My homeland was there. Nearby.
My homeland was there. From its breasts flowed that warm milk, rich and nourishing, which I drank greedily. Those breasts that I pressed with all my strength.
My homeland was there.
Around that time, the seeds must have sprouted from the bosom of the earth. The blue sky was spread out against the enormity of the horizon, the brush fires came one after another, and the birds returned from their distant migration.
My homeland was there.
The prison was a walk through the desert, one that put me face to face with my responsibilities. One that showed me that fate was a broken line, a terrain dotted with sand bars that impede the journey.
That was my France.
One of night. The night of thoughts. The night of vagabondage. The night of walls.
Where was the light? Where had the sun gone?
Part of me hated myself, and the other part exonerated me. I looked for a way out. I looked for redemption. I would have to conquer that, not wait for it like the other prisoners accustomed and resigned to their fate. Not wait for it in blissful fatality. Get out of this place as quickly as possible.
Redemption is a long march. You have to get up early, take provisions, water, and something to cover yourself when night falls. I had to move toward it. Redemption wasn’t going to move toward me.
The road to redemption passed through good behavior. It was in my interest to conduct myself irreproachably in order to get the attention of those whose mission it was to set us on a new path.
I also spoke little. I obeyed. I made my prison bed as soon as I got up. I would have loved to read. I didn’t have that chance. No book, no paper in the building to scrawl everything that passed through my head. To write letters that didn’t arrive at their destination. To report my pain and suffering. To draw the face of freedom. A bird of light with its wings spread.
Read, meditate. Read more and meditate. I invented my daily prayers. With my own words. According to my mood. I didn’t ask for anything specific from the supreme being. He who had left me on this precipice. I simply took communion with my own kind back home.
The path to redemption opened up.
I was as courteous to my fellow prisoners as I was to the jailhouse personnel. I didn’t respond to the escapades of others. God alone knows how many times I was confronted by this. I kept my distance from the confabs and plans for undercover maneuvers that ended up right in the guards’ ears. Punishment was swift. Confinement in a humid place, banished, dark, and with the bonus of a reputation as a renegade, which compromised any plan for clemency.
I agreed to learn carpentry during my incarceration. I put on blue overalls. There were many of us who followed a teacher to the penitentiary’s workshop. The machines hummed. We were closely supervised. I learned how to work with wood, how to handle a plane, to drill a plank, to build floorboards, to hammer a nail without bending it, to saw with dexterity. A few months later, I put together chairs, tables, bookshelves, and especially benches that we would sit on in the dining hall courtyard. I received a certificate at the end of my apprenticeship. I had a skill now. These hands were good for something. I was still waiting for redemption . . .
The hunger strike called by the rowdy convicts was none of my business. They must have hated me. Me, I ate. I emptied my bowl with a healthy appetite and finished my bread down to the last crumb. The hunger strike didn’t concern me. I wasn’t here to agitate, to change the establishment’s penal policies. Why fight to change the conditions of a milieu that I had to get out of, at all cost? If militancy existed, I would have liked to see evidence of it for the purpose of digging the fastest way to freedom. Not liberty acquired under the cover of evasion, something I found abominable—I had to pay, no matter what, and I took that on—but in my soul and conscience, it was merited.
That freedom, could I attain it?
That was another story. First it was necessary to get out of the jailhouse . . .
CLOSING
The light dazzled my eyes.
The door is open.
The two silhouettes are in front of me. One tall and one short. A voice asks me to get up and to go into the next room to wash up.
“The charter leaves in exactly three hours, get a move on!” The charter.
They’re going to carry out the judge’s decision.
I want to go past rue du Moulin-Vert one last time. “Out of the question,” they said. They are strict. “You have no business there anymore, we’ve sealed the room, and we’re looking for your friend and his followers.”
I learn that we’ll make stops in several African capitals: Bamako, Dakar, Kinshasa, and finally Brazzaville. In this last city, which is in my country, I will be left to my own fate, they say, but with a few French Franc notes in my pocket. I don’t know Brazzaville. From there, I’ll take the train, then an allterrain vehicle will take me all the way to my neighborhood, several kilometers outside Congo’s coastal city, Pointe-Noire.
The prospect of going back rattles me.
I’m nothing more than a good for nothing. I’m nothing but a wreck. A failure. I hadn’t prepared myself for that. Couldn’t they give me a few months, the time to put together a little suitcase of clothes, some presents for the family? I was so naïve I thought these two men might help me. Silence. I have to leave France. I’m a black sheep. A dead branch . . .
In the shower, the thought of suicide takes hold of me. The thought matures as the departure time nears. The tap is open, water is escaping everywhere, all the way to the door. I don’t turn off the faucet. The water is still running. It’s too hot. It’s still running. I’m not stopping it. The room is flooded. Like a sauna. I can’t see anything in front of my nose anymore. Only the noise of water. Drops of water. A flood. A diluvian rain-fall. Mist. Burning skin. I suppress the pain. Crush my carotid artery. Crack my skull against the sink. Plug my nostrils. A few minutes would be all it would take. Just a few minutes. Without a single cry.
I glorify that act.
Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
To kill oneself, what could be more heroic? To not entrust one’s fate to the line drawn by a creator, whoever that may be. Facing the wall, a man can decide: withdraw or confront it. Confrontation? Withdrawal?
Somebody knocks on the door to the shower.
“You’ve got no more than five minutes!”
My heart jumps and sinks in my stomach. I have a stomachache. Down to my pubic bone. Boils everywhere. On the skin. The hot water burned me. I’m contorted with pain. I feel something else now burning the length of my thighs. A hot liquid. Not as hot as the water from the tap. But hot. I can’t hold my urine anymore. I want to defecate.
I can’t hold it.
Nude, I look at those shrunken genitals, those contracted balls. The excrement floats in water by my feet. I am not a man anymore.
I know what’s in store for me. I didn’t have the courage to stop breathing. To let myself burn. To split my skull. To crush my carotid artery. I chose to confront another reality. I chose to see this through to the end.
I would go home.
I would be the laughingstock of the neighborhood. But I would be home. There, I would turn an indifferent ear to the crowd pointing a finger at me. People will say whatever they want. They will tell me off, be revolted by me. They’ll give it a rest someday. I’m not afraid of these prosecutors anymore. They don’t take the time to understand everything. They don’t know that the world we live in is a different world. In a milieu that we barely see, nothing can be foreseen. Nothing at all. We don’t foresee. We suffer. We allow ourselves to be carried by the current. We are taught elementary reflexes, current expressions. We are told how to look, what to eat, how to drink. You are nothing but chum surrounded by sharks. There’s nothing you can do but follow the beat. And in that world over there, the beat is normally frenzied. If you walk along slowly, worn out by endless repetition, a whipping will remind you that here, slowness is prohi
bited.
We are caught in a circle. We are serpents biting our own tails. Our circle is there. Without a spoke. Without that fixed central point. So we gravitate to the inside. Our circle is a sort of trap with no way out. Each of us has his own story. In the end, they all intersect. And we come back to Moki’s expression: Paris is a big boy . . .
I will go home.
I don’t fear what’s in store for me anymore. I don’t care about anything except my old mother, a silent woman, resigned and virtuous, who will surely be overwrought by the news of my inopportune return. She will not tolerate her son being the laughingstock of the neighborhood. The women in the marketplace will not make her life easy.
I grieve equally for my father, a proud man who had placed his hope in me. His words haunt me. I didn’t apply them. There was nothing I could do about it. I grieve for him. He made a fool of himself, bowing down before my uncle to ask for money to pay for my ticket. Would he know that these two years were blank and that I had rotted in total darkness at the expense of the French government? I’ll tell him that. From him, I will hide nothing. I’ll invite him to come behind our house. We’ll speak man to man. I’ll tell him everything, from beginning to end. I’ll give my uncle the little bit of money they had given me to wander around Brazzaville. No. I’ll give it all to my father instead. He could take care of reimbursing my uncle.
And my sister? And Adeline? And my son? My sister would readily understand me. She would laugh, with tears in her eyes. We were born to live side by side. Like twins. She would speak to my mother about it. They would cry a little. Especially the first few days. Would Adeline stay at the house? She will leave. With or without the child. I can’t predict it. I know her a little. She will leave. I would be one of those back home they call the Parisian rejects.
And then it would all pass.
A new sky would appear. A new season would begin. The rainy season. The downpours would bring landslides of dreams still embedded on the slopes of memory. Only time can erase the vestiges of a deflected existence. We would stay, all four of us, my father, my mother, my sister, and me, in that hovel. With my son, if Adeline would allow it. We would stay there. Like in the old days. In that house where we were born. We would light the place with a hurricane lamp or candle when we didn’t have enough money to buy gas. We would get water from next door, at Moki’s house. My father would not be brought into the village council. That’s life. My mother, she would pick up her basin of peanuts again and sell at the big market until the end of her days, like Pindy’s mother, who died at the age of ninety without missing a day of business. She raised us with what little she had. My father will expect nothing but his modest pension. One has to live.
For that, we would do everything.
It’s not the white car, the Mazda, that’s going to take me. It’s a police van.
I see faces of other Africans in the courtyard. They are surrounded by uniformed officers, billy clubs in hand. The Africans are resigned. Heartache is written clearly on their faces. They are going back despite themselves. It’s not so much the need to stay that torments them but the fear of confronting a whole large family that awaits them. Like me. This difficult reality. This other reality that we can’t shake off. Those hands held out toward us. The family that encircles you. That’s our fear. It takes guts to come back from a long trip empty-handed, without a present for your mother, for your father, for your brothers and sisters. This anguish resides inside your throat. It stifles your reason for living.
They are there, the others to be expelled. The undesirable. I’m the last one into the courtyard, still escorted by my two men. We’re told to line up. They have to count us. Like merchandise.
They count heads. They make a mistake. They start over. They make a mistake again. They start over again. They divide us into small groups. No. By country, finally. That’s better. It seems that this is more practical. It’s to avoid having those who don’t know how to speak and understand French wind up in a country that isn’t theirs. Moreover, some come from two countries. Others don’t remember their countries anymore. Too bad, their memories will come back on the charter. They all pretend, and when they glimpse a cloud over their homeland, a sudden excitement grabs hold of them.
As for me, there’s a problem. A tiny little problem. I have no compatriots among those being expelled. A police officer who had done a tour of duty in French Equatorial Africa whispers to his colleagues that they can put me in the group of Zairians because we speak the same language on both banks of the Congo (or Zaire) River. Both sides speak Lingala. The officer stops, turns around, takes this to be a joke and titters, as if to say to the other one, “Stop treating me like a halfwit.” He hadn’t done a tour of duty in French Equatorial Africa, he says, but he knows a few things about central Africa, he had read stuff about it, and his grandfather had been governor back in the good old colonial times, etc.
The veteran insists and approaches us in Lingala, with a French accent that strips the language of all its elegance:
“M’boté na bino baninga!”1
I doze on the shoulder of my Zairian neighbor.
It’s been hours already since France was no longer below us. Night has fallen. The journey will be longer than when I came to France because of the stops in the other African capitals.
I will be going back to the starting box.
I almost laugh about it. In three months, the dry season will batter the country. It’s the season of youthful effervescence. The Parisians come home.
Moki will descend with his blue-white-red dream. I wonder whether I’ll go out of my way to see him. I would like to hear what he would say to me in the first place.
I think that I’ll go and see him anyway.
Maybe he’ll convince me to try my luck again?
What would I say to him?
You never can tell.
I can’t say how I would answer him. I’m undecided on the subject. Everything is possible in this world of ours. Without being aware of it, I’m no longer the same. I honestly think that I wouldn’t tell him no. I prepare myself mentally. I can’t rule out the possibility of returning to France. I think I will go back. I can’t live with a fiasco on my conscience. It’s a matter of honor. Yes, I will go back to France . . .
Did I say go back?
Am I asleep or awake? What difference does it make? There’s no border between dreams and reality here anymore.
The plane struggles in the clouds like a heavy bird chased out of the sky by an imminent storm. We all sleep. It’s the only moment when we can forget the face-to-face that awaits us with our family members, the immediate family and the most distant who will come running from the villages to demand their piece of the pie . . .
Paris, September 1993,
May 1995
1. Hello my friends!
Alain Mabanckou was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire for his first novel, Bleu-Blanc-Rouge. Since that time, he has published several prize-winning novels. His latest work, Mémoires de porc-épic [Memoirs of a Porcupine], has won the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Aliénor d’Aquitaine, and the Prix de la rentrée littéraire française. He is considered one of the leading voices of modern French literature. He lives in Los Angeles and has a professorship in the French and Francophone Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an active promoter and gives lectures nationwide. His blog, in French, is considered an essential stop for those monitoring the pulse of Francophone literature.
Alison Dundy lives in New York City and works as a librarian, archivist, and translator. Her translation of Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half was published by Indiana University Press in 2011.
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