Читать книгу The Amputated Memory - Marjolijn de Jager - Страница 14

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Naja, my mother, thank you for my life;

And Grandmother, thank you for my education above all,

For without education a person is nothing, a void.

Humans are not born divine or even human;

They grow into it, achieving it by choosing to transform,

Achieving it primarily because of education.

What is the mystery, then? Enormous work;

The very mystery of the divine is work.

Naja, my mother,

The guitar player isn’t born playing;

The blacksmith isn’t born blowing;

The physician isn’t born healing.

Humans become what they learn,

What they practice with passion again and again.

No, Njokè, my father,

The murderer isn’t born killing,

Nor is the soldier born shooting other human beings;

The politician isn’t born telling lies,

Nor is the trader born cheating;

The wise man isn’t born holy.

Humans are transformed by thought and word,

By actions and realizations,

By time, but by education above all.

What is the mystery, then? Enormous work;

The very mystery of the divine is work.

• • •

Unfortunately, for most of us work is contradictory to pleasure. I thank God that he granted me the good fortune to weave the two together. A slave cannot make that connection. My namesake, Grand Madja Halla, always told me, “You, you’ll always know whether you are free or not as long as you’re able to link work and pleasure.”

Then she revealed to me that she was a caramel woman, and afraid of the sun. And so, at the crack of dawn she’d gather embers, put machetes and hoes in the baskets we carried on our heads, and off we’d go to the field. She’d light a fire because it was still quite cold at that hour. We worked in silence with twice the usual zeal just to stay warm and to keep the insects from stinging us. Sometimes Grand Madja struck up a song and created a rhythm, which my little sister and I would then join—a kind of regular, irresistible motor. In this way, we always accomplished a huge amount of work that earned us our husband’s praise.

We stopped as soon as the sun became too hot. We’d harvest tubers in the last field, pick leaves, fruits, and vegetables, and then go home. Our husband wasn’t like the one in the folktales who forced his caramel wife to work in the sun just to prove that she wasn’t lazy, as the malicious neighbors claimed when they sneered at her. Instead of protecting her, that husband had forced his wife to prove them wrong, something so unnatural to her that she melted completely, and her husband lost the love, sweetness, and wealth she had brought him while working in the shade.

Grand Madja, Caramel Woman, you told us:

“Sheltered from the burning sun, you can take your time,

And if you take the time to do each thing well,

Each thing well-done will provide you with its own pleasure:

“In the shade of the cocoa trees, take your time to crack the pods neatly: You’ll be rewarded and able to remove the beans without the frustration of sand and dirt on poorly maintained machetes.

“Take your time to choose carefully the most beautiful and juiciest pods by separating them from the second-rate ones, and you will be doubly rewarded. First, the cocoa wine you can extract from them will be of high quality, as will the chocolate for which your pods are used when it’s time to sell them in the market.

“In the shade of the palm trees, take your time to slice the palm leaves evenly, and you’ll have the esthetic pleasure of making prettier piles. When it’s time to pick the mushrooms growing there, you’ll have the pleasure of work well done: All you need to do is reach out and run your hand through the piles as if you’re sauntering in a dream. Then, when the mounds are completely dry, burn them carefully and again you’ll be rewarded with extraordinary compost that you’ll use to plant onions or potatoes, which will grow like a miracle.

“Take your time when you’re gathering the palm tree fruit; select the best, and the best palm oil will be yours. Keep the lesser ones dry and pound them gently to obtain half-dry cabbage palms, the only ones that produce lan, the magic oil that protects babies’ skin and the soft spot in their skulls from a thousand different ailments. Once you’ve extracted the oil, be careful to stack the bikagang, those round husks now emptied of their oil; other mushrooms will be your reward, that no waste scattered to the winds will ever produce.

“I cannot list the endless pleasures that extra effort toward perfection will bring you, my ‘little doubles.’ But you have to take your time. And, alas, when you are caramel as I am, it is difficult to take your time in the burning sun.”

Of course, our everyday experience taught us all the advantages of working this way, of transforming one activity into thousands of creative possibilities, joys, and infinite delights. But I wondered about the real story behind the caramel.

For twenty years or so, I tried to live by another one of her sacred theories: “I have no law; I make adaptability my primary law.” And so I turned myself into water, condensing with the cold, melting and evaporating with the heat, like dripping rain in bad weather, leaping in free, tumultuous waterfalls from dizzying heights into unfathomable chasms. It was good, of course—everything had its place to which it always returned, and there is no better situation for any spirit than one with so much flexibility. Still, there are those thousand deaths you die without ever knowing the end. You die as an ice cube to be born a few moments later as vapor, and hardly have you become vapor when you die again to be reborn as dew or drizzle, only to start the process all over again.

Start over or continue?

That is precisely the problem: It lies in the perception of time and in the continuity of that perception, always ephemeral, a restlessness going every which way.

That is when I thought I discovered the story of the caramel woman, who must preserve her form at any price so that her action can move toward a real continuity, and endure beyond the time it takes vapor to turn into drizzle.

Yes, a woman who chooses to lead her life inside the home, for instance, needs a certain amount of time to build, give life to her children, and raise them to be men and women.

If she doesn’t safeguard her life or her form she will melt; yes, life will go on in other forms, but she, in her form as a woman, will not have the time to bring her endeavor to fruition.

When caramel melts it will, of course, continue to be caramel, but it may run and mix with the sand; ants, flies, and bees may eat it. It may even be forgotten right there in the sun where, with luck, it will stay intact until the night’s cool air restores its solidity. But it won’t find the whole of its former shape again. Of course, life goes on, all is well, but the woman cannot raise her children, and they are orphans.

“You who care so much about seeing your choices through to the end, about going to the finish line of what you want to realize here and now, you who are bounded in time, be very careful of your present form, which is so precious to your action, for you are a caramel woman.”

At almost eighty, I pronounce myself caramel: I need a little time; I refuse to expose myself to the burning sun; I am still needed, if only to sing the remembrance of you, my father.