the windows – Mr Endalle, “It’s still the same colour as it was in Rimbaud’s day”. But ultimately it was just as unlikely a place for Rimbaud to have lived as any other house in Harar.
During the day, naïve-looking passers-by sipped their cappuccino on the ground floor. And when I returned in the evening on my own, it had transformed into one of the dimly lit Ethiopian bars, with brightly coloured, naïve frescos painted on the walls. “Cool and the Gang” was blaring out of the loudspeakers, and girls of dubious repute were hanging around in the corners. The dungeon-like cellar would certainly have appealed to Rimbaud. It’s just a pity that he probably never saw it.
But then, as I was standing around, slightly bored, in the Hotel Mekonnen, I suddenly realised that it didn’t matter in the least which street or house Rimbaud had lived in. I looked around the bar, saw people who weren’t speaking at all, or who had the same conversations every day, because nothing happened in Harar that was worth talking about. I suddenly understood.
In order to learn something of Rimbaud’s time in Harar, I had to look beyond the concrete houses and walls. It wasn’t about their design, their name, their past or current function, but about what they stood for.
It must have been places exactly like the Mekonnen, exuding from every corner the idiocy of African provincial life, which inspired Rimbaud’s caustic letters to his mother and sister in the Ardennes in France. In any event, Harar had changed beyond recognition since Rimbaud’s day. Nothing was left of the old Harar. The only thing remaining from those days was the feeling of being buried alive in the provinces here.
For someone reading Rimbaud’s letters to his mother and sister in France, they seem full of unbridled hatred and inescapable despair. They are full of venomous outbursts against the “Negros”.
But I knew where they stemmed from, as I was familiar with these outbursts. Oh, how well I knew them! Just as every expat experiences them when Africa yet again messes up all their carefully laid plans, just like a fresh spring wind rifling through neatly stacked papers.
“I’m always very bored”, Rimbaud wrote to his family from Harar in 1887. “Quite honestly, I’ve never met anyone more bored than I am. And it’s not really a life to complain about, free of a family, free of any intellectual activity, lost among these ‘Negros’, whose fate you’d like to improve but who, themselves, only try to exploit you and stop you making money without first experiencing endless delays. I have to speak their jargon, eat their dirty food, and accept thousands of disappointments on account of their laziness, their deceitfulness and their stupidity. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst part is the fear of slowly becoming just as uncivilised as they are, being as isolated as I am and so far from any kind of intelligent society.”
This isn’t a letter after just a couple of months of frustration in the “hot countries”, but after seven years. And there are a few of these. Soon after he had arrived in Harar, Rimbaud wrote, “Let me tell you, my life here is truly idiotic and stupefying.” Or, a little later, “I’m getting used to this life of hardship. I’m living on my anger, which is so violent and so senseless. What can I tell you about my work here, which is so repulsive, or about this country, which is so terrible? I can only tell you about the fights I have endured and the horrendous difficulties, and all they have brought me is a fever.”
Rimbaud had an extremely ambivalent relationship with his mother all his life. His letters to his friends and colleagues in Ethiopia and Aden have a very different feel. They are full of jokes and wit, full of mocking anecdotes about the political situation and about the people who surrounded him.
But that’s not surprising either. He didn’t want to lose his friends. He couldn’t burden them with his despair. But it didn’t matter with his mother. He had her no matter what. He could offload his disappointment onto her without such concerns. Besides, she was his only link with Europe, and thus also to his European identity. Through her, he ordered books, a camera and measuring instruments which he wanted for voyages of discovery. The letters to his family and those to the other expats stemmed, therefore, from fundamentally different situations.
But that in itself isn’t sufficient to explain their marked differences. These show something else too. Namely, that the man who wrote in his book “A Season in Hell” that “I am a Negro” had fundamentally changed. And I knew that only someone who had not yet observed this same change either in himself or in others, would be surprised by how complete this change seems to be.
Now, all of a sudden, you could marvel at a Rimbaud who had developed an extremely pragmatic relationship to the region’s slave trade. He even got annoyed about the pressure the British put on King Yohannes of Tigray to commit himself contractually to stopping the slave trade. “All native tribes along the coast have thus become the enemies of the Europeans”, Rimbaud wrote in a letter in 1885.
In a letter to a Cairo newspaper, the new Rimbaud also advised the French government, without any apparent scruples, to annex the area today forming the port of Djibouti City, as well as the Itou plateau in southern Ethiopia because the regions were “very healthy and fertile....the only ones in East Africa suited to European colonisation.”
The “Negros” had now become the others. Arthur Rimbaud, the refugee of civilisation, had become Arthur Rimbaud, the strange expatriate. And neither is there any trace, in his letters, of a guilty conscience over this change.
But it gets even stranger – in fact, he was a typically strange expatriate. There’s yet another Rimbaud to marvel at who seems to match the person writing letters to his mother just as much as Doctor Rimbaud matches Mister Arthur. The Rimbaud, that is, who couldn’t say a single good word about his new country in his letters home but who was nonetheless, himself, no longer distinguishable from the natives. For other expatriates, he had almost become one of the “Negros” himself – and perhaps even a Muslim.
The merchant Armand Savouré, who visited Rimbaud in Harar in 1888, wrote that Rimbaud had “a rather nice house, but no furniture. There was nothing for me to sleep on other than my camp bed from the journey, and during the whole month I never found out where he slept. I only ever saw him writing – day and night – at a makeshift table.” And, “Around 1886, he went out preaching from the Quran, in order to break into the as yet unknown regions of Africa.”
Rimbaud lived with a local woman, and didn’t go out much, as the Catholic missionary and Bishop of Harar, André Jarosseau, remembered. “In general he avoided the company of Europeans.”
“Unlike the other European caravan operators, explorers and traders”, noted the Italian explorer Ugo Ferrandi who, in 1886, met Rimbaud at the coast prior to departing to join his arms caravan in the Ethiopian highlands, “Rimbaud didn’t live in a compound outside the village. He lived in the village, and at his house he held learned discussions about the Quran with the local elders. He wore nothing on his head except a small grey Muslim cap. An intimate detail – when he had to answer a certain call for nature, he squatted like the natives. They even considered him to be something of a Muslim. He advised me to imitate this course, seeing that I had some knowledge of Islamic customs.”
Rimbaud’s business slogan read “Abdoh Rinbo”, or “Rimbaud, the servant of Allah�
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And the Italian trader Ottorino Rosa, who knew Rimbaud well, was surprised by his “bizarre” clothing – “He lived like a native, very carelessly dressed. I remember that the English Resident at Zeilah, Lieutenant Harrington, seeing him dressed so oddly, took him for a simple building worker. He used to make his own clothes, out of white American cotton, and simplify things he had ingenious ways of avoiding the tiresome need for buttons.”
You need to have seen the self-portraits Rimbaud took with the camera which his mother had sent him from France. As the French writer Paul Claudel noted, they made Rimbaud look something of a convict. His monochrome white jacket and white trousers hung from him like a sack. No-one wearing such clothes could have cared what others thought of him.
This was why, according to Jules Borelli – another Italian explorer who knew Rimbaud from Aden and the East African port of Tadjourah – Rimbaud seemed too eccentric to the other expatriates. “His way of life, which some saw as grotesque and others as an obscure kind of originality, was essentially the product of his independent and rather misanthropic personality.”
They smiled at him. They saw Rimbaud as something of an oddball. And Rimbaud was certainly a strange individual, but not quite so odd that, for all his quirkiness, the strange expatriate didn’t yet shine through clearly.
After all, such people who have become “like the locals” can still be found today in almost every African town. They have usually married a local woman, and are neither able nor willing to return to their former home country. Take the Frenchman, for instance, in a suburb of the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, who a German historian told me about. He had goats wandering around his living room. Or the Belgian I met in Timbuktu, whom you weren’t allowed to disturb during his midday nap, and who told me conspiratorially wild stories about the gold trade in northern Mali.