Increasing numbers of merchants thronged to Saint-Louis from France, using it as a springboard for opening up the rest of Africa, mining mineral resources, planting groundnuts and establishing rubber plantations, so further stimulating the traffic of human beings. Saint-Louis became the capital of Senegal in 1840. But just eight years later the slave trade was officially outlawed, leaving France in possession of two slave islands, Gorée and Saint-Louis, but divested of all legal rights to operate them as such. What was to be done? Was the best thing simply to give up and withdraw? But that would be tantamount to capitulating. Accordingly, in response to the aggressive colonial policies of Britain at that time, it was decreed that Saint-Louis should be expanded to become the centre of French West Africa, and as a result, the city became a site of both humanistic high culture and of misery and oppression.
Although slavery had been officially abolished, to all practical intents and purposes it endured for another century. It developed covertly in Saint-Louis, as the position of domestic servant was created to cover all manner of subservient duties – this role was largely unregulated, making it a very attractive proposition for the ruling classes. Thus began a period in which the number of slaves in the city far exceeded that of free men and women.
We found a room in the Hôtel de la Poste, a crumbling building from the colonial era. The hotel was as beautiful as some flamboyant cliché. The veranda, constructed completely out of bamboo, and roofed with straw and with rattan furniture, was managed by a barman wielding a fly-whisk and wearing a red képi; it took him a while to appear at our table, but eventually he served us long drinks in tall glasses with such a passion that you might almost have thought one of the Ten Commandments read: ‘Thou Shalt Make Long Drinks’.
After our drinks, Greta wants to go up and rest in our room. She finds it too hot to go out around midday. We turn off the air-conditioning, though, as it’s too noisy. Instead, we open the bathroom window to try and get a rather faint draught to blow through. Then we lie back naked on the bed, waiting for tiny beads of sweat to form, only just about feeling the airflow, which doesn’t seem to want to move either. Outside the window, four vultures are tussling in a treetop. But even they are going through their lazy routine like they’re in slow motion.
In fact, two distinct districts go to make up Saint-Louis: the coastal area with its administrative buildings, its fading old-style hotels and hidden palazzi, and then – reachable across the Pont Faidherbe – an offshore island, in actual fact more of an extended sandbank with straight alleyways and low houses of a light hue, with wrought iron grilles on the windows, balconies and inner courtyards. But most of them lie empty.
One time we were there, a Muslim dignitary came walking down one of the alleys holding a little boy by the hand. As he passed an abandoned house and read the graffiti on its walls, he shook his head disapprovingly.
‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, ‘a spectre lives there!’ The architecture here is offbeat. There’s rubbish lying around everywhere. Somewhere, rotting carrion is creating a miasma. The better-maintained houses sit in their own compounds; none of them were built directly on the seafront. But some of the flower beds hereabouts are as precise as a Turkish woman’s eyebrows. We stroll through a ruin; in its courtyard, an enormous turtle has become stranded and died. Next to it, there is a tortoise tethered to a chain, hissing furiously and tugging on its shackles. Despite the searing heat of the sand, it refuses to give up.
The part of the island that faces the sea is a slum. The canals in its interior are full of detritus that has long since begun to rot. But its outer fringes are lapped by the foaming surf with its pure white crests. Dugout canoes ride the waves. Some of them, piled high with fish, are being hauled up the beach out of the tide, where men with crates on their heads come running up to carry off the catch.
The architecture in this second part of the island resembles that of the other, only transformed into filth, without any buildings worth speaking of. Instead, standing crumbling amid piles of refuse and abandoned appliances and toys are mean little shacks with chairs where a person can sit or lie down, living organisms with the appearance of rubbish tips. In the sheer variety of forms of decay here, man’s ability to coexist with all the things he needs, consumes and discards has been honed to a fine degree. Symbioses are in evidence everywhere you look.
A girl of about seven sitting on the beach suddenly hoists her dress up above her waist to expose her genitals. Everyone around screams. She didn’t do it for money, she did it for us, proud to call something so beautiful and shocking her own. But when she sees the effect it’s had, she does ask for some money and sulks when she doesn’t get any.
Greta announces that she’s captivated by the ‘dithyrambic’ spirit of the place, by the musicality of its atmosphere and colours, its abundance and indulgence and its sheer exuberance in decay. Even so, the next morning, she wakes up and tells me about a dream she had. When the real world takes on phantasmagoric features, dreams can often feel dull by comparison, and as your day unfolds it can happen that you do little more than log the kaleidoscopic welter of impressions offered by the world outside.
For example, Greta never misses a single animal that crosses our path: not the cranes in the tops of the tallest trees, nor the geckos spiralling up the trunks or pooing in the hotel swimming pool, the black pig rootling around in a little stream of filth, the aardvark galloping over the hill near the market, the dried fish butterflied and hung out to dry like Christ on the cross, the dog lying in the roadside ditch with its ears bloody and weeping open sores, the birds with their unfamiliar cries, the butterflies and their exotic coloration – and all of this at every moment in close proximity to blood, earth, bark, mud, ashes, piss, effluent, secretions, things intrinsic to, bound up with, associated with or related to death, and like everything creaturely with its face turned towards transience – forms that the Western world’s obsession with hygiene has largely effaced.
This is a unique place, for sure, unique also in the way it gathers all its life up into one foaming wave crest and sets it free to dance on the seething Atlantic. All the same, I can’t shake off a feeling of déjà-vu, this impression of a place I’ve visited before, but in a quite different way to the US tourists returning to their roots on Gorée – more immediate, more sensual.
Every morning we venture out once more into the cacophonous atmosphere. Every morning there’s the old man playing the same melody on his goatskin-covered stringed instrument; he continues until we pop a couple of banknotes into the soundhole of his kora. Occasionally, he’ll accompany his playing with chanting that sounds querulous, argumentative and discontented but which is, in fact, all about love – a song that was made up somewhere out in the desert and which sounds somehow wrong when played near a hotel.
Sometimes we’ll stop and listen for a while as a second musician, this time a guitarist, joins in. There’s a captivating simplicity about the tonal interplay between two stringed instruments, enhanced by a recitative voice breaking in. They produce sounds like those heard in nature, only then to conjure up mood pictures that sound like they’ve been painted by the plucking of a mandolin. It’s as if the emotions of the players first have to gain a foothold, and acclimatize themselves, and then can begin to vary, taking on height and depth. Theirs is the quintessential exhilaration of musicians.
‘We never practice,’ says the older musician. ‘Music’s part of my physical constitution, and it makes my spirit grow. We don’t discuss it, we just improvise.’
‘Pure traditional music is a source of truth,’ the other chips in, and launches into a rhapsodic declaration of love for griot, the musical language of the legendary keepers of the oral culture, who preserve the legacy of traditional West African classical music through long song cycles, recitatives and ballads, which among certain noble families are passed down from generation to generation. This music conducts an antiphony with nature. We may not be able to hear it, but it resonates within the inau
dible aspects of the music all the same.
We’ve made our way through the detritus, over ditches and down narrow paths, and have not been aware of any curious, outraged or astonished looks directed at us, but rather fixed gazes from watery, weeping eyes, into which any expression, be it of shock or amazement, would only seep very gradually and then remain there. Eyes in which encounters with the unfamiliar would find an invisible reflex, such as can be triggered by encountering death or set off by illnesses that cause flickering vision.
‘If you contract this disease,’ a sufferer from this so-called ‘river blindness’ tells me, ‘the maggots work their way right up to behind your conjunctiva, where they mate and reproduce visibly. That’s when your eyes start shimmering from all the seething activity going on inside them.’
At the market, manpower is no longer on offer, but instead the remnants of European surpluses, Chinese mass production, and cheap manufactured goods from the Far East. Alongside these are the home-produced textile handicrafts, while pharmaceutical products range from modern medicines to indigenous animistic cures. A long line of stalls offers snake heads, songbird beaks, turtles’ feet, lions’ paws, bat heads and the internal organs of crocodiles. Everything is effective in some way or other. There are even animal body parts here which are barely preserved, nor are they embalmed, but instead surrounded by a stench of decay and swarms of flies; the vendors are coy about what beasts they originally came from. They just smile at us and say:
‘Souvenirs.’
There’s even a white man at the Saint-Louis market who performs a routine behind a curtain that involves him baring his expansive white belly and gyrating it to the accompaniment of the Beatles’ song ‘Get Back’. One man is prepared to give him two mangoes for his performance with the one proviso:
‘Just keep your gut covered!’
Someone at my shoulder offers me some product or other. I decline, smiling. Whereupon the man takes my hand.
‘I want to thank you for the polite way you said “no”. It shows me that you’re no racist. Look here, at our two hands, black and white together, that’s how it should be …’
And into my hand he suddenly slides his ‘present’, a silver wire bracelet.
‘And think how lost you would be if you didn’t have this bracelet ready to slip onto your lady’s arm – beautiful as she is – when she was ready and waiting to go out to a club …’
The conditional tenses he uses are spellbinding; they make his little speech so poetic.
But the much-vaunted lady in question, who’s right beside me, interposes a sharp ‘No’. ‘No presents, damn you! Take your rubbish back and clear off!’
Undeterred, he shimmies his considerable bulk up to her, slips the bracelet onto her arm and laughs; half an hour later, she’s still weak at the knees wondering what retribution might befall her for having bought it.
The truth is that the street vendors here aren’t bothered about what people might actually need. Rather, their sole concern is how rich they reckon their customers are. That’s how they end up trying to sell an individual electric hotplate to a backpacker, a crude pair of sunglasses to a glasses wearer, a black wig to a blonde woman, and black shoe polish to someone wearing suede shoes. After all, don’t these foreigners have the wherewithal to buy all this stuff?
When we turn down the chance of buying ourselves some fans, the saleswoman, who has a huge iridescent fly perched on a wart on her upper lip, calls after us:
‘Don’t think you can forget me that easily. I’ll appear to you one day and you’ll cry … you’ll found a village that’s always shrouded in darkness … You should … ’
And so it goes on. Finally, our resistance worn down and we buy a bottle of bissap – a watery, dark red juice that tastes of tea and fruit combined – and a bundle of teeth-cleaning sticks.
‘I’ll give you a sweet for the mature lady!’ a lad shouts out. His sales pitch persuades me to buy the sweet.
Then there’s the seven-year-old mouth-organ salesman, draped all over with instruments. He’s carrying one in his mouth, one in his hand and one in a box. Every time someone turns him down, he sighs into the harmonica in his mouth. It sounds like the blues, or a collection of blue notes that have been waiting patiently in the mouth organ precisely for that moment of disappointment.
Yet amid all this chorus of itinerant salesmen, market traders, canvassers and guides, I still can’t shake off my sense of déjàvu. But it’s not Gorée, or the slave trade architecture, or the legacy of the exploiters, human traffickers, colonial masters and oppressors that’s making all this seem so familiar and inevitable. It’s something else which I can’t put my finger on.
Sitting alone on the hotel veranda, looking down on the street, I can observe the basic modes of local life. People here organize themselves into personal microstructures. They don’t consume in any centralized fashion, but go from shop to shop, nor do they think in a centralized way, but go straight from the church to the local soothsayer and then on to the totem seller. They create vertical systems, with farmers employing farmers and nursemaids having nursemaids of their own …
A delegation of boys who guide blind people appears in front of the veranda. After them come the footballers from the prostitutes’ quarter. And then the match sellers announce themselves:
‘Isn’t it us that you’ve been keeping an eye out for all this while? Well, here we are! Un cadeau, please, un cadeau!’
The hotelier shoos them all away with his feather duster.
‘I beg your pardon, monsieur,’ he says before adding – no word of a lie – ‘they’re the descendants of slaves.’
That may well be so, I tell him. But, I continue, nowhere has the memory of slavery gripped and unsettled me like it has in Gorée, the centre of the African slave trade. And it’s absolutely true: in the Maison des Esclaves, we’d been reduced to silence, as had our fellow visitors, who’d just stood there, overcome by the injustice, the martyrdom and the thought of the terrible voyage …
The hotel owner gives an ironic smile, and then addresses me in all earnest, as soberly as any academic:
‘Écoutez, I don’t want to disappoint you, and you’ve experienced what you’ve experienced. Also, there’s nothing we can do about it, but American and French researchers have suggested that Gorée didn’t actually play an significant part in the slave trade at all.’
‘But there’s all this talk about millions of slaves being shipped from here, and of the “Dachau of Black Africa”!’
‘Yeah, those researchers have been publicly denounced here as “Holocaust deniers”, but there’s no denying their theories were based on sound evidence. Between 1700 and 1850, only just over 427,000 slaves were transported through Gorée.’
‘So what does that mean?’
‘It means we’re talking about less than 5 per cent of the total slave trade! So, in contrast to Saint-Louis, say, Gorée was, if I can put it like this, a relatively unimportant “source of supply”.’ I could have replied that that was an obscene statistic, could have trotted out the customary cliché about figures telling us nothing about people and their experiences and suffering; I could have advanced arguments about families being split up and enforced deportation, mentioned the phrase ‘individual fates’, or asked what it meant to him to live in the capital of slave deportation. I could also have asked myself why I’d followed this remembrance trail in Gorée and not in Saint-Louis, where there was no such slavery commemoration industry. I could have considered whether the idyll of the world heritage site somehow kitschified my act of commemoration, whereas the plain, unattractive presence of African poverty in Saint-Louis hadn’t even prompted me to memorialize slavery in the first place.
But instead I just nodded to him in parting, disabused and chastened, rose from my bamboo chair and wandered back inside the hotel, where I was drawn in passing to a small framed photograph hanging on the flower-pattern wallpaper. The first person I recognized in it was Philippe Noiret, then
Stéphane Audran, and then the rest. It turned out that Bertrand Tavernier had shot his film Coup de Torchon here in 1980. That was all I needed. The first port of call for memory isn’t real history, but the cinema. I was still standing in the corridor looking at the photo when Greta appeared and announced:
‘You won’t believe the dream I just had! Well …’
Hong Kong
Poste Restante
There was shattered glass lying in the courtyard. Alarmed but lethargic, your ear reconstructed the story behind what had happened – ebbing away in a scrabbling on the ground, and prior to that a scream, and before that the recollection of being woken by an explosion. Your ear sweeps back to the silence before the fall. To a time when there was no courtyard in your consciousness, and no alarmed agitation either. And then came the silence of the fall.
There’s a clinking, shivering sound on the cement paving as the glass is swept up outside. In amongst the clatter of the broken fragments, two girls can be heard laughing in turn. Someone must have opened a window in the laundry opposite, because all of a sudden you can quite clearly hear the washers and tumble driers belching their steam out into the courtyard. In the midst of this rhythmic thudding, a man’s voice calls out and the girls respond. Then silence descends.
Outside, a radio is switched on, the traffic noise dissolves into a monotonous basso continuo, only interrupted now and again by the shrill blast of a horn. The stifling heat of the street even penetrates through the closed window. But when I close my eyes, the red earth of China appears – it really is red, too, and in mountainous regions is piled up into neat sheaves and cubes that look positively unnatural.
The Ends of the Earth Page 27