by Drago Jancar
When Albert Moindre lands in Africa, the first creature he encounters is a giraffe. He can hardly believe it. He questions the evidence of his senses. Could he perhaps have fallen victim to a hallucination? He wonders what this tall thing could be good for. Then he has a flash of illumination.
—There’s nothing it could be except a hat rack.
But to use such a tall, beautiful, and rather sophisticated construction for such a prosaic purpose is admittedly out of the ordinary. Not to mention that great care has clearly been taken not to overload the image as a whole so as not to harm the equilibrium that assures its singular elegance, its blend of solidity and gentle grace, whether seated or soaring.
A Western man wouldn’t have failed to multiply the number of pegs in order to make the object more cost-effective.
Albert Moindre contemplates the giraffe. What could you put on it? A baseball cap, or a melon.
If you have two hats, you need two giraffes.
So that’s how herds are born, Albert Moindre realizes, slapping his hand to his forehead.
Albert Moindre thought he had finally made his way around the elephant. It had taken him at least fifteen years, without ever slowing his stride. But this time he arrived at the end of his circuit. Wasn’t he starting to recognize things that he had already seen, people and places? Still, he pressed on. For as soon as he decided to stop and put down his bag, doubt crept in: what if these were only resemblances, providential similarities? And so he took off again. He was going to see what was around the bend.
Poor guy, he’s still walking.
Has no one ever made it around an elephant? wondered Albert Moindre as he lengthened his stride.
Africa: there you have it. It’s certainly enough. At least when you stay at a distance from a thing you can get a good view of it in its entirety. Why should he wander all the way there and risk never again being able to grasp more than the handful of dirt at his feet? And thus lose all contact with Africa? Moreover, he’s not the type to go running around the globe. What does it get you? Can you ever really finish? There’s always another island, a mountain, the steppes and the floes. The Pampa.
So he’ll stay nicely and peacefully at home.
One begins to make out this moderately complex character. A certain talent for the rhetoric of justification and bad faith could have misled us. But no, we quickly saw through it. He’s a coward. He can only breathe easy within his own lair, amid his own scent. Beyond his little redoubt extends the land of shadows, of malevolent spirits. From which no one has ever returned.
What a lot of fuss!
His intelligence torments him a bit nonetheless. He toys with being tempted by Africa. Not seriously. He won’t go. But still, he starts talking about it with whomever happens to be around. He pretends to be hesitating. Perhaps I’ll go to Africa at the beginning of next year, I don’t know yet. I’m feeling it out. He leads people to believe that his life consists entirely of that—plans, departures, running zigzag across the planet.
Rest, never, but sometimes he lies down for a moment to nap beneath the forest canopy. Or, rather, his sofa.
Casually dropped in conversation, the information is fascinating. He manages to take on all the prestige of a traveler without moving an inch. Let’s see about doing it next winter, he says, then adds, unless I’m in Africa. I’m thinking about popping over to Mali in January, he murmurs dreamily, as if to himself. Listen, I can’t get too involved, it’s not out of the question that I’ll be in Africa by then.
Who does he think we are?
He won’t go. But he’s taking advantage of his position. The word is enough for him. The word Africa is his now. He has the right to use it. Doesn’t deprive himself of it. Africa Africa. In his mouth, it’s not such a blatant incongruity as it once was. He gazes at the horizon with the eyes of a landowner. He’s at home out there. He has good reasons to articulate the word Africa.
When he talks about it now he even seems just the slightest bit blasé.
One would think he had already been to Africa. Think that he spends half his life there. Six months of every twelve. He’s kind of had enough of Africa. He’s going to take a break. A few months without Africa, that would be good for him, a change of scenery. He would take advantage of the break to read, to write, at last. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but everything about his attitude, his allusions, and his silences suggests a weary adventurer who wouldn’t mind granting himself a little break.
Oh! But only to bounce back even higher.
What a lark! This man who seems to think that nobody knew how to use paper before he gave them a demonstration, now he wants to pose as a man of action, and in order to do that, he wants the word Africa to resound as often as possible. Africa Africa. Sometimes he says Mali instead; it’s more accurate.
Precision is one of the most acclaimed qualities of his style.
Indeed, he has been invited to Mali, to a village, on the banks of the Niger. He will decline. He won’t give his real reasons. He won’t say that it’s because of cowardice, indifference, and because in the confines of his stunted spirit he feels so pleased with himself that he sees no reason whatsoever to modify his condition and prefers to let the marrow melt delectably under his tongue with his eyes turned inward.
An attentive ear would hear him snoring.
Great poems rise up in him:
Africa Red land of the black man
Land of the return to self when the dust settles
Here discipline and savagery are co-wives
Here you must dig a well in the crust to reach the fruit
Here you see and admire yourself in the shining ebony face
Etc.
People would believe it. Why bother actually going?
Africa Dry shore of the Milky Way
Moon of the moon without water or electricity
Without its astronaut boots the elephant won’t go far
Here the weapons are coarse but the sun has been hit
Here is its great body outstretched on the earth
Etc.
Because he no longer believes in poetry, he no longer believes in Africa, either.
Africa has never been more than a poetic creation to him, a territory peopled by the dream of chimerical animals, elephants (elephants!), giraffes (giraffes!). Because poetry, exhausted, suddenly has no words left to name it, it must disappear. How long has it been since a new pachyderm was evoked? Our pragmatism from here on out can do nothing with these childish fancies. Africa is far behind us, ancient history.
It was nothing but a dream.
Naïve fiction of innocence preserved, of a prehistory that has lasted into the present. So quick to marvel before the authenticity of the Fula and the Masai, the western traveler refused to recognize or admit to his own—suddenly, curiously enough, authenticity equals rusticity. Then he pretends to envy the Fula and the Masai who haven’t lost theirs and laments that he must belong to a derailed civilization, incomprehensible and false.
But this rapture and this refusal and this pretense and this lamentation characterize nothing other than the authentic western traveler.
For he has theories that he doesn’t hesitate to divulge in public. He considers himself an authority ever since he received the invitation from Africa. The western traveler, he says for example, has no fear of affirming, considers the Fula or the Masai as individuals who are essentially inhabitants of a place, typical, leading lives tightly structured by their customs, their rites, their traditions, and the western traveler broods over them, feasting his eyes on them, filled with tenderness.
Don’t they live in truth?
The Fula is one hundred percent Fula. Fula from head to toe. Fula when he sleeps, too. Fula consenting prisoner of Fula. Fula like none other would know how to be Fula and especially not the Masai, far too Masai for that, Masai to the tips of his fingernails, Masai even when he thinks about something else, intractably and definitively Masai, in each of his gestures, in each o
f his actions, Masai.
Fula Fula and Masai Masai.
Fula inside and out, Fula in depth and on the surface, Fula with no other horizon than Fula, Fula in the Fula in the Fula in the Fula, Fula sewn up with Fula, stuffed with Fula, son Fula and father Fula, Fula as only the Fula, and especially not the Masai who is nothing but Masai, stuck in Masai, rooted in Masai, married to Masai, eating Masai, dancing Masai, singing Masai, dying the death of the Masai.
Masai Masai and Fula Fula.
As for him, the western traveler, he is endowed with a freedom not only physical, economical in nature, but also mental, psychological, which is precisely what permits him to travel, to understand all cultures immediately and perfectly, in any case that’s what he seems to think, as if he weren’t typical with his baseball cap and animated by reflexes acquired in his native land, made up of the same clay as any other, and where he’ll remain as nothing more than an empty bowl on the potter’s wheel.
Spirit without attachments or prejudices flying across the world offered up to his curiosity, to his limitless understanding, and which reserves for him its hidden beauties: this is how he sees himself.
Nonetheless, it’s difficult to find a more determined, more predictable, more folkloric individual than the western tourist. It’s not by chance that caricaturists sitting on their folding chairs wait for them in all the high places. Rigorously truthful portraitists who amuse their models by holding up mirrors to them. And the more the latter laugh, the more their traits swell, their nostrils flair, their noses lengthen.
And it’s hardly worth noting that they have fat knees.
Not him. He won’t go running headlong into it. But he’s looking for information about the village. He feels he needs to flesh out his discourse with a few concrete details when serving it up to his fascinated and moving audience. He obtains the regional gazette, which informs him:
The waters of the river rose abruptly and flooded the banks up to the first houses of the village. A hippopotamus wreaked havoc among the sand tradesmen. Two of them have already died. Tiémoko Coulibaly lost his life on Monday following an attack by the animal. According to witnesses, Tiémoko and his companions had already finished loading their canoe with sand when they were attacked. Tiémoko fell into the water. His body was not found until the next day. The second victim was Hamadoun Touré. The angry hippopotamus stomped twice on the pirogue, which capsized. Hamadoun Touré sank like a stone.
Is that concrete enough?
At the same time, this lamentable news brief reinforces his incredulity (a hippopotamus!). Africa is improbable. He then remembers that they were planning to house him on the riverbank. The Niger lapping against the walls of the Residence. Never before had the threat of being stomped on by a hippopotamus made him shudder. Faced with this peril, he remained stoic.
But suddenly his courage wavers.
He’s there quite comfortably in his imagination, in this distant country. The trip itself has proven utterly uninteresting, just the hassles of airport and visa, the chore of dealing with the baggage porter. As though his African adventure could accommodate such a trampling. Mali means hippopotamus in the Bambara language. All you have to do is know it and say it, and it’s the same as having been there, as returning from there. I am expected in the Republic of the Hippopotamus, he says.
And you?
Little by little the trap closes on him. He can no longer back out. People wouldn’t understand. Now he regrets that he didn’t hold his tongue. He’s just about to leave, he hears them whisper behind his back. They’re chasing him out. They’re banishing him. Here he is, forced into exile. His decision still unmade, people come from everywhere to say good-bye. Fine, fine, he’ll go.
He will have been brave for once in his life, trembling in every limb.
He’s going. He situates himself comfortably in the reclining seat, in position for takeoff. Through the clouds he makes out a Spanish scarf, he dips his toes in the Atlantic, he rakes the Saharan sand with his fingers. He passes through some turbulence, faints briefly, then the doctor removes his rubber glove, tosses the syringe in the trash, all set, you can put your shirt back on.
He needs no fewer than six vaccines to finally feel affected by Africa.
He’s going to go. It’s still the surest way to come back. Then he’ll be mistaken for another man. A new man. Africa changed me completely. I used to be that, now I’m this. I was White and now I am Black. He already hears himself say: Life’s not worth living without the harsh test of Africa. And: You think you understand Africa from the papers and the news, but no, not at all, don’t make me laugh. You have to have been there.
You have to have lived there to know what Africa truly is.
He already hears himself say: Submit yourself to the harsh test of Africa. If you want to know yourself, my boy, go to Africa. Go search for your truth in Africa. Renounce your bourgeois habits, renounce your morbid, nauseating happiness, go to Africa. You who doubt, you who contemplate yourself in frivolous despair and bitterness, go instead to Africa. Take the risk of Africa.
And he will write My Mali.
He usually writes in pencil on loose-leaf paper. It’s not ideal for travel. You have to be able to write on your knees. You have to be able write shoulder to shoulder with people in a crowd. You have to be able to write at night, by the light of a hurricane lamp or a match. And perched in a tree. Lying on the grass. In a trough of sand or dirt. He dreams of obtaining a little pocket notebook.
Black, covered by moleskin, with an elastic closure.
In the meantime, he’s just received his passport. I had to have it renewed, he says. But it’s clearly the first time he’s ever had a passport. He grabs the flat object by a corner and dangles it in front of his face, then taps it with the palm of his left hand. With his fingertips he caresses the smooth and luminous cover, with its very fine grain. Until now he has only known such intense feelings when handling the cover of his checkbook.
And yet now it’s the contrary. He’s done with petty savings.
And long live exhausting your resources. Living without counting. Double or nothing every second, playing with fire. He strokes his brand new passport. He considers accelerating its aging process. Maybe if he ran it under water, or forgot it outside in the grass for a night? Should he cover it with dirt, or scour it against a rugged stone? Or would it be enough just to scratch it up a bit with his fingernail?
A passport isn’t worthy of the name unless it has made it out of the lion’s den.
And as for him, will he also expose himself to violent winds and storms to tan his own hide a little before he leaves? My God, he’s so pink! The baby doesn’t change! Skin unchangeably baby-soft, it makes you want to kiss him on the neck, caress his thighs. I’ll have to have all that beaten out of me. No corns on his feet or calluses on his palms, this little cutie.
Where are his scars?
He’s leaving, and that’s final. He tells everyone, even when nobody asks. —And what is the purpose of your trip? —Humanitarian. —Really? —Yes. In this country devoid of shadows, mine will soon appear . . . At this point, one thing at least is certain: He won’t come back any stupider. Why is he going, actually? What is he going to do in Africa? Simple enigma. As always, as everywhere, he is going to look for a book.
Did you think he was going to bring back the moon?
He’s not going with the intention of pillaging the treasures of African art, or of trafficking ivory, rhinoceros horn, and gorilla thumb. He won’t stuff the cargo hold of the plane with baby wild animals or parakeets. He won’t hide an ebony trunk in his intestines. But if he finds some bit of old mythology that’s not too well-known here, if someone tells him a wonderful story that he could claim as his own with impunity . . .
Writing, for him: to raid.
For he’s far too lucid in any case to keep a journal and try to persuade his reader that he’s the first white man to land in Africa. You can’t just talk about about your travels anymore, u
nless it happens that the telling itself becomes a catastrophe, that all his slides display backwards, and then one of these slipped in by mistake, there’s a scandalous flash of nudity, with nothing to do with his adventure at all, and then the screen falls off the wall.
And then the projector catches fire.
His nights are troubled. The boat pitches from side to side. He dreams that Africa is an open hand that threatens to slap him and this hand does actually hit him, right cheek, left cheek, then crushes him against his bedroom wall like a bug. He wakes up hollering, his companion takes his hand, wipes his forehead, speaks softly to him. He breathes. He calms down. Little by little he relaxes. He falls back asleep, relieved.
Striking him like an axe, Africa splits him in two from top to bottom.
Where is he going with that wheelbarrow? To the pharmacy. He fills two whole travel bags with medications. Dying is now out of the question. He also buys whatever he needs to preemptively arm himself against specific dangers: sunscreen with SPF 100+, protective lip balm, mosquito repellent, antivenin, capsules to purify water. It reassures him, but it terrifies him too.
Could he, despite it all, just pretend that he’d lived in Africa?
Will he even be able to claim that he survived the harshness of Africa, so long as he has the protection of these sundry coverings? People will think he sent his grandmother instead of himself, or that he had expedited a smooth, cold photograph of himself across the land. And yet it’s the skin that really travels, the skin alone. It’s the skin that discovers America and both poles through its pores and nerves.
The eyelids learn of new realities much more quickly than the eyes.
And yet he’s getting ready to go to Africa without it, without his skin, seeing as it’s so thoroughly coated and saturated by protective lotions that it will no more experience Africa than if it was parting ways with him for a nice trip to Norway, or if he’d left it hanging in the soft shadows of his closet, alongside his winter clothes. But who said anything about feeling or touching? He wants only to take, and a gloved hand can do it as well as the bare.