by James King
In many ways, Peggy was a hapless—but far from detached—observer of the gulfs between herself and the Somalis. She became particularly concerned with the plight of women, especially when she could do little or nothing to remedy a difficult situation. By dint of circumstance and determination, she taught herself to nurse. After word of her expertise spread, a group of women called on her for help with menstrual pains, pains made unbearable because of the removal of the clitoris or a sewing together of the labia: “I did not know what to say to these women. They were explaining, almost apologetically, their reasons for asking.… What should I do? Give them a couple of five-grain aspirin?… ‘I have nothing to give you. Nothing.’ This was the only undeceptive reply I could make. They nodded their heads unprotestingly. They had not really believed I could give them anything.”
Her helplessness in this situation was mirrored in her confrontation with a parched Somali woman and her dying child:
She must have possessed, once, a tenderly beautiful face. Now her face was drawn and pinched. In her hands she held an empty tin cup. She did not move at all, or ask for water. Despair keeps its own silence.… We had a little water left in our spare tank, and so we stopped. She did not say a word, but she did something then which I have never been able to forget.
She held the cup for the child to drink first.
…To her, I must have seemed meaningless, totally unrelated to herself. How could it be otherwise … What we could do here was only slightly more than nothing. Maybe she would reach the wells. Maybe she would not. She might with good reason have looked at us with hatred as we began to speed easily away, but she did not. She was past all such emotions. She knew only that she must keep on or she would perish, and her child with her.
This quintessential Madonna image, redolent of every essence of motherhood and seared into her memory, haunted her for the remainder of her life. Margaret Laurence, who would later in her fiction create a gallery of strong women, obviously received some of her inspiration from these encounters.
Cosmopolitan Djibouti in French Somaliland proved a welcome distraction when Jack and Peggy travelled there to supervise the unloading of the huge tractors and scrapers that could not be accommodated at the smaller port of Berbera. In Djibouti, no one went to bed before two or three in the morning; they frequented nightclubs on the sea front. There were all manners of exiles at the club—middle-aged prostitutes, various kinds of remittance men, colonial service officials in their immaculate whites—and they all co-existed peacefully, if resignedly. “Life was an existing from one whisky-and-soda to the next, and home was a place you would never see again.” She found refuge from the daytime heat by spending a large part of each day in the huge bathroom of the British Consul’s residence, where they were staying: “Each morning I filled the tub with cold water and perfume, and spent most of the day there, emerging at intervals to re-fill my pint glass of orange squash.”
At English-held Zeilah, on the coast near Djibouti, the Laurences stayed at the Residency, reputed to be the only three-storey dwelling in Somaliland. Built of coral-coloured stone blocks, its middle tier was surrounded by grey wooden verandas. In the 1950s, this absurd but magnificent building no longer had any official status. During their stay, the Laurences had the eerie feeling that an invisible presence surrounded them. Later, they learned there was a legend that a Somali policeman had been murdered there. According to the locals, the Laurences had obviously encountered his ghost.
When he went back by himself to Zeilah, Jack, not someone usually susceptible to ghost stories, refused the comforts of the Residency in favour of an airless shack. Only years later did he and Peggy learn the truth: a British administrative officer—not a Somali policeman—had killed his wife there and then shot himself. “I cannot entirely dismiss” the story, she later said; “Nor [could I] deny the overwhelming sense of occupation we felt in the tall grey house at the edge of the leaden sea, where the locusts flew with the silken wings of destruction, while out on the shore the whorled and fluted sea-shells, pearl white or gaudy as paints, inhabited by living claws, scuttled across the wet sands like creatures of fantasy which only in that one place could exist.”
A similar ghostly presence could be felt at the ruins of Amoud (“sand”), near Borama. Peggy could imagine a once-prosperous settlement, but what she saw was one of time’s sad relics: “The walls were falling away, and the mosque was desecrated by birds and small wild animals. The candelabra trees had grown inside the houses, their bright green tapers looking as though they had been here always.”
Gradually, Jack became known to the Somalis as odei-gi rer-ki, the old man of the tribe. The nickname signifies their acceptance of his special role in assisting them to overcome the hardships imposed by their unfriendly landscape. When the Caterpillar D-4 tractors and D-4 bulldozers were being uncrated at Zeilah, they could not be moved because they were jammed solidly behind a pillar in the ship’s hold. Further confusion ensued because Jack’s principal assistant was an Italian with no English. When Jack wanted to give him a message, he gave the message to Hersi, one of the Somalis, who translated it into Somali for a colleague, who then translated it into Italian. “I know now,” Jack exclaimed, “exactly what the tower of Babel must have been like.”
Relentless in his dedication, he was sometimes incautious. One day, the sun blazed even more fiercely than normal as Jack worked on the docks. When he arrived home, he hesitated at the doorway and called out, “Peg—give me a hand, will you? I can’t seem to see.” His blindness was accompanied by a splitting headache. Peggy became frantic, but the consul, who happened to be there, nonchalantly assured them it was sunstroke: “Bound to happen sooner or later, working out in the sun all day. It’ll probably pass off after an hour or so.” A few hours later, Jack was fine, and he returned to work the next day.
Jack was long-suffering. On one occasion, he had made a crucial point in painstaking detail to some of his workers, who merely nodded their heads in agreement although they had no idea what he was saying. “I was explaining,” he told Peggy, “the fact that the wing halls will have to jut out in a straight line, and I realized from that what they said that they didn’t have any concept of what a straight line is. Why should they? There aren’t any straight lines here. There isn’t a tree that doesn’t grow crookedly.”
Small problems were often of unsurmountable complexity—one such difficulty was the presence of a child prostitute, Asha, who was part of a jes, a Somali family following the camp, who sold tea and sweets to the workers. Asha, who was about eight years old, was accompanied by a disreputable-looking man, an old woman and an attractive girl of sixteen. Asha and Peggy hardly ever spoke, except when Asha, who was unusually unkempt for a Somali child, asked to borrow a comb. She was happy to comply, but she and Jack did not know how to deal with the horrendous circumstances of the child’s existence. If they interfered, Asha would be forced to leave and might face even more unpleasant circumstances. They did nothing. Then, during the jilal of 1952, Asha and her jes vanished. But the little girl never disappeared from Peggy’s imagination: “Asha’s half-wild, half-timid face with its ancient eyes will remain with me always, a reproach and a question.”
Peggy felt silenced. She had not yet found a voice to deal with such agonies. The very form of The Prophet’s Camel Bell reveals her hesitancy. Only after she has described her slow acclimatization to Somaliland does she attempt to give the reader a series of vivid portraits of some of the people she met there: the Italians Umberto and Gino, Hersi the interpreter and language teacher, Mohamed the cook, Arabetto the truck-driver, and another driver, Abdi, “The Old Warrior,” whose canny behaviour had saved the lives of the Laurences when they were overtaken by the flood. Peggy felt she could not venture to describe these persons until she had provided a context for them in the reader’s mind, almost as if she cannot attempt to explain another person until she has come to some solid understanding of his life. Almost painfully, however, these portraits—in form v
ery much like short stories—show how even the strongest will to understand can be defeated because of cultural differences.
The saddest gap between intention and reality is contained in the story of the disintegration of the Laurences’ friendship with Abdi, who had become increasingly jealous of their generosity to Mohamed.
We were caught between the two. All we wanted to do was keep the peace. We could not see why either of them should be making so much fuss about so little. We came to see something of Mohamed’s outlook, but Abdi’s was more difficult to see, for it was more deeply hidden. To us, the old warrior appeared to be two men. One was gentle, compassionate, courageous, the man who stopped the car rather than run over a bird, the man who sorrowed for his destitute people, the man who would walk calmly up to a poisonous snake. The other was fierce, violent, raging, the man whose anger had to run its course before it faded.
Abdi also disapproved of what he considered Arabetto’s influence over the Laurences, but the situation was modified by the favours dispensed by Jack, who intervened on his behalf to have his wages increased. Then, Jack fired a labourer, who turned out to be a relative of Abdi. “We will take that man back,” Abdi informed Jack, who retorted: “Oh no, we damn well won’t.” A series of minor incidents followed. When Abdi went to visit his family (using Jack’s Land Rover), Jack was willing to provide half a drum of water. Abdi wanted a full one and told anyone that would listen that the sahib was a shaitan, a devil, and a miser. Increasingly, Abdi became more withdrawn and sullen in the presence of the Laurences. Then, when his animosity turned against Hersi, Jack had to fire him.
At first, Peggy—as she told her diary—was inclined to believe “Abdi’s sweet talk to us was in the main a method of achieving favours. I think he has always hated us, simply because we are Ingrese, and that he could never feel any differently.” This was her suspicion at the time of Abdi’s apparent paranoia. Only years later did she realize this was not only too simple an explanation—one that distorted the truth whatever that was—but also a form of misguided, cultural appropriation. If she tried to understand the meaning of the break in Western terms, the reality of the situation would completely evade her. Ultimately, her way of dealing with the situation was to make it open-ended: “Abdi was a man of integrity, but in his own terms, not ours.” Her final conclusion was that Abdi’s “truest and most terrible battle, like all men’s, was with himself.”
Towards the end of The Prophet’s Camel Bell, Peggy provides another, extended portrait of “The Imperialists.” The opening of this chapter is given over to a description of “the English monarch’s official birthday celebrated in the outposts of empire with pomp and with tumult.” Her rendition of the event is laced with heavy sarcasm: “Every last one of these people purported to hate Africa, and yet they all clung to an exile that was infinitely preferable to its alternative—nonentity in England.” So angry did the trappings of empire make her that she “imagined that if I ever wrote a book about Somaliland, it would give me tremendous joy to deliver a withering blast of invective in their direction.” Her sense of fair play was such that she adds to this chapter a long gallery of small portraits of the foreigners who, despite their dubious status, tried to find ways of coming into accord with the Somalis.
As can be seen in a letter from November 1952, she kept important revelations about the English out of the book.
We were so glad to get away from Hargeisa, with all its constant and unvarying drink-parties, its bed-hoppers, and its gossip! Wait till I tell you about it! I never used to realize what Hargeisa was really like, but now that we’ve seen a bit more of it, we see that it’s no different from any other colony (at least Jack says it’s the same as India in that way) in its petty intrigues and all that. However, most of the Hargeisa population is discreet enough to keep their private lives reasonably private.
This code of silence had been broken by the outrageous behaviour of one couple. Peggy provided no details concerning the exact nature of their conduct in her letter. Later, at the time of the publication of The Prophet’s Camel Bell, she felt her book was much too sanitized, almost as if she had airbrushed essential—earthy—things out of the book. She held herself back in this book, as if she did not wish to reveal anything of her own thoughts or feelings about sex. In those days, Peggy could be easily shocked. When this was not the case, later on, she did not wish to betray her youthful naivety.
Fiction was safer. Indeed, “Uncertain Flowering,” Margaret Laurence’s only surviving short story set in Somaliland, contains a very unflattering portrayal of the sexual mores of the English. That story, a sombre one of initiation in which sixteen-year-old Karen Aynsley learns in a particularly painful way about the discrepancies between reality and appearance, is Margaret Laurence’s most powerful indictment of the world of white mischief airbrushed out of A Prophet’s Camel Bell. When Karen, on holiday from boarding school in England, visits with her parents at Bor Mado (obviously Hargeisa), she becomes aware her mother and father are both having love affairs, a situation they attempt to conceal in half-hearted ways. A shocked and confused Karen pretends to a knowledge of the world well beyond her years. She convinces a young officer, obviously infatuated with her mother, that she takes such matters in stride and, indeed, is herself a woman of the world, one recovering from a broken affair. This revelation lessens Howard’s reserve: “not thinking now, [he] pulled her closer to him, and let all his young longing for a woman take her as its object.” After they have sex, realizing that she lied to him, he is angry and repulsed: “You might at least have the decency to cover yourself.” He leaves the room:
“You think I should be glad,” she whispered. “You really think I should be glad …”
She lay there on the bed, still as stone, her body rigid. Her eyes were open, but they saw only the wall.
Young Peggy Laurence’s reaction to the expatriate world in which she was an unwilling participant can be glimpsed here. In Somaliland, she was forced to see how the world says it is governed by one set of rules, whereas, of course, another set prevails.
Somaliland provided yet another initiation to Peggy Laurence. Just as her husband was attempting to help in the fertilization of the Haud, she tried to find a parallel way of making a contribution to this strange desert land. Jack’s work was one of enlightened assistance, whereas Peggy’s was a fundamentally different one in which she searched for a way to make Somali culture accessible to the English.
Shortly after arriving in Somaliland, Peggy, who had long had an abiding interest in the magic of words, found a kindred spirit in Bogomil Andrzejewski, always known as Guś (pronounced “Goosh”). He was a tall, thin, angular Pole, who having escaped his native country during World War II, joined the Free Polish Forces in England and subsequently attended Oxford University. A linguist specializing in the Somali language and its phonetics, he spoke Somali better than any other European there. In Poland, he was a published poet, which immediately established a bond with Peggy. Sheila, Guś’s English wife, was also a kindred spirit, a link clearly established on the day she informed her: “I don’t really think I was cut out to be a memsahib.” Peggy was not as attuned to Musa, Guś’s Somali assistant, a well-known poet.
One evening, while she and Sheila had been listening like “acolytes” to Musa speaking of some of the intricacies of his language, Peggy, in her impulsive way, blurted out, “Could some of the Somali poems be rendered into English?” “Absolutely not,” rejoined Musa derisively. Guś was intrigued, and a somewhat chastened Musa said he would have to ponder the possibility. Later, after the other two had left, Jack advised his wife: “Take it easy. It may not work out.” But even that evening, Peggy was convinced it would. During the following months, she and Musa even became close friends.
Her first step was to learn to speak Somali, a frustrating experience because she was often misunderstood and condescended to by those with whom she was trying to communicate. Eventually, she, Guś and Musa devised a working relationship
:
Musa knew a great many gabei [a long, elevated poem] and belwo [a short, lyric love poem], and had a wide knowledge of the background and style of Somali poetry, but while his command of English was fluent, he had to discuss the subtler connotations of the words with Guś in Somali. Guś and I then discussed the lines in English, and I took notes on the literal meanings, the implications of words, the references to Somali traditions or customs. I would then be able to work on this material later, and attempt to put it into some form approximating a poem, while preserving as much as possible of the meaning and spirit of the original.
In her introduction to the published translations, she makes her motives clear: “In a country as barren as this, where the population is almost entirely nomadic and where the actual process of salvation demands so much effort and tenacity from each tribesman, it seems remarkable that there should be such a large body of unwritten literature, containing such a high degree of dramatic sense, vivid imagination and wit.” She did not want to undertake a useful writing task as much as she wanted to preserve something which might otherwise be lost. Throughout her entire writing career, she would be obsessed with the idea that through her creativity—the often painful act of writing—she was rescuing something that otherwise might be destroyed or never come into its rightful existence.