by Edem Awumey
4
The railway car is desperately empty. The train slows down as it approaches an urban area. Ito Baraka feels a need to talk to someone. It’s an old habit of his, spending the night talking to whoever cares to listen, a buddy or, very often, a woman, his muse of the moment, with whom he has just gone a first round of lovemaking. He’ll talk to her until she regains her strength and mounts him again, and on the creaking bed he’ll become a steed charging across the desert in search of a waterhole. And sometimes he finds that wellspring, when his friend of the evening starts to come and floods him. Then he feels himself come back to life, as if he has been baptized on the shores of a purifying river. And his eyelids grow heavy and he closes his eyes, the desert sand pulls him down, and his body becomes light, ethereal, like the bodies of the flying men.
It was his friend Koli Lem who first told him the story of the flying men. The story, or rather the mythology, of those who, back in his country in the north, were both feared and respected because they were not ordinary beings. Sorcerers, who had strange powers, and who, in their beds after nightfall, would close their eyes and order their spirits to leave their bodies and fly to distant lands. Strange beings with their arms outstretched above the sleeping huts, their wings of fire spread wide in the wind, they would soar upward and set a course for a land somewhere between the cardinal points, not as tourists, but to seek knowledge, to glean in that place at the ends of the earth the learning that made them what they were . . . soothsayers, magicians, healers, and above all, sorcerers and soul-eaters. They would go there and meet others of their kind, wizards, fakirs, and magicians, with whom they would talk all night long while taking part in strange rituals in which they tested their powers against each other, and banquets and orgies where wine, sperm, and blood overflowed from chalices and open skulls. And before first light, they would return sated and calm and re-enter their bodies and continue to live among ordinary people. At night, only the flying men could dream and enjoy life, only they knew the streets of the world in their entirety, the streets of the world and everything beautiful, horrible, or insignificant that happened there. They would come back among us with the conviction that they alone possessed the meaning of things.
Ito Baraka’s dream is to become a flying man and from time to time to escape his painful body and his rotten blood that is taking him inexorably to the end.
He scrunches down a little more in his seat, breathing noisily. On his knees, the notebook he cherishes like a serious schoolboy, or one putting on an act for parents he considers gullible. He runs a trembling hand over the greasy, dog-eared pages. He should try to sleep, but because these moments are clearly a race against death, he lines up more words, bent over the page.
***
At that time, the end of the 1980s, we were at the onset of a kind of fever. In the streets and markets and on theatre stages, we were dreaming with our eyes closed, envisioning the architecture of the country to come. Newspapers of every stripe were sketching the vague outlines of a state under the rule of law, freedom of speech, and human development.
However, those who had the balls to write in the newspapers would often get beaten up or, worse, gunned down. So it was necessary to find an indirect way to say these things that displeased the cops. We thought again of Sony and his theatre, and in a tiny space cleared in the middle of Beno’s bedroom, we started acting out characters, King Lear, Ubu, Toussaint Louverture, tyrants or heroes in jail in France, Kamchatka, or the Congo. We would get into the skins of these characters to test ourselves as actors. We found acting fun, and we would be bent double laughing at our clownishness. And we came to the conclusion that if this acting and these gestures made us laugh like little kids, we wouldn’t be so bad reinventing our lives on stage. And one morning, Beno, Wali, Sika, and I came up with a plan to create what would now be our reality, in which we could shout what we wanted without fear of reprisals by the sergeant with the Uzi. We decided to write a powerful play with four characters, with a role for each of us. That last point was a constraint, but we would be able to manage it, confident in our dazzling project, or blinded by it. We were thinking about this play when Wali borrowed from the university library a Beckett play we hadn’t read yet, Endgame. And it happened that chance favoured our crazy ideas, and the play contained three male roles and one female. It was us, we were in the same immovable shit as Beckett’s characters. And with that thought, I recalled some words of Beckett’s in Molloy and I remembered the neighbourhood madman from my childhood who barraged us with songs and jokes all day long as though he understood those words by Beckett: “When you are in shit up to your neck, there is nothing left to do but sing.” Yes, we were in shit, and that was why, as the nutcase declared, we smiled constantly in the city streets, clowns and parrots tirelessly repeating the same gestures and drivel, and when tourists landed in our city, they could observe our legendary good humour. In shit, and congregating in the squares downtown for the most comical of carnivals.
We were in deep shit, which was why the entire populace had to sing and dance when the country played host to a distinguished guest or some elected official, monarch, or despot wearing a suit and a few tacky medals, the people forming an honour guard from the airport to the presidential palace, school children, bureaucrats, teachers, new-borns on the backs of the little mothers who didn’t want to miss one bit of the hilarious show, and sorcerers and all the saints of the city, gesticulating and belting out the song of eternal tropical happiness. And I didn’t yet understand that it was because we were in shit up to our ears that there was nothing left for us to do but this, to keep up a pretense as a form of resistance. I reread Molloy, and at the same time we assigned the roles in Endgame. Sika took the only female character, Nell, the old woman stuck in a trashcan like her old husband, Nagg, whom I was to play. I had it easy because I didn’t have a lot of lines to learn, just had to stick my head up occasionally from my trashcan, my final dwelling place, and pester the two other male characters, who had a lot more crap to mouth. Hamm, the blind man, was played by Wali in a wheelchair, so it was clear that, physically, Wali would not have to make too much effort. And Beno took the role of the servant and caretaker, Hamm’s adopted son, Clov, who went back and forth between the stage and the kitchen in the wings. And Hamm’s old parents in the trashcans slept or sighed.
5
I remember the easy parallel we drew between the old people in Beckett’s play and the human wrecks and relics in the streets of our city, in front of the houses, coughing and sighing, worn out, finished, ruins of wrinkled flesh with the toothless expressions of zombies, their mouths gaping open to frighten kids tarrying on the way to school. We started rehearsing at Beno’s place in the heavy heat of the afternoons when we had no classes and on the beach on weekends, offering our voices to the open sea. As I said, Sika and I didn’t have a lot to do inside our blue plastic trashcans. I would doze off, lulled by a sad, monotonous swell, and so would Sika, I suppose, but at regular intervals Clov, I mean Beno, would give the barrels a kick to wake us up, and in so doing, he was deviating from the stage directions. We progressed speech by speech, and thus, little by little our acting took form. Hamm-Wali, in his chair that couldn’t roll in the sand on the beach, gave Clov-Beno a hard time, and the sand also hampered Clov-Beno’s movements. We would rehearse for hours, an audience of onlookers forming a circle around us, though we didn’t know as yet if we would try to present the play on one of the stages in the capital.
We were not unhappy on the beach, wrapped as we were in an aura of grandiloquent pride. Beyond the fact that it had four characters, we had chosen Endgame because we saw it as a means to portray what urgent, young, resolutely committed voices in the darkness of bars and maquis, clandestine restaurants, and the corridors of our university were calling immobility, imprisonment, the status quo, the suspension of our movements on the stage of the single party. But I must say that the time we spent
with our Beckett on the beach was above all a time of pleasure, at least until we left the text behind to go back to the unchanging theatre of the streets and crossroads, where the numbers of beggars and madmen had increased. In our performance we tried to add a little tropical flavour to the play. Hamm would hold onto his wheelchair and sink slowly down into the worn seat like a doddering king in the autumn of a thirty-year reign, his ass taking root in the throne, farting regularly and enveloping us in his tear gas, dulling the brilliance of our pretentious boldness from behind his blind man’s dark glasses, coughing, dying a slow death, his legs inert, wearing not commando boots anymore but innocuous slippers. And because we were on the seashore, he would gradually sink into the sand up to his ears and the sea birds would come and pluck out his dead eyes.
6
Revolution, Ito Baraka says to himself, is a big word, a terrible horned beast that snatches and swallows up whatever it wants, especially lives, with all they contain of flesh and bone, blood and voice. It’s that time when he and his partners in crime were devoured by the Beast that he’s trying to find in his notebook, that time that both saddens and fascinates him, like an old possession you want to take out of a trunk to see if it will have the same effect on you that it once did or if its beauty could have been deceptive to your fevered gaze of long ago. Because all that is far away now, like the last stifled sob of his mother in the airport departure lounge the day he left the country. That was twenty years ago. Maybe more. He tries to revive that monster they had called Revolution in the fervor of young hearts and the turmoil in the streets.
Ito Baraka rouses himself. He wonders if he will be able to tell it all. He knows it will depend on his body, which is trying to trace the contours of other faces and voices, men and women lost in the mists of the past. He knows he will be able to do it if his body holds up long enough. Because soon the fever and the cold will try to regain the upper hand. Then, to get warm, he’ll rub his body with his trembling hands, he’ll rub his skin and bones so as to stay here with us long enough to finish his story. You live well and long if the light body of night allows you to dream and take flight. That’s what his friend Koli Lem would repeat during the long hours of tropical time. On the other hand, you croak pretty fast in the cellars of torture and pain, like Albert Ayler with his trumpet in a gutter in America, his jacket dirty, and shit on his skin, or like a poet, Paul Celan or Gherasim Luca, in a night flight from a bridge on the Seine. You die like that, at a turning point in life when the body that carries you is one of pain, anguish, insomnia.
The train, thinks Ito Baraka, must be travelling under a clear sky. You might even be able to catch sight of the flying men in the sky. His friend Koli Lem would tell how the flying men came back feeling light from their nocturnal journeys in the air. Relieved of all anxiety, fear, and pain, they simply went back to living instead of exhausting themselves like the tormented poètes maudits searching for the meaning of life and of what was happening within them and around them. Instead of trying to disassemble and reassemble the mechanism of reality in the hope of understanding it. “They’re making a mistake,” declared his friend Koli Lem, “the mechanism of reality doesn’t change, it’s a sturdy, well-oiled machine. It’s in the head that something’s not right, something snapped a long time ago. Like a poet or a madman, you’ve been hanging out in the streets and the shadowy nights of the world, trying to console yourself with shots of whiskey or between the fat thighs of a whore who makes you pay dearly. You come out of the brothel and set out again, and one day you end up putting a bullet in your head.”
7
The train moves forward by fits and starts, its progress repeatedly interrupted, complicating Ito’s task. On his lap lies the notebook. The thick, unmanageable paper slips through his fingers. It isn’t only the train that has to race ahead, the words also have to, trying to recapture the past, the life that was, before imminent death. Ito Baraka is not trying to understand the things he and his comrades did, which side they were or were not on, whether he was a monster or a just man, how deep was the courage of some or the cowardice of others, no, he simply wants to roll the film and find each character in the posture that was his or hers, to grasp in its entirety and its precision a gesture, an image, an emotion, a laugh, a grimace. Bent over his page, he scribbles, crosses out, scratches.
***
In our production of Endgame, Clov, the son, would witness the decline and fall of his blind, paralyzed master, Hamm. Clov would savour the gradual deterioration of Hamm, the master of the house—and of the country, in our fabulous creation, patriarch of the time of immobility. Clov, while playing the lackey and jumping at the slightest snap of the master’s fingers, would run from behind the scenes to the front of the stage, where he would make us believe he actually had power, the servant attending to every need of the master’s dog, but more and more threatening to leave the master. And the master would finally die all alone behind the dark glasses of his blindness. Clov would take wing like a seagull or a sinister, disturbing bat, and since we were facing the sea, he could leave when he wanted to. And I must say that at that time—and as always in tearjerker novels or movies—sons would leave their families and go overseas, as I, too, did a few years later. Clov would leave after checking that the birds had finished eating Hamm’s eyes and that the grandparents Nagg and Nell had finished rotting in their trashcans.
In our barrels, playing the grandparents Nagg and Nell, Sika and I would portray the reality of the repression and corruption we were living through, our old people thrown on the trash heap, shaking with fever and dying on the doorsteps of their straw huts that would collapse in the monsoons, vanishing heaps of wicker and thatch, every twig of which would float out to sea.
On the beach, the number of onlookers around our group was swelling, we were close to winning our pretentious wager of presenting the immobility of the time as a heap of shit, with dying people piling up, words stuck in rotting maws. After the rehearsals, once we were out of the barrels, we would massage our joints on the beach, and Sika and I would put away the barrels that held Nagg and Nell in a warehouse in the big market facing the Atlantic. However, during the last week of our rehearsals, Wali got sick with an infection, and we decided, against his advice, not to do the play without him.
So we suspended our rehearsals, and we returned to our classes with less enthusiasm and at the risk of forgetting our lines in the play. On the airwaves, the same celebrations, commentaries, and testimonials by the population describing all the favours bestowed by the single party: peace, food self-sufficiency, authenticity, health for all by the year 2000, complete nationalization of all mines and mineral deposits, a green blue orange yellow red revolution. A green revolution because our vitality and our salvation would come through a return to the land, to authentically agrarian values. And in the darkness of the maquis, the shadowy bars on the coast where we would go for a drink some evenings, things were said, such as that our prisons were full of dark, undesirable characters, that there was a militia that maintained order with, of course, the tools necessary to clean house if need be, and the forgetful earth, purged of the blood of torture, was once again virgin and ready to receive the seeds of the green revolution. And pending the year 2000 and health for all, they did not hesitate to beat up those who were resistant, and in the streets of the city the staging of parades and marches in support of the party and its green coffee cocoa banana cotton revolution continued, and I remember that prof who one day remarked, “If we have to support the party, it’s because it’s collapsing!”
It smelled like decline. Our character Hamm would collapse and tumble from his wheelchair under the mangroves from which mockingbird fledglings began to release their sticky droppings onto his bare skull in a volley of precise, coordinated farts. In the maquis, we analyzed the situation, speaking of the fault in the system and the impeccable order of the quagmire we were living in. The sturdy machine of p
ower was going to start to sputter and cough. “If we have to support it, it’s because it’s breaking down!” “The green revolution,” my father said pointedly, “is losing its stripes, its boots, its berets, its fatigues, and the honour of holding a leaden sky over our heads!” Another of our profs, I don’t remember exactly who, would say, “There’s a heaviness, put your hands up over your heads and you’ll feel it.” And we wanted to puncture the ball of heaviness above our heads with our impatient claws. In the bistros, people said the real revolution was still to come and that we would be its children.
Meanwhile, our chum Wali was consumed by illness, and this had become a much greater concern for us than any change of regime. Our group was overcome by a pervasive sadness. Wali was not recovering from his infection, and Endgame was beginning to look like ancient history. Those pithy bits of dialogue from Beckett were still in our memory and we didn’t want to let go of them. We quite seriously called them “suppository phrases,” to be shoved up the armoured assholes of the military thugs, the green ass of the revolution—the old one that had fucked us over—dry, without Vaseline, if you please. And when we met at Beno’s place, we would read them again, just to touch their devastating beauty, especially Clov’s lines when he was resisting the doddering Hamm or provoking him with his deceptively innocent questions. Little gems.