by Edem Awumey
Koli, my mentor in matters of death, was blind. I found that out the first evening when we were lying on our pallets and he asked, “What colour was the sun today?” A funny question. In fact, I didn’t understand. He repeated, “What colour?” I answered, “As usual.” He continued, “How?” Irritated, I retorted, “You saw it for yourself!” He smiled and said in a whisper, “My eyes are gone.” Then he turned onto his side facing the wall, and five minutes later, I heard him snoring. I spent part of the night speculating that Koli Lem had probably not arrived in the camp blind. And that the same fate no doubt awaited me. When Koli was dead, I would be the new blind man of the place, the new puppet with spindly arms and a mechanical walk. But I wasn’t sure he’d lost his sight in the camp. The next morning, I asked him, “How did you lose your sight?” He replied, “The sun.” I didn’t understand then. He left me alone and went off to do the guards’ dishes and gather eggs in the henhouse. With his dead eyes, because he was used to it.
As for me, I was taken to a hut behind the young prisoners’ yard. A bare room with a chair in the middle. I sat down as ordered by the guard, who already stank of beer. My hands were tied behind my back, and my feet bound with wire. Half an hour later, a tall, slender man arrived. He had big eyes and very black skin. He took a second chair from a dark corner and sat down facing my naked torso. He was smoking, like a torturer in a war or spy movie. He said, “How are you, my friend?” I replied that the wire was digging into my ankles. He replied, “That’s to be expected. Let’s talk. I know that many people in the capital think the movement around the courthouse and in the streets was spontaneous. However, we have information to the contrary. We know, for example, that there was manipulation. You were brainwashed by our political adversaries, those opportunists who don’t have the balls to come out in the open. Now, tell me, weren’t they the ones who sent you the money for the placards and banners? You didn’t pay for all that with your miserable student stipends? We want to restore order, and to do that, we have to catch those jackals! Do you have names for me?” I shook my head, I had no names to give him. He smiled, looked down a moment, then straightened up, and wham! gave me a slap that landed me, along with the chair, on the rough floor. He placed his boot against my ribs and pressed down, and I whispered, “I don’t know anyone, we just followed the crowd.” He calmed down and said, “Very well, I’ll give you the day to think about it.”
I stayed in that position, tied to the chair overturned on the floor, for a good part of the day. Koli Lem came later to untie me. In the afternoon, I think. He gave me a piece of cassava to eat. Then I must have fallen asleep. I was awakened at dusk by shouting, the rapes had begun again in the bush. I learned later that it was mostly the sorcerers who were on the receiving end. It was necessary, the guards said, to get into their bodies through every hole. They used the expression “cleaning out the sorcerers.” So that they let go of all the shit and evil spirits. A deadly ceremony. Bodies that were emptied and that consoled themselves by thinking their rotten waters could feed the earth and nourish hope.
After that first day of interrogation, I was taken back to our cell. Koli was waiting for me, lying on his back, hands behind his neck. He said, “Take the gourd under your pallet and drink.” I did so, and he said, “And now, sleep.” And, as was his habit, he very soon began to snore. The next day, the same program. In the evening, Koli asked if I could read to him. I replied that first we’d have to find a book. He lifted his mattress and I saw books. He smiled and explained that they were survivors from his former life as a teacher. And from that time on, we would live with characters other than the ones in our prison camp.
18
The bum sitting next to Ito Baraka in the bus also reminds him of a character in a novel, he’s the perfect picture of a poor wretch. Ito again sees those characters who spent the evenings with him and Koli in their cell. Strange creatures of paper to whom he owes his survival. They had spirited confrontations, intense moments, skirmishes that they came out of shaken but alive. However, it was many years after the prison camp that he discovered the character who would mark him forever. Not one of those who inspire you to cling to life. Hero or shadow, that exhausted character with dangling arms, that painful spirit from the pen of Bohumil Hrabal: Hanta, in Too Loud a Solitude. Hanta alone in the hole that is his home, crushed under the weight of all the books he has saved from destruction, a romantic messiah-come-lately. Hanta, executioner of books and knowledge deemed subversive by the Czech regime, Hanta destroying the volumes in a compacter in which he himself will end up dying with his books. Ito Baraka considers that an end that is both tragic and beautiful, as the endings of novels can sometimes be, the chance Hanta had to choose the outcome of the story, with the hero plunging into the gaping maw of the compacter surrounded by Goethe, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Dante, like a patient in the hospital at the final moment when he must resign himself to throwing in the towel, with his wife, children, parents, friends, and colleagues around him.
Ito Baraka knows his girlfriend Kimi Blue will be there at the end beside his burdensome body, even though he wants to spare her that unnecessary torture. Yes, Hanta, because of the choice of his end, a semblance of nobility regained. Because, thinks Ito, back home, there are many who weren’t able to choose their exit, cut down by a tropical fever or the whistling bullets of the republican army, dead on the seashore with a knife in the belly or burnt to a cinder at the wheel of a car or floating amid the garbage in the lagoon. He feels he is lucky that he can choose his own end. Like Hanta, he will write the last act as he wishes, although he has the impression that Kimi Blue will do everything she can to keep him on the stage.
Meanwhile, he wants time and the changing of the seasons to stop, and things to pause on Kimi Blue’s skin, breasts, body while he continues to touch, to caress the oval face of that girl with her brown skin, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped black eyes and the surprisingly cool, deep voice that takes the time to polish each word. Kimi, who can display a serenity that reveals nothing of the junkie, and that is spoiled only when she begins to need a fix.
In the bus, the bum jostles Ito. The image of Kimi disappears, the contours of her body become hazy as though she no longer had breasts, and that thought is unbearable to Ito.
19
His obsession with breasts is an old story. It goes back to the time of the great glory of the single party back home, when breasts had a role to play in the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.
Ito remembers, at the peak of what the party called political animation, recruiters would come into the neighbourhoods looking for girls to instruct in patriotic dancing and singing. The girls would be taught to sing at the top of their lungs and wiggle their hips, to stamp their feet on the ground to trample the enemies of the revolution, to vibrate their whole bodies in rejection of neocolonialist projects, to shake their bosoms to show anyone jealous of the national awakening that the people were bursting with life, electrified, galvanized, ready to meet the challenges of the present and the future. In the municipal stadium, at the many nationalist festivals, there were choreographies of those busts in full bloom, with cannons firing red-hot cannonballs at the enemies of the nation, and the dancers’ breasts jiggling. And since the girls were very young, barely out of their teens, they had breasts that were firm and hard and taut and that threatened to poke holes in their costumes. Their chests wet with sweat, their clothes would cling to their skin, revealing the arrogant beauty of their shining round breasts. Their arms open in the form of a cross, the girls would shake their bosoms, leap backward, and push their breasts forward, deadly grenades with the pins pulled, aiming at invisible targets. And watching those shows, Ito Baraka had his first erections, just as the officials on the platform must have had, those respectable gentlemen fixated on the breasts, which they were ranking and sorting mentally according to their degree of firmness, deciding which girl, after the festivities, wo
uld sweeten their night. They would choose the most beautiful breasts to knead and nibble in their waterfront hotel rooms costing a small fortune.
And the day after the celebrations, the girls would come out of the hotels drained, their chests sore, their breasts crushed, their nipples munched on with champagne. The officials gave them gifts, large bills and jewelry, but since those gentlemen detested condoms, the girls would return to their shacks knocked up and with a nice assortment of diseases. And nine months later, there would be brats with hostile eyes in their arms suckling, brats bawling and draining the breasts of those little mothers, dozens of nursings a day, breasts that were beginning to point toward their navels, at half mast, already far from the days of glory and cannons. On their chests, unsightly bags drained by their pitiless offspring, the little mothers were turned into tropical cows nourishing the next generation, and no one, no lover in his right mind would want to touch those slackened, ruined breasts. And since the presumed culprits, all men of power, did not acknowledge the children, the girls had to get by one way or another. And when they scanned the horizon, they could see only one way, just one, to bring a little money into the house. So while the resigned grandmothers watched the kids, the girls went out to walk the street, offering their leftovers to anyone who wanted, their breasts decked out in provocative tops, and as they leaned over the car doors negotiating, the undecided clients could contemplate the drooping charms of these beauties of the night. The men would become stingy, no point paying a fortune for those crumpled bags, never suspecting that those breasts had been the best weapons of the anti-imperialist revolution.
And from sidewalk to sidewalk, the twilight of the breasts came very quickly, the girls worn out, wrinkled before their time, prematurely aged, sitting on the doorsteps of the houses, their busts now deflated, flat, their breasts flaccid, useless, covered with ridiculous wrappers or simply left uncovered, the old women, bare-chested in the hope that the wind might swell the dugs hanging under their chins like old socks. The wind didn’t help, and the sun came to finish the job, pumping what was left of the blood from those hideous rags. It was not unusual to find those women dead and stiff in front of their huts, in a lovely illustration of the end of things, the end of life and of beauty. And there was nothing left to do but sing a requiem for those girls whose bodies, ten years earlier, had been so firm.
The reason Ito Baraka never tires of looking at Kimi Blue’s breasts and watches over them is that he’s afraid they, too, will begin to decline. But he’s surprised to note that they remain firm as in youth, when so many things, follies and victories, are still possible. The implacable wheel of life has not yet passed over them. With those breasts, Kimi Blue remains alive, and that’s the only ray of light that remains for Ito. So, every day, he asks his girlfriend not to spoil her breasts, he doesn’t want to see her looking like those dried-up women he saw in the streets of his youth, laid low by bad times, like those sorcerers in the camp where he was detained. He clings to Kimi’s breasts because they alone still connect him to life, to madness, and to blind hope.
20
Ito Baraka gets off the 95 bus at the Rideau Centre, the commercial heart of the city of Ottawa, and heads towards the wine and spirits store where he’s a regular. His gaze drifts over the store windows, his right hand gripping the escalator handrail. He steps into the shop, grabs his rum from the shelf, pays at the cash, and stuffs the wrapped bottle into his bag. He reflects that if the government, by some absurd decree, were to put all spirits under lock and key, a lot of budding poets would kill themselves after trying in vain to pull some timeless masterpiece from the bottoms of their empty glasses. He comes out of the shopping centre and heads towards the stop for the buses to Hull, on the other side of Rideau Street. The rising February sun provides a semblance of warmth on his head, and he’s thirsty. Before taking his last bus, he goes into the Chapters bookstore, where a front corner has been turned into a café. He orders a coffee and sits down at a table facing the street. He’s served his coffee, he takes a sip, looks up, and can’t fail to observe that he has just missed his bus. He’ll take the next one. On his lap, his bag suddenly feels very heavy. He takes out the notebook and lays it on the table. The pen, like the flask, is in one of his inside pockets. He takes it out and finds Koli Lem where he had left him.
***
Before he was imprisoned, Koli Lem was a teacher in a village in the same region where the camp was located. He taught the last year before high school. Thirty years teaching algebra, ethics, history and geography, calculus, civics, and patriotic songs, according to the curriculum devised by the party. He had to follow that idiotic curriculum. And often he had to take the children to the town five kilometres from the village to form an honour guard for a prominent guest the country had a duty to welcome with appropriate pomp and ceremony. Four hours standing along a road in the scorching heat, and when you least expected it, the guest’s cortege would speed by. And the surprised crowd could only applaud the disappearing Mercedes and its illustrious passengers. Four hours in the sun or rain for that farce. Then again, you couldn’t say most of the children were unhappy about it. It was a chance to skip school. Jeeps followed the cortege to protect the behinds of the guests and keep an eye on the crowd of school children. You never knew, some little smart aleck armed to the teeth could be hiding among the young people to take a shot at the asses of the distinguished guests.
And once back in class, the kids were much too pooped to take in the teacher’s lessons. They were no longer receptive, they even dozed off, and in the evening some of them would have to go to the courtyard of a village chief for rehearsals of dances and songs for the political animation, when they would shake to the fervent melodies of the revolution, ready to grace the thousands of celebrations on the calendar of the nation.
Then came that week when yet another distinguished guest was passing through the region. Koli Lem got ready to act. He bought some castor oil at the only pharmacy in the area, ten kilometres from the village. Castor oil, and all night long, he wondered if he would go through with it. He barely slept. The children were supposed to set off around ten o’clock the next morning to form an honour guard for the despot. Koli Lem couldn’t stand to watch them go through that again, and in the middle of his restless night, he dreamed that the Revolution, a lady in black holding a pitchfork, was breaking down the doors of the huts in the village and gobbling up the little kids, who didn’t have the tough skin of the older people, indifferent now to the ravages of time. The lady with the pitchfork snapped them up with a flick of her tongue, her mouth bloody, and moved determinedly toward Koli’s hut at the edge of the village. She plunged the pitchfork into the door and sent it flying. She burped, and Koli woke up. He went and showered behind his hut to clear his head, and at dawn, he made his decision. He would do it.
That morning in class, he told the children he was going to give them some medicine that would help them digest their food, so that they would feel less heavy and would better learn their lessons and memorize all those calculus formulas for the year-end exams that were fast approaching. And because they, of course, all wanted to pass, they didn’t need much persuasion. They lined up in front of Koli, and each in turn gulped down a good tablespoonful of his oil. They made faces. It wasn’t easy to swallow that disgusting grease. They sat down again and wiped their lips with the backs of their hands, and instead of the usual dictation, Koli Lem talked to them about his old dream. He confessed that when he was their age, he had wanted to be a pilot, and the cleverest of his little charges asked, “Like Saint-Exupéry?”
A girl in the classroom coughed and put up her hand, “Mr Koli, can I go to the toilet?” Without waiting for his permission, she dashed off to the lavatory. A minute later, the same problem occurred with another student, who didn’t even have time to raise a finger, and another, and so on. The students were lined up at the lavatory, fighting to hold in the boiling broth in their
bellies that was trying to get out. They stamped the ground impatiently, jostling to be first as soon as one of the three stalls freed up. Koli went to see the principal and told him that his children had caught some virus or bacteria and they couldn’t stop . . . The principal came out of his office and saw the crowd in front of the lavatory. He said, “This is serious, I’m evacuating the school and sending the other classes out to the honour guard right away. You stay here with these poor kids.” Koli replied that that was the best thing to do. This was at nine o’clock, and a quarter-hour later, he was all alone with his charges, who continued their ballet between the classroom and the toilets, emptying themselves more and more with each trip.
Around one in the afternoon, the fury of the waters in the children’s guts began to calm, and Koli said they had gotten rid of the stagnant waters inside them that were rotting their bellies and heads. They didn’t seem to understand, but by about four o’clock, they’d all stopped running to the toilets.
The day after that memorable event, the principal summoned Koli. He told him he had questioned some of the children. He had to make his report to the school inspector. A week later, he sent the report, and the inspector, a devoted servant of the party, did not take long to make the connection between the mysterious epidemic and the outing planned for the honour guard that day. One morning in September 1984, two men in fatigues came looking for Koli Lem at the school. A cruel, burning sun was shining.
21
The sun. At this point in his story, Ito Baraka stops writing and studies the street scene in front of him. The street and the anonymous crowd. A scene comes back to him of a seashore that could have been Lomé, Cape Coast, Port Said, or Dakar. But it isn’t Lomé or any city on that coast where he grew up. We are somewhere in Algeria. The Arab, with his knife, is threatening Meursault. The reflection from the blade hurts Meursault’s eyes, and to stop the pain, he shoots the man. And in court, Meursault, in Camus’s L’Étranger, to show his contempt for the world, says he killed him “because of the sun.”