Transit (8 page)

20

ALICE

WHEN I MET YOUR FATHER
, I wasn't looking for some mythical Africa; I wasn't looking for the love of my life, the way others run after a great novelist. To tell you the truth, I wasn't looking for anything at all; I was just dragging myself around, bored and daydreaming away on the banks of the Vilaine River. Africa would come to me all by herself, like a big girl. Alas, my little cactus, it was not the rebellious continent, just the Africa of news reports as they're filtered through the clear conscience of the West. Then it became the Africa of dictators with Swiss bank accounts, the Africa of rickety children and bony old men, the Africa of famine and the shameless looting of its resources, the Africa of squalid huts and gleaming white teeth, the Africa of landless people, the Africa of guerrillas and desperados. The so-called experts who speak about Africa do not think it necessary to know its languages. Can you imagine a Sinologist who can't say hello-goodbye in the language of his studies? But I'm getting off my topic.

At that time, especially at that age, I was constantly fuming with rage, living on a volcano of passions. I wrapped up my studies of history with a college degree, and, disgusted by what
they were teaching me about Africa and the French Empire, I registered for the entry examination to the School of Journalism in Paris. I felt ready to land on the burning banks of the Red Sea and examine the Africa I had begun to imagine, a many-layered, historical pastry with unique sedimentation. Your father joined me there, abandoning his band of friends with a heavy heart. He seemed to have grown up: in a few weeks, he had climbed the steps of age it usually takes many years to ascend. The perspective of finding his country still under colonial rule had given him wings, even if he dreaded the ordinary racism on both sides of the fence and what people might say once we were settled there. He lived through the last months of his life in Paris like a passerby, light-heartedly wearing the first wrinkles on his brow and a little paunch in his midsection. He couldn't care less about it, because in Djibouti, when you're married and past thirty, people talk to you like you're a responsible man, the head of a family, an almost-old man. Then, very quickly, came the whirlwind of the return. For the first few months, you don't really know who you are. You go from one house to another, one family to another, one friend to another with the assurance of a tightrope walker. You listen to advice; you collect various views and contradictory opinions with the same ears, without asking yourself too many questions. You don't really know who you are, or who they are. Everything is intoxicating: visiting the country, combing the city. Real life, right? But that feeling won't last. Soon, they put you in a ready-made box: you're the mixed couple people look at suspiciously. On lonely evenings (or their corollary, boring ones), you'll catch yourself sobbing at the prospect of once again having to face the gaping sadness that comes after dusk. You tell yourself that for him, you're ready to accept pain, humiliation, and even the sorrow to come, when things become normal, when his family wants to take back their man. We'll be caught in the midst of the storm,
but alive and strong. In that situation of insidious adversity, you can only get tougher. A little inner voice would whisper to me on difficult days: “What made you come here to this land of echoes and dust, this antechamber of the desert where they bury the dead quickly to prevent the flies from gathering and performing their diabolical ballet? You're breathing an air made of boredom, routine, and triumphant poverty. Here, no one's going to ask much of you. Where will you put your tombstone if anything happened to you? Let this man and people like him soliloquize till the end of time.”

A month after our arrival, both of us found work. The authorities must have wanted to polish up their image: a domino couple with college degrees just off the plane, isn't exactly run-of-the-mill here, even if the president of the territorial council, M. Ali Aref, dug up a Frenchwoman from Nîmes—a naive lady, they say—with the help of Jacques Foccart, the man who distributes destinies in French-speaking countries allied with France. In September 1973, I was starting my first year of teaching at the Boulaos junior high school and your father joined the little scientific institute mainly devoted to geology, which had just opened its doors on the road to the airport. I really couldn't bring myself to be a journalist under the “leadership” of the high commissioner of the Republic, and aside from reporting on sports scores, I don't see what I could have shared with this milieu. I remained walled up in my silence with my colleagues; almost all of them were French, spurred on by the prospect of buying their rented apartment in a few months. Open my heart to them—are you kidding? They would have thought I was crazy, a terrorist almost, a half-wit who should be sent back on the first ship bound for France. I could read hypocrisy, spinelessness, and cowardice in their eyes. I kept my distance, never letting them think their meaningful glances or invitations had any effect on me.

Stay on your own side of the river, and above all never throw oil on the fire, never arouse the right-wing crowds of the colony and pet the muzzle of Lucifer. At first, we managed to avoid the cold kiss of killing steel by keeping ourselves at a respectful distance from the authorities. But as one might expect—and perhaps we nourished some illusions in this respect—your father received a cool welcome from his family, and even from some of his friends who had recently returned to the fold. The time was not ripe for mixed-race love or mixed flavors in this erratic country, this womb so fertile it cannot keep its children unless it uses a straitjacket and holds them in neurotic silence.

When we landed we were dreaming of a world in which people looked each other straight in the eye and spoke to each other like human beings, a world where people spoke man to man the way South Americans address each other—
Hombre!
—with no distinctions of class, race, or nationality. Alas, this country and its sun drove me mad. Their way of living in apnea infuriated me. Always waiting, spying on the neighbor's breathing, the cousin's breathing, the breathing of the man who came back from Ethiopia that summer or the woman who just found a meaningless administrative job at the Fisheries through her relatives. Waiting. Waiting. I could have written a whole notebook of his return to the country of his ancestors as I waited.

But there were also things more serious than my petty bouts of melancholy; what's more, you know me, I'm not a poetess of the tropics, you can see that straightaway, right? Sure, they'd warned me, but really, as long as you haven't lived through something yourself it's a waste of time. As long as you haven't felt the tough, concrete reality in your own flesh it doesn't amount to a row of beans. Ali Aref's henchmen kept the little colony in a state of permanent terror as if their political mentors were Dr. Malan and the farmer Ian Smith, respectively the brain behind apartheid in South Africa and the strong man
of the future Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia after the name of the British explorer and builder but nonetheless exterminator Cecil Rhodes. On the map of Africa, only Djibouti—besides Rhodesia and Pretoria—was still living under the colonial yoke. I'm sorry, my little cactus, if I'm giving you so many political examples that are not from your time. It's to better render the sound and fury of that period, nauseating and explosive all at once, and then I felt terrible when they associated me with the last little bunch of colonists just because I was French. In fact, I was a walking disgrace; maybe you'll understand that some day. An animal with horns avoided by your father's so-called friends. I couldn't have cared less about their distrust, aside from the fact that all around us the atmosphere was insurrectional. The lower city was untenable even if the Foreign Legion held the main roads and intersections from the end of the afternoon on. On the Richter scale of fear, our world had toppled into eruptive, telluric panic. A world the color of meat and blood. Of poverty, too: never had I seen so many begging hands at every bus stop, so many malnourished children as there were the month after we arrived. It's because of the famine in Ethiopia, said the propaganda. And a world of bling and lucre, where, at noon prayer on Fridays, we could already see crowds of suvs, exhibited as zebus once were in times gone by.

Ali Aref and his supporters had done all they could to sort people out, and anathema and exclusion were the rule. Your membership in a tribe, or more precisely a clan, contrary to the common appellation, was stamped on your identity card, and, as if that weren't enough, they invented a new population category, decreed non-native on the pretext that they were supposed to be from Somalia. Non-natives and nomads of the inner country had to go through the Balbala checkpoint to get here, to the capital. This checkpoint was a miniature Berlin
Wall. One word too many and you'd be accused of sabotage on the spot, handcuffed, shackled, and brought to the Service du Fichier, the data agency behind the only high school in the colony—attended mainly by children of expats, let me say in passing. You had two solutions: confess all the sins of Israel and you had a very slight chance of being released, broken but alive, intellectually annihilated but still hanging onto life by the guardrail. You would return home, but it was an open secret that you'd been turned; appointed by the secret services and their slave forever, you'd be constantly on edge now: you'd take to your heels at the sight of a dead caterpillar. The other solution: you had nothing to confess, had committed no crime, and your corpse would be carried by the tide between Haramouss and Loyada or, at two cable-lengths from town, between the slaughterhouses and Boulaos, half-decapitated by a shark, twisting in a net of seaweed, your skin eaten away by salt and the sun of the Last Judgment as an eyewitness. Of course there were a few exceptions, widely bruited about and held up as examples to hail the kind indulgence of the white chief. Again and again they told of the case of such-and-such, a young man from a good family led into the temptation of rebellion, the harmful influence of friends quickly detected, the virus eradicated, the young man miraculously saved from deadly waters, God recognizing his own, God always works in mysterious ways with resurrection at the end of the road, blah-blah-blah, once he was put on the straight and narrow the young man was sent off to study in France with a scholarship awarded by the Territory like that Vic Lebleu and his silly nickname.

Despite battalions of paid informers, the wrath of the people never ceased to explode during the two decades of the Aref regime. The people found a way to express itself creatively, each link in the chain doing its job; with no clear leader, the results
were obvious nonetheless: now the people was building barricades in poor neighborhoods, driving the Legionnaires away with stones, occupying Gabode prison, derailing trains, boycotting French products and schools, and refusing to pay taxes of all kinds, as in August 1966. Everything would suddenly calm down for a while, and then, without advance notice, start up again with renewed vigor. The staccato drone of helicopters grazing the rooftops and the heads of the demonstrators, the suffocating smell of tear gas, the neighborhoods locked down, the main roads blocked, the headquarters of the labor unions sacked, the arbitrary arrests, lashes of whips, pointless humiliations, expulsions from the country, the corpses of activists on the sidewalks—everything was catching fire again. Then back to calm. The cycle of struggles would begin its rounds again elsewhere, tomorrow, based on spontaneous anger, underground activism, the slogans of poets and singers, the ruses of the multitude—the thousand-and-one faces of solidarity. The multitude is the old woman who carries in water to soothe eyes smarting from the gas; it is the women who gather stones and give them to the men and to the children who have taken the vanguard—
mater dolorosas
and amazons all at once. The multitude is the muezzin who calls for insubordination and at the same time for prayer and return to the bosom of God. The multitude is the rage of the rebels, most often adolescents, confronting forces stronger than they are, biting the dust and getting up again to charge the enemy. The multitude is repetition, too. Starting again, always. Resistance and desire are present in every moment of life. Raising an old bush song to rally, relay, reconnect, wake sleeping energy, shake the genealogical tree. The old underground laws show the tip of their nose. Raids, razzias, fantasias, vendettas, last-ditch stands, everything that could frighten the good organization of the colony. Depriving the high commissioner of sleep, and his local native, too.
Telling the outside world, seeking out potential allies in the enemy camp. It is impossible for the police to contain the movement, its life, its protuberances, its transformations, its desires and its new needs, which come from afar, from very far. Silence, exile, and cunning. Crossing and re-crossing borders that make no sense for anyone; a surge of nomadic life, mobility, cooperation, exchange, sharing, the power to annoy. “Irredentism, irredentism,” shouted the head of the high commissioner's cabinet. No matter.