Picked-Up Pieces

by John Updike

  “I swear by Ogbunabali the god of the night that the Pond of Wagaba belongs to Chiolu.

  “If this is not true let me die within six months;

  “If true, let me live and prosper.”

  The novel then shifts from the social realm to the psychological; Olumba, the strongest man of his village, struggles with the invisible. Though elaborate precautions hem in his activity, he impulsively climbs a palm tree, is stung by wasps, falls, and nearly dies. The event is revealed to be the result of a spell Igwu has cast in Aliakoro; a counter-spell, cast by the consulting dibia Anwuanwu, saves his life. But as the weeks of his six months drag by, the impalpable weight of the god Ogbunabali preys on the warrior’s mind and wastes him to apathy:

  He was like a man swimming against a strong current. By frantic efforts he could gain short distances, but invariably the current swept him back, draining energy and confidence out of him … Olumba was a shadow of his former self. Emaciated and haggard he shuffled about with hunched shoulders. His hollow eye-sockets could hold a cup of water each. Looking at him people feared he would collapse any moment and die.

  The suspense of Olumba’s struggle not to die is frightful. The motions of his morale feel immense. We see life as pre-scientific man saw it—as a spiritual liquid easily spilled. The invisible forces pressing upon Olumba are totally plausible. The novel treats magic respectfully, as something that usually works. The recipes of witchery are matter-of-factly detailed, as are the fevers and divinations they inarguably produce. But Olumba’s heroic battle is against a force deeper than magic—the death wish itself, the urge toward osmotic reabsorption into the encircling ocean of darkness wherein life is a precarious, thin-walled epiphenomenon. Ogbunabali has no shrine in Chiolu; he is “therefore non-directional, distant, menacing, ubiquitous.” His silence and neutrality are uncanny and invincible. Ogbunabali is not evil, or even especially concerned; “the gods would rather have fun than run after us.” He is simply Ogbunabali.

  As Olumba is about to succumb, a second intercession occurs: others in the village begin mysteriously to die. Olumba’s fighting spirit returns: “His private fears vanished in the face of the village-wide consternation.” Wonjo, the coughing sickness, carries off one of his wives and imperils his only son. Nevertheless, as the sixth new moon shines down upon the decimated village, Olumba still lives. And yet, in this defeat, Wago the leopard-killer finds a way to deprive Chiolu of the Pond of Wagaba; the war is carried to a fiendish end, though Aliakoro, too, has been ravaged by wonjo. Is wonjo the wrath of Ogbunabali, taking vengeance for the impiety of war? The villagers think so, but Captain Amadi tells us, in a last sentence like the lifting of a vast curtain, that

  Wonjo, as the villagers called the Great Influenza of 1918, was to claim a grand total of some twenty million lives all over the world.

  One world indeed. Until this sentence, the apparent isolation of the Erekwi villages has been total and pure; this novel, so revelatory of the human condition both inward and outward, contains no trace of the world of white men save a few old Portuguese swords worn as adornment.

  In Alex La Guma’s novel of South Africa, white men are everywhere, “pink and smooth as strawberry jelly.” They function as bosses, owners, policemen, and torturers. In the Fog of the Season’s End has a setting as thoroughly urban as that of The Great Ponds is rural:

  The suburbs passed quickly and the city skimmed into sight: a serrated horizon of office blocks with rows of parking meters like regiments of armless robots in front of them.

  There is cosmopolitan glitter for whites:

  the clink of glasses; a woman’s voice saying nasally, “… must come to Los Angeles some day …” soft music from the dim futuristic cocktail lounge where the Indian stewards moved skillfully among the tables …

  and ghetto squalor for blacks:

  On the narrow, torrid staircase the smell of urine and old cooking hung on the stale, thick, groping air that touched exposed skin with a hot caress.

  Through this crowded, active, bipartite cityscape (Cape Town, though not named as such) moves our hero, Beukes, “a brown man in a brown suit.” He works for “the movement,” and in the course of the novel goes about distributing incendiary leaflets, meeting varieties of coöperation and distrust among his fellow black Africans, catching odd hours of sleep in borrowed rooms, reminiscing about his life and his love, Frances, whom we never meet. At the end, the Security Police surround a tin shack where he is conferring with Elias Tekwane, an older revolutionary; Beukes escapes, but Tekwane is captured and tortured to death. The last scene shows three young blacks being smuggled north to join the army of freedom fighters while Beukes stands in the brightening sunlight and thinks, “They have gone to war in the name of a suffering people.… What we see now is only the tip of an iceberg of resentment against an ignoble regime, the tortured victims of hatred and humiliation.”

  Mr. La Guma is not, then, one to let his message slip by unnoticed, nor is his descriptive prose shy of insistence. Similes proliferate; at their best they quicken their referent:

  She was small and fine-boned and pretty as a garden snake.

  … the dark-skinned children staring out over fences like shabby glove-puppets …

  and at their worse smother it beneath a clumsy muchness:

  Here and there tiny cafés clung to precarious business with the fingernails of hope, like the foxholes of a last-ditch stand, dust gathering on the stale menu cards.

  Faces especially excite the author to a viscous overflow of imagery:

  The Sergeant had a flabby, wrinkled face over hard bone, as if a loose, flexible rubber mask had been hastily dropped over a smaller wig-stand.

  … a woman with tired, bleached hair and the face of a painted waxed doll accidentally left near a fire, then hastily retrieved …

  … a squat man with a face like a badly formed and stale cheese …

  … a small man with bad teeth and a big smile that split his face like a blotched melon.

  The writing does, however, convey a jumbled, sweaty sensation not inappropriate to the subject—the human jungle the white man has imposed upon the South African black. And when La Guma’s prose connects directly to outrage—as when Tekwane is tortured by two tweedy policemen, or when the maze of permits the police state has created is dramatized—the fuzz of overwriting burns away. As a thriller, In the Fog of the Season’s End suffers not only from its chosen interweave of flashbacks but from a certain languid futility in its basic mission; the risk Beukes runs distributing the leaflets seems far greater than any possible effect they can have. As political description, the book is less strident than its metaphors. The black population Beukes moves through is represented, in what feel to be fair proportions, as amused, threatened, or inspired by him and his cause. Personal friendship among these oppressed counts for more than political commitment. We are aware how far we have come from the villages of The Great Ponds when a character responds, “Strangers? I dunno. I reckon there’s always strangers hanging about like. People you don’ know.” In Chiolu and Aliakoro, there are no people you don’t know. In a modern state, strangers are the rule, and Beukes more than once reminds himself of the uncomfortable, comforting fact that he is anonymous while, with his carton of pamphlets addressed to the faceless masses, he dodges from one island of acquaintanceship to another. I have heard it observed that among black Africans South African exiles invariably stand out as the most dynamic. Perhaps “dynamic” should be read as “best able to deal with strangers.” The people in La Guma’s world are fighting for identity; Amadi’s villagers have had theirs bestowed upon them—in their kinship, in their nicknames, in their hierarchical roles. Dragging its captive blacks in the ruck, the South African state has nevertheless dragged them into modernity, into the post-tribal impersonality that makes it necessary for the narrative artist to particularize every face. The need to describe, excessively felt in In the Fog of the Season’s End, arises when teller and listener no longer share a commo
n reality.

  As protest, La Guma’s cry from this particular underworld has a value that transcends its artistic faults—a special value, it may be, to Americans. For at this distance it is easy to be complacent or forgetful about South Africa, which sends us only its admirable white athletes and, with less publicity, its pleasant investment dividends. Perhaps one has to visit black Africa to realize how automatically is assumed the complicity of the United States in the continued white rule of that continent’s rich southern third. The Portuguese supposedly fight with weapons we supply them through NATO; the Afrikaners buttress their tyranny with our capital; our new Vietnam will (supposedly) come here. In the Fog of the Season’s End contains only the occasional overheard invitation to Los Angeles, the glimpsed Coca-Cola billboard. But the glistening white world that hangs above the black townships like a forbidden paradise does have a familiar air. We live there.

  Agatha Moudio’s Son takes place in an agreeable intermediate climate: its Cameroonian fishing village is intact but not untouched. White power has planted a public fountain in the center of the village and run a paved highway through it. A party of hunters comes on Sundays to shoot monkeys in the forest—an intrusion considered “picturesque.” They are admired as exotic creatures:

  There were three white men and their two white women.… The two ladies always wore trousers: what kind of woman was this …? One of the men was very rich, at least we thought so every time he opened his mouth to speak, for he had replaced the two rows of ivory that Heaven must surely have given him at birth with two sparkling rows of gold. He was tall and strong and ugly.… The children were looking at these men and these women with curiosity and admiration, especially the man with the gold-filled mouth, in spite of his strange ugliness. But why on earth weren’t they black, like us?

  More admired still, however, is the striding Scotsman on the whiskey bottle—“blessed be thou, oh bottle manufactured by the whites.” Another bracing import is law and order, which sends almost all the male villagers to jail for four years. Unlike Beukes, they accept fatalistically these strangers “who rule us, you, me, all the villagers, just as they rule our forest, our stream, our river, and all the animals and fish that live in them.” They are puzzled only by how their first set of white masters, the Germans, who drank from mugs, could have been defeated by the French, who drink from “dolls’ glasses.”

  Francis Bebey writes with the lightness and irreverence and affectionate thoughtfulness that the patterns of acculturation have bestowed upon the literature of Francophone Africa. Magic, so deadly in Amadi’s Nigerian fastness, is here playful and amorous: a woman throws salt on a fire to bring on a rainstorm that will protect her and her lover from interruption; in the figure of Mother Evil-Eye the witch and midwife merge. The frightful silence of Ogbunabali becomes the kindly silence of the dead, giving assent to the living:

  We waited a few seconds for a possible manifestation. It did not come; nothing moved in the room, neither the door, nor the single window with its scanty light, which was covered by a little rectangular mat of woven raffia; we heard nothing, not even a step on the freshly beaten earth of the floor. Nothing: my father was giving us a free hand.

  Even when ritual turns lethal and heaps rocks upon a culprit’s head, his neck by a droll miracle refuses to break. The elaborate parleys, which in The Great Ponds present a worthy analogue to the discourse of nations, are here portrayed satirically; venerable formulas mask haggling greed as a bride price is agreed upon. Religion has ebbed, leaving a fertile wash of credulity. Little myths sprout into instant being; a stray frog hiding in a sleeve becomes in the telling a devil, and a young wrestler feels himself “in the process of gradually becoming a legend.” Darkness, a death-concealing curtain in Chiolu, in this Cameroonian village panders to lovers, covering their comings and goings and even permitting the whispering visits of a white man on a bicycle.

  The hero of The Great Ponds, Olumba, agonizes between life and death; Mbenda, the hero of Agatha Moudio’s Son, vacillates between two women and solves his problem, in the way of his ancestors, by marrying them both. Though both present him with illegitimate children, the triangle is essentially amiable—Fanny, the wife whom the village has chosen for him, urges him to marry as well Agatha, the woman his heart has chosen, though she is a white man’s tart and with time his desire for her has so cooled that she seems “very little different from any other woman.” The novel brims with the village’s most precious gift—its bestowal of value upon every life within it. An illegitimate child, far from unwelcome, “prospered and was the sun of our village.” Uncle Big-Heart, upon whose head the stones are heaped, is deplored because he “had not acted in a brotherly way” toward his fellow-villagers: “After all, just because Uncle Big-Heart could read and write and talk to foreigners, he had no right to neglect his brothers.” And eventually he comes to repentance, appearing at a wedding and announcing, “I was born in this village. I shall stay here all my life, and I don’t intend to be ignored at moments as important as this one.” All forgive him his cheating them, and he forgives their trying to break his neck, and the men imprisoned because of this escapade forgive him their term in jail.

  Mbenda, as he narrates these events in a sidling, unpredictable manner, seems ambiguously situated both within and outside the village. He is a fisherman in love with the fisherman’s life, with the “fraternity, solidarity, the sky, the sea, men, men lost in this overwhelming natural setting, simple men living to sea’s rhythm” and solidly of the village. Yet he looks back upon it from a mysterious distance: “Happy life, what would I give to return to you again.” He alludes to intervening experiences not described within the novel’s compass: “Today, time and mixing with people who ‘know about life’ have given my arguments a certain measure of ‘civilization.’ ” The reader expects, then, a scene of severance from this village recalled through a shimmer of nostalgia. It never comes; Mbenda never leaves. The author, however, the jacket tells us, after being born in Douala, Cameroon, studied at the Sorbonne and has been a “composer, guitarist, broadcaster, and journalist,” and has given recitals “throughout Africa, in Paris, and New York.” The awkwardly obtrusive narrator consciousness, with its unresolved double focus, is the only stammer in this confidently relaxed novel, and is probably symptomatic of an African unease with the device, so natural to the West, of confession, of the narrator as hero. I recall—to be personal once more—a student in Nairobi explaining her aversion to reading novels by saying they were “too much showing off.” Mbenda, in one of his philosophical asides, analyzes his own distrust of books: a book is, “fundamentally, the most indiscreet of friends.… In our society, we had preserved the ancestral custom of communicating things only to those we loved, and with the certainty that they would make good use of our information.”

  Agatha Moudio’s Son culminates, as the title foretells, in the birth of a boy. He is born oddly pale, with straight hair. Mbenda tells himself, “Most black children are born white, and only take on … local colour a few days after coming into the world.” He waits. “You will understand why this child, neither flesh nor fowl, which had just been born, made me so thoughtful, when I tell you the truth: the colour of my own skin is like the deepest shades of ebony.… As for Agatha Moudio, very pretty as you know, she too was quite black, from head to foot.… I kept on hoping for a whole month after the birth of the little boy, but his milk-chocolate complexion barely changed, or so little as to be barely noticeable.” At last, Mother Evil-Eye announces the obvious truth:

  “Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps this child will one day have a mouthful of gold, like its father.…”

  I rushed to a mirror, on hearing this, and bared my teeth: two rows of ivory, clean and white beyond reproach.

  But this, too, is in time forgiven—forgiven Agatha, and forgiven her white son, who as he grows and plays in the village with the other children “looks like a child come from afar.” Mbenda, abruptly older, meditates, “When all’s said a
nd done, Agatha’s son expects from me not the wicked and stupid sneer of a man deceived by fate but the parental advice which will bring him happiness in the strange adventure of life as a man.” And he remembers Mother Evil-Eye’s predicting to him, of Agatha, “She’ll lead you a fine dance till you can’t tell black from white.” Speed the day.

  Addendum: Excerpts from a Symposium*

  HELD ON January 26, 1973, at the University of Lagos. Text edited by Dr. Theophilus Vincent of the University Department of English and published by the United States Information Service.

  “The author is faced with this difficulty. He has to write on a private level, on the social level and on this other level which, for want of a better word, we may call the supernatural. So you may find things happening in the African novel which normally would be quite untenable from the Western point of view. Why should a man die because some gods are angry? It is rubbish, it is childish, it doesn’t happen.… And yet, down in the village, this is the reality. If someone is sick in the village it is not enough for the medicine man or even for the doctor to give him an injection. It may be a purely organic disease, so he gets this injection. Now if he has not lost his innocence, you will find that he will not recover until he has also satisfied his gods. In other words this emotional aspect of the thing is very much tied up with his illness. Even now in the village you find a relation of yours falls ill and then there is the usual divination. With your sophistication and Western education, you say, ‘Look, mommy, this is trash. I will take you to the doctor; you will be all right.’ Then you bundle the old lady to the doctor and the doctor does his bit and she does not recover, even with all the drugs. Now she has to go back and, if she believes strongly in this thing, and most of them do, the native doctor is called in, he does his bit and then she recovers. This is the reality of the African situation. We have not lost all our innocence and if we try to lose it, I think we would be losing a very great deal. So we have to write in three dimensions.… One may ask: is this not perpetrating something which really ought to be done away with? Why resurrect all this stuff of the gods and the supernatural and so on? Well, my answer is: we really do not know—I mean, there is so much about nature that we do not know. Nowadays hypnotism is standard practice in psychotherapy. When Mesmer was exploring this art, he was dubbed a quack and he was abused and mesmerism was very much in disrepute. But today, hypnotism is an accepted part of psychotherapy. People are researching in telepathy and gathering evidence every day on this. In other words, we do not really know much about nature and it may well be that the ignorant villagers are right after all.”