by Rob Spillman
When she has prepared the meal and Zaak deigns to eat with them, Cambara requests that as soon as they have finished eating they ask the driver to take them in the truck so that Zaak can show her the family’s expropriated property. To her great relief, he agrees to her demand.
ABDOURAHMAN A. WABERI
• Djibouti •
from THE UNITED STATES OF AFRICA
I. A Voyage to Asmara, the Federal Capital.
1
In which the author gives a brief account of the origins of our prosperity and the reasons why the Caucasians were thrown onto the paths of exile.
HE’S THERE, EXHAUSTED. Silent. The wavering glow of a candle barely lights the carpenter’s bedroom in this shelter for immigrant workers. This ethnically Swiss Caucasian speaks a Germanic dialect, and in this age of the jet and the Internet, claims he has fled violence and famine. Yet he still has all of the aura that fascinated our nurses and aid workers.
Let’s call him Yacuba, first to protect his identity and second because he has an impossible family name. He was born outside Zurich in an unhealthy favela, where infant mortality and the rate of infection by the AIDS virus remain the highest in the world today. The figures are drawn from studies of the World Health Organization (WHO) based in our country in the fine peaceful city of Banjul, as everyone knows. AIDS first appeared some two decades ago in the shady underworld of prostitution, drugs and promiscuity in Greece and is now endemic worldwide, according to the high priests of world science at the Mascate meeting in the noble kingdom of Oman.
The cream of international diplomacy also meets in Banjul; they are supposedly settling the fate of millions of Caucasian refugees of various ethnic groups (Austrian, Canadian, American, Norwegian, Belgian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, British, Icelandic, Swedish, Portuguese . . .) not to mention the skeletal boat people from the northern Mediterranean, at the end of their rope from dodging all the mortar-shells and missiles that darken the unfortunate lands of Euramerica.
Some of them cut and run, wander around, get exhausted and then brusquely give up, until they are sucked into the void. Prostitutes of every sex, Monte Carlians or Vaticanians but others too, wash up on the Djerba beaches and the cobalt blue bay of Algiers. These poor devils are looking for the bread, rice or flour distributed by Afghan, Haitian, Laotian or Sahelian aid organizations. Ever since our world has been what it is, little French, Spanish, Batavian or Luxembourgian schoolchildren, hit hard by kwashiorkor, leprosy, glaucoma and poliomyelitis, only survive with food surpluses from Vietnamese, North Korean or Ethiopian farmers.
These warlike tribes with their barbaric customs and deceitful, uncontrollable moves keep raiding the scorched lands of the Auvergne, Tuscany or Flanders, when they’re not shedding the blood of their atavistic enemies—Teutons, Gascons or backward Iberians—for the slightest little thing, for rifles or trifles, because they recognize a prisoner or because they don’t. They’re all waiting for a peace that has yet to come.
But let us return to the shack of our flea-ridden Germanic or Alemannic carpenter. Take a furtive look into the darkness of his dwelling. A mud floor scantily strewn with wood shavings, no furniture or utensils. No electricity or running water, of course. This individual, poor as Job on his dung heap, has never seen a trace of soap, cannot imagine the flavor of yogurt, has no conception of the sweetness of a fruit salad. He is a thousand miles from our most basic Sahelian conveniences. Which is further from us, the moon, polished by Malian and Liberian astronauts, or this creature?
Let us cross what we might call the threshold: swarms of flies block your view and a sour smell immediately grabs you by the throat. You try to move forward nonetheless, but you can’t. You stand there, dumb-struck.
Your eyes are beginning to get used to the darkness. You can make out the contours of what seems to be a painting with crude patterns. One of those daubs called primitive: clueless tourists are crazy about them. Two crossed zebu horns and a Protestant sword decorate the other side of the wall, a sign of the religious zeal that pervades this shelter for foreign workers in our rich, dynamic Eritrean state.
Let us say in passing that our values of solidarity, conviviality and morality are now threatened by rapid social transformations and the violent unleashing of the unbridled free market, as the Afrigeltcard has replaced our ancestral traditions of mutual aid. The ancient country of Eritrea, governed for centuries by a long line of Muslim puritans, deeply influenced by the rigorism of the Senegalese Mourides, was able to prosper by combining good business sense with the virtues of parliamentary democracy. From its business center in Massawa or its online stock market on Lumumba Street, not to mention the very high-tech Keren Valley Project20 and the military-industrial complexes in Assab, everything here works together for success and prosperity. This is what attracts the hundreds of thousands of wretched Euramericans subjected to a host of calamities and a deprivation of hope.
Our carpenter is muttering in his beard. What can he possibly be saying with his tongue rolled up at the back of his throat? God alone could decipher his white pidgin dialect. He is racked by the desire to leave the cotton fields of his slavery—quite understandable, but let’s get back to the subject.
Still more dizzying is the flow of capital between Eritrea and its dynamic neighbors, who are all members of the federation of the United States of Africa, as is the former Hamitic kingdom of Chad, rich in oil; and also the ex-Sultanate of Djibouti that handles millions of guineas and surfs on its gas boom; or the Madagascar archipelago, birthplace of the conquest of space and tourism for the enfants terribles of the new high finance. The golden boys of Tananarive are light-years away from the black wretchedness of the white Helvetian carpenter.
You’re still standing? Ah, okay! Now you recognize a familiar sound. You try a risky maneuver, taking one, then two steps into the darkness. You walk through the tiny door. You can make out the first measures of some mumbo-jumbo full of shouts and strangled sounds. An antediluvian black and white TV, made in Albania, dominates the living room of this shelter for destitute Caucasians, with their straight hair and infected lungs. After an insipid soap opera, a professor from the Kenyatta School of European and American Studies,21 an eminent specialist in Africanization—the latest fad in our universities, now setting the tone for the whole planet—claims that the United States of Africa can no longer accommodate all the world’s poor. You might be taken in by his unctuous voice as you listen to him, but in fact his polished statements, all cheap lace and silk rhetoric, fool nobody—certainly not the immigrants from outside Africa. His idea can be summed up in one sentence: the federal authorities must face up to their responsibilities firmly but humanely by escorting all foreign nationals back to the border, by force if necessary—first the illegal immigrants, then the semi-legal, then the paralegal, and so on.
Alternative voices have arisen, all or almost all from liberal circles which hardly needed the TV talks of Professor Emeritus Garba Huntingwabe to react against “the irrational fear of the Other, of ‘undesirable aliens,’ that continues to be the greatest threat to African unity” (www.foreign-policy.afr, editorial, last March). Assembled under the aegis of the World Academy of Gorean Cultures, which includes all the enlightened minds in the world from Rangoon to Lomé and from Madras to Lusaka, these voices remind us that the millions of starving Japanese kept alive on the food surpluses from central Africa could be adequately taken care of with what that region spends on defense in just three days. You may recall that the face of this network—reviled by all the ulemas, nabobs, Neguses, Rais and Mwamis—is none other than Arafat Peace Prize winner Ms. Dunya Daher of Langston Hughes University in Harar. In September, the young ecologist put 15,800,000 guineas granted her by the austere Society of Sciences of Botswana into the kitty of many humanitarian aid organizations. The learned society’s announcement stated that this prestigious prize was unanimously awarded to her for “her struggle against the corrupt dictatorship of New Zealand, her fight against AIDS [whereas] the e
cclesiastical authorities of Uganda are still preaching abstinence, and her promotion of Nebraska bananas by vaunting their native merits in the supermarkets of Abidjan . . . [and finally] Ms. Daher made the world aware of the tangible facts that Dean Mamadou Diouf of the University of Gao had set forth long ago in a satirical tract that has remained famous to this day.” (Invisible Borders: The Challenge of Alaskan Immigration, Rwanda University Press/Free Press, Kigali, 1994. 820 pp. 35 guineas.)
Dean Diouf, Ms. Daher, Ahmed Baba XV, Sophia Marley, Thomas Sankara Jr., the rappers King Cain and Queen Sheba, Hakim Bey, Siwela Nkosi and company were never in favor with the big turbans of the world. Ms. Daher deplored the silence of the political leaders of the first continent about questions crucial to the future of our planet. His Excellency El Hadj Saidou Touré, United States of Africa Press Secretary, had accustomed us to a different chant. He stated that our first priority remains keeping peace in Western Europe; and then he was relatively optimistic about signing a cease-fire in the American Midwest and Quebec, where French-speaking warlords have reiterated their firm intention of going to war with the uncontrollable English-speaking militias in the Hull region near Ottawa, the former capital, now under a curfew enforced by UN peacekeeping forces from Nigeria, Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Bangladesh. The federal councilor (highest political authority of what remains of Canada)—the proud aborigine William Neville Attawag—has remained extremely vague on the question of a time frame for relaxing the emergency laws now in place. Sir Attawag has violently rejected the term “apartheid” used by newspapers completely ignorant of the conditions of life for Whites in the Canada of his ancestors. And yet Human Rights Watch and El Hombre, with their long experience in this North American quagmire, relentlessly keep sounding the alarm.
Yacuba has just left his shelter. He dashed into Ray Charles Avenue, caught his breath at the corner of Habib Bourguiba Street and is now walking towards Abebe-Bikila Square. He is wearing a shirt the same color as his chronic cold; an indigo boubou floats around his body. People turn around as he walks by, more intrigued than an ethnologist taken in by a primitive tribe in the remotest parts of Bavaria. Have no fear, our long-distance cameras are recording his every move. In less than fifteen minutes, he’ll be back in his den. Which won’t prevent him from getting into trouble again.
Surely you are aware that our media have been digging up their most scornful, odious stereotypes again, which go back at least as far as Methusuleiman! Like, the new migrants propagate their soaring birth-rate, their centuries-old soot, their lack of ambition, their ancestral machismo, their reactionary religions like Protestantism, Judaism or Catholicism, their endemic diseases. In short, they are introducing the Third World right up the anus of the United States of Africa. The least scrupulous of our newspapers have abandoned all restraint for decades and fan the flames of fear of what has been called—hastily, to be sure—the “White Peril.” Isn’t form, after all, the very flesh of thought, to paraphrase the great Sahelian writer Naguib Wolegorzee? Thus, a popular daily in N’Djamena, Bilad el Sudan, periodically goes back to its favorite headline: “Back Across the Mediterranean, Clodhoppers!” From Tripoli, El Ard, owned by the magnate Hannibal Cabral, shouts “Go Johnny, Go!” Which the Lagos Herald echoes with an ultimatum: “White Trash, Back Home!” More laconic is the Messager des Seychelles, in two English words: “Apocalypse Now!”
• Former Portuguese Colonies •
MIA COUTO
• Mozambique •
LANGUAGES WE DON’T KNOW WE KNOW
IN AN AS yet unpublished short story of mine, the action is as follows: a terminally ill woman asks her husband to tell her a story so as to alleviate her unbearable pains. No sooner does he begin his tale than she stops him:
• No, not like that. I want you to speak to me in an unknown language.
• Unknown? he asks.
• A language that doesn’t exist. For I have such a need not to understand anything at all.
The husband asks himself: how can you speak a language that doesn’t exist? He starts off by mumbling some strange words and feels like a fool, as if he were establishing his inability to be human. But gradually, he begins to feel more at ease with this language that is devoid of rules. And he no longer knows whether he’s speaking, singing, or praying. When he pauses, he notices his wife has fallen asleep, with the most peaceful smile on her face. Later, she confesses to him: those sounds had brought back memories of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.
When we were children, all of us experienced that first language, the language of chaos, all of us enjoyed that divine moment when our life was capable of being all lives, and the world still awaited a destiny. James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world “chaosmology.” This relationship, my friends, is what breathes life into writing, whatever the continent, whatever the nation, whatever the language or the literary genre.
I believe that all of us, whether poets or fiction writers, never stop seeking this seminal chaos. All of us aspire to return to that state in which we were so removed from a particular language that all languages were ours. To put it another way, we are all the impossible translators of dreams. In truth, dreams speak within us what no word is capable of saying.
Our purpose, as producers of dreams, is to gain access to that other language no one can speak, that hidden language in which all things can have all names. What the sick woman was asking was what we all wish for: to annul time and send death to sleep.
Maybe you expected me, coming as I do from Africa, to use this platform to lament, to accuse others, while absolving my immediate fellows from guilt. But I prefer to talk about something of which we are all victims and guilty at the same time, about how the process that has impoverished my continent is in fact devitalizing our common, universal position as creators of stories.
In a congress that celebrates the value of words, the theme of my intervention is the way dominant criteria are devaluing good literature in the name of easy and immediate profitability. I am talking about a commercial rationale that is closed to other cultures, other languages, other ways of thinking. The words of today are increasingly those that are shorn of any poetic dimension, that do not convey to us any utopian vision of a different world.
What has ensured human survival is not just our intelligence but our capacity to produce diversity. This diversity is nowadays being denied us by a system that makes its choice solely on the grounds of profit and easy success. Africans have become the “others” once again, those who have little to sell, and who can buy even less. African authors (and especially those who write in Portuguese) live on the periphery of the periphery, there where words have to struggle in order not to be silence.
My dear friends
Languages serve to communicate. But they don’t just “serve.” They transcend that practical dimension. Languages cause us to be. And sometimes, just as in the story I mentioned, they cause us to stop being. We are born and we die inside speech, we are beholden to language even after we lose our body. Even those who were never born, even they exist within us as the desire for a word and as a yearning for a silence.
Our lives are dominated by a reductive and utilitarian perception that converts languages into the business of linguists and their technical skills. Yet the languages we know—and even those we are not aware that we knew—are multiple and not always possible to grasp by the rationalist logic that governs our conscious mind. Something exists that escapes norms and codes. This elusive dimension is what fascinates me as a writer. What motivates me is the divine vocation of the word, which not only names but also invents and produces enchantment.
We are all bound by the collective codes with which we communicate in our everyday lives. But the writer seeks to convey things that are beyond everyday life. Never before has our world had at its disposal so many means of communication
. Yet our solitude has never been so extreme. Never before have we had so many highways. And yet never before have we visited each other so little.
I am a biologist and I travel a lot through my country’s savanna. In these regions, I meet people who don’t know how to read books. But they know how to read their world. In such a universe where other wisdoms prevail, I am the one who is illiterate. I don’t know how to read the signs in the soil, the trees, the animals. I can’t read clouds and the likelihood of rain. I don’t know how to talk to the dead, I’ve lost all contact with ancestors who give us our sense of the eternal. In these visits to the savanna, I learn sensitivities that help me to come out of myself and remove me from my certainties. In this type of territory, I don’t just have dreams. I am dreamable.
Mozambique is a huge country, as huge as it is new. More than twenty-five languages are spoken within it. Ever since independence, which was achieved in 1975, Portuguese has been the official language. Thirty years ago, only a tiny minority spoke this language, ironically borrowed from the colonizer in order to disaffirm the country’s colonial past. Thirty years ago, almost no Mozambicans had Portuguese as their mother tongue. Now, more than 12 percent of Mozambicans have Portuguese as their first language. And the great majority understands and speaks Portuguese, stamping standard Portuguese with the imprimatur of African cultures.
This tendency towards change places worlds that are not only distinguished by language in confrontation with each other. Languages exist as part of culturally much vaster universes. There are those who fight to keep alive languages that are at risk of extinction. Such a fight is an utterly worthy one and recalls our own struggle as biologists to save animals and plants from disappearance. But languages can only be saved if the culture that harbours them can remain dynamic. In the same way, biological species can only be saved if their habitats and natural life patterns can be preserved.