Daria

by Irene Marques

  After leaving the hospital, Abassi took off to the African continent for several years, completely cutting off communication with Canada and the Caribbean, where he was originally from. None of his relatives heard from him during that time. He immersed himself fully into the collectivity systems that he was studying so that he could write his dissertation (he called it a treatise) and share it with the rest of the world. His goal was to prove that evidence of true egalitarian systems could still be found in Africa, and that these systems had been ruined by the unkind interferences of arrogant white foreigners and Islamic sheiks. He spent years excavating an area where the remains of that perfectly egalitarian community had once existed. He found all kinds of utensils—like forks, spoons, and broken pots—as well as human skeletons, and he was also able to discern the precise dimensions of the houses where entire families had lived in perfect and joyous communion. To these discoveries, he applied the most modern and non-universal anthropological methodology, explaining in great and highly precise detail how the forks, the spoons, the broken pots, the size of both men and women’s bodies, and the house dimensions reflected the true egalitarian system of pre-colonial African societies. At the end of page 776 of his dissertation, his conclusion read: These ruins are the mirror of what the Europeans and the Muslims did to the great civilization of my ancestors. One ought to rebuild these ruins and bring them to full life so that the world can regain its full sense and learn how to live from ancient Africa, which, after all, is the mother to all of us, a fact to which the latest discoveries related to the origin of the humans species attest. He had to defend his dissertation in front of a committee of twelve professors at the Northern University in Canada, one of the most prestigious in the country. Although all twelve of them specialized in specific aspects of African civilizations, they also had their own stubborn, individual views on the matter Abassi was writing about. Not to mention the fact that they all had fallen victim to what is generally known as inherent bias in the discipline. As a result, Abassi had great difficulty in successfully defending his dissertation. He presented it to the committee many times, and he failed it as many times as he presented it. He rewrote it many times to accommodate some of the committee member’s viewpoints and ideological trenchant, but he also left room to explain and be faithful to his ideas. He did not want to feel like a traitor to himself, but there was always someone who would have a problem with some aspect of his reasoning, argumentation or evidence. After each failure, frustrated but resolved to continue the battle, he would go to the site again and rethink the objects he had found, re-measure the house dimensions one more time and carefully and rigorously apply the methodology of the discipline to the findings. He would end up reworking a few arguments here and there to see if the professors would all be happy this time so that the trial could end once and for all and he could move on with his agenda and work in the real world. But because his conclusion would always remain the same, when he came back to the defence table and sat in front of those who had the power to decide whether he should become a doctor of philosophy or not, and thus be in a legitimate position to teach the world, no consensus could be found and he was again impeded from obtaining his doctorate. He often would have anxiety dreams, his angst replaying over and over again and his unconscious, in conversation with his conscious, would try to find a solution to the problem he was having. One particular night, he had an illuminating dream that involved a big pot of soup. He saw himself in his kitchen in front of a big black pot of soup. His dissertation director was there with him, and he was trying out the soup, which was still cooking on the stove, with a long wooden spoon. The professor tried a spoonful and then another and another, taking a sample from a different part of the pot each time, and each time he shook his head negatively, stating that the soup was not quite ready to serve yet, that Abassi needed to add a pinch of salt, a little more Italian zucchini, a little more of the Indian yellow spice known as curry, a little more yam to thicken the texture, a cup of coconut juice to balance the taste, and so on and so forth. Abassi agreed that a little more yam and coconut juice would be good ingredients to add because they were original products of Africa, but he did not see the point in bringing in more quantities of the Italian and Indian elements because the soup was already full of non-African elements, including its very base, which consisted of Knorr chicken broth, an imported artificial product from Germany. They argued with one another for what seemed to be a very long time, and the supervising professor said that Abassi was in fact wrong for thinking the coconut was indigenous to Africa and that, had he thoroughly investigated the matter as a careful scholar ought to do, he would have found out that that fruit is actually indigenous to Austronesian-speaking nations and has, through commercial transactions and throughout millennia, been brought to and cultivated in various parts of the world. Eventually Abassi lost his temper and threw the soup on the kitchen floor, stepping on it over and over again—though what he had really wanted to do was throw it directly at the professor so that he would stop arguing with him and trying to make him push his epistemology forward. He woke up sweating and afflicted from the drama that had taken place in his kitchen. He lay awake in his bed for some time reflecting on it, and then suddenly he understood exactly what he had to do. He decided to fire his entire committee and find one that would be solely composed of professors who had been born in Africa and educated in African universities. It occurred to him that the reason he was failing his dissertation over and over again was that his committee members were all Western professors using mostly Western-based ingredients to analyze his work, just like the soup that he had been making in the dream. They could never see what he was trying to prove and would always apply their Eurocentric universal method to African cultures, just like their ancestors had done since at least the fifteenth century. They carried, still deep within themselves, Rudyard Kipling’s civilizational burden and complex. When he explained his plan to an African friend of his from Nigeria, his friend told him he had to be careful because a lot of those African professors could very well be more Westernized than the Westerners. And he gave specific examples to support his argument: the way Nigerian judges and lawyers kept wearing that ridiculous blond wig regardless of the local climate, and the way upper-class Nigerian women kept referring to any girl who showed her cleavage as immoral and were even trying to impose a regulated dress code for university girls. Of course, if we go back to pre-1800s Nigeria, his friend continued, we see women selling fruit at the market naked from the waist up, fully displaying their breasts. Abassi replied that Nigeria, despite being the most populated African nation, does not constitute the whole of Africa. In fact, he continued, it is also the most corrupted one, and should therefore, not be used as a standard good example.

  Abassi had a shaved head, which sharply contrasted with his long beard that almost reached his chest. The beard had abundant silvery tones that contributed to his air of distinction, making him irresistible. He was stunning, just stunning, illustrious, with skin dark as the night—not just any night, but rather the night of epiphany, the night of revelation. He had teeth like you’d never seen before: white, straight, almost otherworldly. He reminded you of the proud African kings that you would have seen in films here and there, during colonial times and then after colonialism had fallen and the African continent was trying to find its way out of the ugly mess that the Europeans had engendered during the many centuries of exploitation. He looked like a resurrected African king who wanted to show the world that Africa did indeed exist fully before the Europeans went there, that it had its own culture and its own sophisticated political systems, and that it had been happy and fulfilled and civilized without the white man. When you first met him, you could not stand to look at him directly; he made you feel afraid and ashamed and guilty, as if you yourself were responsible for what your ancestors did while in his continent, or rather his ancestors’ continent. He made you want to cry—cry out of love, out of pain, out of mercy. Cry because
of something that you could not quite understand or call by its true name. At the time, not long after your love affair with Francisco had ended and turned very ugly, you were starting to feel irrationally attracted to Black men and had just started studying African literatures. You went on and on about Abassi, about his goals and his beautiful ideas. You told your friends that Africa was a stunning, perfect place before the colonizers got there, a place with collective systems of social organizations that we in the West could not possibly understand, and that we were becoming poor as a result of that incapacity. Your friends would point out that you were sexualizing Black men. You didn’t entirely agree with that; in fact, you thought that they, the Black men—or at least the ones you came in contact with—were sexualizing you too. And some of those same friends—the ones who had lived longer, had travelled abroad much more than you, and had read several books and treatises written by the gurus of many civilizations—appointed themselves as truly multicultural critics and said there ought to be limits to cultural relativism and that female genital mutilation really ought to go. They would say that you were very fond of utopias and that you always tried to find them. And when you couldn’t find them, you would invent them, like a Marx of sorts. You were young then and impressionable, and there was that thing stirring between your legs that often made you fall on your knees and tremble in pure expectation. And Abassi did that for you. Abassi Izuora Mbembe. He was like another version of Francisco, one who was a little farther away from home, who did not speak the Lusitanian language. Perhaps because of that you were even more attracted to him. His otherness made you feel more yourself. You thought about and would invoke the deeply philosophical, mystical, and poetic writings of Emmanuel Lévinas and Luce Irigaray to prove to them (and to yourself) that indeed the other is the way to the self—as long as the self does not incorporate that other into itself, eating up his individuality, his difference, like a starved cannibal always in need of the meat and soul of someone, of something. You felt safer with him because you spoke in English with him, that neutral language that did not evoke in you all kinds of emotions, and in which words did not seem as crude as they did when pronounced in Portuguese. Even bad, dirty words, said in the heat of the moment when you were making love with him, seemed less intense, less promiscuous, less visceral. After the whole affair with Francisco and Vasco, you wanted nothing to do with the Portuguese community—or rather with the Portuguese-speaking community, since Francisco and Vasco were not Portuguese themselves, a fact they brought up in court to argue their innocence and their victimhood. It was their defence.

  Abassi Izuora Mbembe. You would pronounce his name over and over again like you had pronounced Francisco’s. You would see him in your dreams, his beautiful body against yours teaching you the ways of heaven and the true spirituality of being, teaching you how to lose your virginity and regain it again through magical African wisdoms that only those from there, with ebony skin and shining eyes could teach you. It was as if he, stunning Abassi, also represented your father and his ways of being. In your mind, he, like your father, represented the old way of being, which is also the most modern, the most present, the most futuristic, the most eternal. It was a true and pure attachment to the land, to the cows, to the plants, to the skies—a perfect communion with everything and everyone in the universe. Both spoke that language that says without saying, that teaches slowly and unobtrusively and allows you to truly see, feel, and be. It was as if you were trying to recreate the beauty of your old village back in Portugal, to make it exist just like you left it or like you thought it was then, like you remember it being then. You could see it: animals and people living and breathing together, houses without running water, and women carrying buckets of it on their heads from the central fountain to clean and cook and bathe and drink. It was as if you were transferring all your yearnings—all your saudade for that which had been lost, for the past, for what you did not have and perhaps never would—to Abassi. In so doing, you proved Freud’s theories of how twisted the human mind can be—how tricky, how confused, how delusional, how unreliable, how subjective, and also how relentless in its search for perfection and fulfillment.

  And then there were your two brothers who went to the colonial wars in Angola and Guinea Bissau, forced by Salazar and his entourage. There was the one who never came back, who was blown away by the mines hidden in the middle of the dark and luscious forest, the Mayombe full of secrets. It was as if he, Abassi, was your link to them, especially to Alberto, your mother’s first-born. He had had fair, fair skin and black curly, curly hair—facts that your mother kept repeating as though she were haunted by a past that cannot correct itself, as though she occupied a space that was equally beautiful and equally ugly. You never saw Alberto because you were the last to arrive—sometime after Marcos—the last to exit your mother’s tired womb, while he was the first to inhabit her new house, the house of a young woman—a clean, clean house still completely ready to shelter love and life. And then there were the other dark things, the unnameable things that your people had done since the fifteenth century, the things they had done to the beautiful continent. All of this was playing in you, playing against and with you, and you wanted to live and learn and love and remedy the errors of history to make things better, to make the pain go away, both your own and that of others. And Abassi was stunning, just stunning. And there was that vast, pounding, liquid thing stirring between your legs, calling you, calling you by its own name, like a voice coming from the remote corners of yourself, the world’s self, viscerally potent, viscerally incantatory. The mere sound of his name made you see the beautiful place somewhere in Africa before the Europeans got there, a place like no other where everything made sense. It was a place where animals and people and trees, the sea and the sky and the earth were truly interconnected, creating a universal language and making humans feel complete, complete, wholes of wholes. You were much younger than him and you were white, so you tried to find a way for him to see you, to love you, to communicate with you. You wanted him to call you by your name, your name. He had a reputation of being a lady’s man at the hospital, and you had heard rumours about his improper conduct with the ladies: Black, white, Chinese, you name it. He was truly multicultural. He wanted them all like a hungry man who cannot say no to any offer that openly and generously offers itself. And indeed there were many offers. They would come to him from every corner of the world, eager to give, to feed him, to lie beneath his body and feel his heavy thrust inside their virgin vaginas, vulvas utterly hungry to be penetrated to the core. They wanted to truly find their name, their purpose, their destiny. He had a reputation and you hated PIGS, so you tried to convince yourself—in your mind, in your body, in your deep self—that this man could not be what they said he was. He could not be because you needed him and you needed him to need you. You became deaf to the rumours; you became obsessed by his own voice, beard, skin; and you kept reading Africanists like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Agostinho Neto, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. These writers talked about mother Africa incessantly, yearning and calling for a return to pre-colonial African values, to a place where justice, equality, and mystical consciousness existed—all those things that made human beings feel truly alive. You kept reading and reading beautiful poems that create, in stunning language, that Africa of the past—so how could you not want Abassi? How could you be blind to his beauty or deaf to his wisdom and his profound insights? You read about elders in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia who were still shepherds and cow herders and were trying to keep their language alive, that undulating language with lows and highs and clicks, a language like no other, a language that told millenary lives through oral stories. Long, endless lives, displayed just like that from memory, with no pen or paper, as if the human mind were indeed the greatest monument, keeping alive all the records of history, encoding them in its cells, these sturdy recording tapes that do not, cannot forget. Stories and stories pouring out, like marvels of another world, a w
orld that is trying to be kept alive, to preserve the beauty of the magnificent old ways. Just like your father, a peasant with land and cows, who loved his way of life so much that he needed, he wanted his sons and daughters to carry on his tradition, to cultivate the land and raise the cattle, so that what he loved and knew the most—and he himself—would not vanish. In fact, he had ten children so that they could help him work the land, keeping it alive through veins and veins of memories, vines of wine produced every spring that made you drunk to the core and satiated your most profound thirst. But then came the new ways: the tractors and the corn and the potatoes and the wine and the beans arrived in truckloads from other parts of Europe, from the whole wide world. His crops and his way of life lost value, leaving him melancholic and mourning the days of Salazar, when he worked from sunrise to sunset and life made sense. Yes, the new ways came and took away most of his daughters and sons, who eagerly entered the new modus operandi, finding ways to cross the borders. They went to France, Germany, and even beyond, trying to reach the American dream that, though farther away, was believed to be the most fulfilling one. The new ways came, and he was left almost alone, anchored to that powerful rocky village on top of a mountain. He was left there to admire the sun, still fascinated by the magnanimous way it illuminates the world and all the other small stars that visit at night. He still believed that the sun moved around the earth, like the eye tells you, and not the other way around, like the scientists insist on claiming. He was still fascinated by the way his cows mooed when he spoke to them, calling them by their own names, as if there was no fundamental difference between them and himself; they were all beings of the same god, children of the same universe. He was like a mercy of the eternal refusing to move and break the beauty of time. He wanted time to be a sphere, not a straight line that blinds us to the meaning of the world.