by Maryse Conde
Simone and Rosélie first met at the French Cultural Center. The French Cultural Center was guarded like Fort Knox ever since its wine cellar and stock of foie gras had been raided one Christmas Eve. Despite its cafeteria, which, until that terrible raid, had served excellent wines and delicious sandwiches, the center was always deserted. Charlotte Gains-bourg and Mathieu Kassovitz were doing their best. But how could you rival Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who could be seen strutting across every movie screen in Cape Town?
One evening Rosélie found herself sitting not far from the lovely, golden-skinned Simone, who positively glowed, during a showing of Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley. She had seen the film again and again in Paris, N’Dossou, and New York. She never missed a showing, not merely for its merits as a movie but because Euzhan Palcy’s miserere each time empowered her with the reality she did not possess. For an hour and a half she could stand up and shout to the disbelievers:
“Look! I’m tired of telling you. Guadeloupe and Martinique actually exist! People live and die there. They make babies who in turn reproduce. They claim to possess a culture unlike any other: Creole culture.”
Question: How do you recognize a compatriot? The Caribbean people have an instinct, like any other endangered species. That evening Simone was sitting with her children. As soon as the sepia-colored opening sequences started to roll the children began whispering in her ear. She likewise whispered her answers so as not to disturb the other spectators, pathetically trying to authenticate this far-off land that they had only seen depicted as fiction.
Kod yanm ka mawé yanm. Friendship binds those who are far from their shores.
From that day on, Rosélie and Simone became inseparable. Yet their personalities were strict opposites. Rosélie was attached to nothing, perhaps because nothing belonged to her. Simone was pathologically attached to those thousands of facets some people call traditions: Christmas carols, mandarin pips, and polka-dot dresses at New Year’s, coconut sorbet at four in the afternoon, codfish fritters, crab matoutou, and red snapper stew for lunch. She would go for miles to buy blood and pig’s intestines to make her black pudding. But above all, unlike Rosélie, she had an opinion on politics and just about everything else: underdevelopment, dictatorship, democracy, Kofi Annan, Muslim fundamentalism, homosexuality, terrorism, and the India-Pakistan conflict. Belonging to the same people as Aimé Césaire, the inspiration of Caribbean consciousness, she naturally had the right to teach everyone a thing or two. She dared make negative comments about Nelson Mandela, the untouchable. She believed his influence had not allowed the South African people to purge their frustration and be born again in a baptism of blood under the sun. See Fanon: “On Violence.”
“One day all hell’s going to break loose,” she liked to say, rubbing her hands as if overjoyed at the prospect. “It’ll explode like at Saint-Pierre. The whites will hurl themselves on the blacks, and the blacks on the whites.”
For those who might not understand the comparison, she was alluding to the eruption of the Montagne Pelée and the total destruction of the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. Only one person escaped—a prisoner by the name of Cyparis…Oh, I’m sorry, that’s another story.
What upset Simone the most as a devoted mother of five was the government’s disregard for children. Didn’t they know they were the future of the nation?
The child is the future of man.
In her opinion, kindergartens and nursery schools should be under government control and not left to individuals, who were only intent on making a profit. Having investigated several of these places, she had seen for herself how these innocent children were left to macerate in filth, urine, and fecal matter. No intellectual stimulation. The lucky ones had a few cuddly toys, coloring crayons, and modeling clay. So at the end of December she begged Rosélie to play Santa Claus with her and accompany her on a toy distribution mission. Rosélie, who had the regrettable habit of being intimidated by anyone whose willpower was stronger than hers, gave in. One afternoon, then, they set off in the embassy’s Peugeot to empty their sack of toys at strategic points. The way they were received at Bambinos as well as Sweet Mickey’s as well as Tiny Tots’ Palace filled Rosélie with dismay. Worse than intruders, veritable undesirables! The directors scarcely poked their heads out of their offices while their assistants grabbed the packages in such an offhand way, it was to be feared the cumbersome objects would end up in the garbage.
Why, for goodness’ sake?
Simone hadn’t always been a homemaker. She had been a brilliant student at the School for Political Science in Paris and read all the classics of decolonization. So the explanation she provided was inspired by her readings of years gone by.
“We’re not white women. We are black. The whites, however, have brainwashed these people to such an extent that they not only loathe themselves but everything of the same color. What’s more, it’s the class struggle. Here we are in a luxury car. We don’t live in the townships. We’re bourgeois. They hate us for not living like them.”
Bourgeois? Speak for yourself. I live like a parasite. I don’t have a career. I don’t have any money or own any material or spiritual goods. I have neither a present nor a future.
Simone had a short memory; she hadn’t always been a bourgeois. She was born in one of the most destitute villages of Martinique. Her father was a cane worker who had been a regular customer at the company rum store. There was never any meat on the table. The family was lucky when the fig bananas were accompanied by a slice of codfish and a little olive oil. At the age of ten, though she had never worn anything else but sandals, her godmother, a bourgeois mulatto from Prêcheur, gave her a pair of shiny pumps that her third daughter had not quite worn out. At boarding school she washed and ironed the only two dresses she had, one for weekdays and the nice one for Sunday mass. Right up to graduation she “massacred” the French language, which made her classmates die laughing. When she met Antoine Bazin des Roseraies, a minor aristocrat, nothing more, an egghead and first in his class, she had not been impressed. He had won her over only after a persistent courtship. Then, like in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, after a marriage of convenience, the buds of love had blossomed.
At the present time, Simone would have been perfectly happy with a faithful husband and a loving family, if her public life had not been a calvary. On the many occasions when she represented France at her husband’s side, she was systematically ignored and snubbed. Under her own roof, at her own receptions, the guests never spoke to her. At other people’s dinner parties she was relegated to the bottom of the table. Nobody would believe she had studied at the School for Political Science. At her children’s school they took her for the maid. Unlike Rosélie, she was feisty. With the help of her husband, albeit discreetly because of his function, she founded an association, the DNA, the Defense of the Negress Association, her handbook being a work by the Senegalese author Awa Thiam, La Parole aux Négresses, which she had read while at university. To those who balked at the word “Negress” and its colonial connotations, and who proposed periphrases such as “women of African origin,” “women of color,” “women of the South,” or even “women on the move,” Simone retorted that, on the contrary, it was good to shock.
The DNA had a large membership, wives of diplomats and international civil servants, teachers, traders, owners of beauty shops, visiting nurses, the manager of a travel agency, and the director of a school for models, one of whom had been voted runner-up in the election of Miss Black Maracas.
The association was known for including French, English, and Portuguese speakers, irrespective of class or nationality. Simone had no trouble inviting a wide range of guest speakers, for on this planet there is no black woman who one day or another has not been doubly humiliated because of her sex and color.
Simone had the brilliant idea of making the young poet Bebe Sephuma honorary president, since she enjoyed a reputation throughout the country as dazzling as Léopold Sédar Sengho
r’s in Senegal, Derek Walcott’s in St. Lucia, or Max Rippon’s in Guadeloupe. There is no equivalent in a Western country, where poets are generally ignored. Yet she had only written three flimsy collections, one of which was dedicated to the woman who brought her into this world before being carried off by AIDS when Bebe was three months old. She had been blessed with good fortune when, on the death of her mother, an English couple had adopted her and saved her from the Bantustan, where she would have surely wasted away with the rest of her family. They had taken her to London and sent her to the best schools. Nevertheless, she had never forgotten the hell she had escaped from. As soon as she could, she returned to settle in Cape Town, where she became the uncontested leader of arts and letters. She had her own cultural column and appeared regularly on television. Since she sponsored a string of art galleries, it was Simone’s idea to drag her to Rosélie’s studio, the plan being that Bebe would love her work and offer her an exhibition in a select gallery.
“She could give you the chance you’ve been waiting for.”
Rosélie and Bebe had often met. But obviously Rosélie did not interest Bebe, who would hurriedly greet her with a superficial smile. As for Rosélie, she had to admit that Bebe scared her. Too young. Too pretty. Too witty. A wicked smile revealing sharp, carnassial teeth made for tearing great chunks out of life, and betraying her formidable desire to succeed.
But what does it mean to succeed?
But in our countries, nobody ever gets a unanimous vote. Bebe Sephuma was not lacking in detractors. “Is she a true African? What does she know about our traditions?” whispered some of the disgruntled who recalled she had spent her childhood and adolescence in Highgate before reading philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. As a result, she could not speak any of the languages of South Africa. Not even Afrikaans.
Simone managed to introduce Rosélie to the intimate circle of friends who were celebrating Bebe’s twenty-seventh birthday. Duly coached, Rosélie slipped on a black silk sheath dress and brought out her gold bead choker, the one she would never part with, for it was her mother’s, and applied her makeup. It’s incredible what a little penciling around the eyes and a good lipstick can do! Under her arms she soaked herself with Jaipur by Boucheron. But she had a great deal of trouble trying to convince Stephen to accompany her, usually so worldly and infatuated with high society. He considered Bebe’s poetry atrocious, and what’s more, she spoke English with a pretentious accent.
Bebe lived in a villa decorated in a futurist manner by a Brazilian designer who was the darling of the rich South Africans. He had designed interiors of a number of pop singers and artists living in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
The villa was situated in Constantia. This neighborhood, one of the smartest residential districts of Cape Town, was gradually being taken over by ambassadors, businessmen, and experts from sub-Saharan Africa, as the good old Black Africa was now called. Not only were blacks seen as uniformed chauffeurs, their white-gloved hands holding the wheel, but sacrilege of sacrileges, they were also sprawling in the back, their peppercorn heads resting on the leather cushions of their Mercedes 380 SLS. Children with the same skin color were pedaling their expensive mountain bikes along drives lined with pine trees and centuries-old oaks.
But what struck Rosélie was not the environment, the interior design, the walls decorated with brightly colored azulejos and glass insets, the white marble tiles, the monochrome leather furnishings, the eclecticism of the decoration, a No mask next to a Calder mobile, a Fang mask rubbing shoulders with a tapestry from Ethiopia. Not even the sumptuousness of the dinner table, where nothing was lacking—from pink champagne and caviar to Scottish salmon. What struck Rosélie was that the dinner guests were made up solely of mixed couples, white men and black women, as if they constituted a humanity all their own that on no pretext should be mistaken for any other.
The most self-assured was Antoine, Simone’s husband, on whom the nature of his job and the assurance of future promotion conferred an immense authority. When he spoke, his words had the power of a private bill being read to the National Assembly.
The handsomest was without doubt Bebe’s partner, Piotr. This Swede, who would not have been out of place in a film by Ingmar Bergman (the early Bergman) shared and supported her enthusiasm. Like her, he knew that Art should be brought to the people and not the reverse. Like her, he had a different notion of Art than that found in school manuals. Art is everywhere, in the street, in everyday objects. To explain his point Piotr had recently pulled off a major accomplishment. With the help of a photographer, he had plastered over the buses in Cape Town giant pictures of the market in Cocody before it went up in flames, a London double-decker filled with turbaned Sikhs, the junks and floating restaurants of Hong Kong, the mosque at Djenné, and a caravan of camels crossing the desert on their way to the salt mines at Taoudenni.
The most romantic was Peter, an Australian, a telecommunications engineer who had had to flee Sokoto after eloping with Latifah, the only daughter of the sultan. Latifah spoke only Hausa, Peter only English. The couple had three children. But Peter had still not learned a word of Hausa and Latifah not a word of English, which goes to prove that passion forges its own idiom.
The most captivating was Stephen, with his intellectual charisma, his somewhat obscure language, and his references to works of fiction that nobody had ever heard of but that he made you want to read. Once he was at Bebe’s, as Rosélie had guessed, he seemed to forget his reservations and was determined to charm anyone who approached him.
The most average was an American high school teacher from Boston who boasted of being a WASP, on honeymoon with his Congolese wife from Brazzaville who taught at the same school. Together they had written in French a seven-hundred-page novel, extremely boring, Les derniers jestes d’Anténor Biblos, published by Gallimard.
But it was Patrick who stole the evening, a somewhat common-faced fifty-year-old who escorted his wife, a Congolese, this time from Kinshasa. Patrick was a former deep-sea diver. For years he had lived on offshore oil rigs from Indonesia to Gabon, from which he escaped every two weeks to blow his phenomenal wages plus danger money in the brothels. At the age of fifty, when the hour of retirement had sounded, he had decided to settle down in Cape Town, where the climate suited his arthritis of the knee, contracted in the ocean depths. During the meal he held his audience captive, recounting quite simply how he used to dive down over a thousand feet, brushing against the fish and the coral amid the silence and darkness of the ocean deep.
But at dessert, however, the conversation got bogged down in inescapable terrain. Life as a mixed couple. In the ensuing brouhaha everyone had a story of prejudice, rejection, or exclusion to tell, and one’s heart never knew whether to laugh or cry or do both at the same time. In fact, no society is prepared to accept the freedom to love.
The most spectacular tale was that of Peter and Latifah. To prevent this union, which he considered unnatural, the sultan Rachid al-Hassan had his daughter locked up in one of the wings of his palace, the Palace of the Wind. Here she was watched over day and night by four ferocious hounds and six old hags who fed her nothing but curds in order to incapacitate her. She had escaped with the help of a guard who had poisoned the hounds with meatballs and drugged the old hags with a sleeping potion. Up to this very day the radio in Sokoto is still broadcasting the description of Peter as a wanted person and public enemy of the sultanate. The sultan has never given up hope of jailing him after having first castrated him with a fine blade inset with ivory dating from the eighteenth century.
Stephen refused to give in to the general gloom. He began by cheering up his audience with his sardonic erudition. The mixed couple is a very old and honorable institution. Ca’ da Mosto and Valentin Fernandes can testify to it. It dates back to 1510, when a group of Portuguese from Lisbon, including criminals fleeing the kingdom, settled at the mouth of the river Senegal and, adopting the African custom, took up with black women. Although they were held in con
tempt by their fellow countrymen, they were adored by the Africans and called themselves lançados em terra, those who are thrown onto the shore, or tango mâos, the tattooed traders. At the same time, 1512 to be exact, other Portuguese were washed up on the shores of Brazil, near São Paolo, one of whom was João Ramalho, who took as his wife the daughter of a Tamoia Indian chief. On June 14, 1874, Lafcadio Hearn married Alethea Foley, a woman of mixed race from Cincinnati. In the same humorous vein, Stephen then asked why we only take into account the biological element. Isn’t the union between a Spaniard and a Belgian a mixed marriage? Between a German and an Italian? A Czech and a Romanian? An American and a French woman? And after all, aren’t all couples mixed? Although they may belong to the same society, the spouses themselves come from different social and family backgrounds. Even if a brother married his sister it would be another case of mixed marriage. No individual is identical to another.
He brought out a sense of pride in the guests by painting in glowing colors the day when the entire world would follow their example. Yes, the mixed couple would conquer all! The greatest thinkers of our time are saying that the world is in a state of hybridization. You only need two eyes to see it for yourself. New York, London, cities of hybrids. Hybridized cities.
In their enthusiasm Piotr and Bebe proposed they join forces, and pursue and repeat the “Art for the People” operation. Could he select lines from poems or meaningful quotes by writers? They would be blown up into giant posters and displayed in the markets, the bus stations, the railroad stations, and bus shelters, everywhere where crowds gather. Stephen was only too pleased to accept. He believed the poets who are reputed to be the most difficult are in fact the most accessible. Simone looked at Rosélie angrily, betraying what she thought. Incorrigible Stephen! Once again he had managed to make himself the center of attention. Me, me, me!