Читать книгу The Amputated Memory - Marjolijn de Jager - Страница 17

6

In spite of the unspeakable agony, the ceremony was really lovely, and everyone had something to contribute.

So as not to blame himself later on, should things turn out badly, for giving blessings without believing in them himself, Grand Pa Helly delegated the task to his cousin and initiation partner, the Mbombock Tonyè Nuk. This man was dying with admiration for your daring and good luck (which he called insolence), although he considered them arrogant, Father. Uttering his blessings upon you, he asked that the power you had just snatched from the esoteric forces of nature be productive for you and for the entire tribe. He recited a series of highly symbolic proverbs, and concluded that, no matter what, you alone were responsible for deciding what to place in your bag, riches or rags.

Grand Madja forced herself not to meet her son’s gaze so that she wouldn’t cast a shadow over his happiness. She moved from a group of Mbombock initiates to a group of Kindak initiates, serving them kola nuts, kola bitters, flavored bark, and Guinea pepper—ingredients that, when measured in a particular way, are supposed to wrap the spoken word in very special power. People chewed them while uttering incantations.

In spite of the huge number of guests, Aunt Roz went out of her way to cook beautifully prepared dishes, as if she were merely making dinner for her husband Ratez. She took special care with the presentation, and every time she served a new dish the crowd gave her an ovation.

Even my mother joined the party! She smiled at all her known or presumed rivals, seating them affably and showing personal concern for each. She’d chat with one and laugh loudly with another. She exuded charm, and was so attractive that many of the guests couldn’t hide the fact they were mesmerized and captivated by her.

In the end, the sorry sight was you, Father! It happened when you saw my mother chatting warmly with your cousin Gwét; he was telling her how incomparable she was, assuring her she’d always be the queen of this family if not the tribe, that the men of your clan would never abandon her if you were to be foolish enough to neglect her. Had it not been for the presence of mind of Great-Aunt Kèl Lam, who immediately began to hum the praise song of your superiority, we might have seen you run after Uncle Gwét the way you once went after Uncle Ngan, bat in hand. Aunt Roz burst out laughing, took my mother by the hand, and led her away, saying: “Bravo, Naja, well done! Now that you’ve decided to listen to me nothing will throw you off anymore, you’ll see. Let’s go and have a drink.”

They went off together serenely, supreme in their complicity; and you left, peeved, forced to follow your man’s destiny. My apathy in the face of this male status, which had once impressed me so, came as a big surprise to me. I began to think that perhaps this status was no more than appearances. Might Grand Pa, my super husband, be right? Maybe I was in the throes of acquiring something finer than what a man had.

Perhaps it was because that day I was the only one to watch you without fear, without any specific attitude toward you, that you came to me and addressed me for the first time as one human being to another, honestly and openly. Or so it seemed to me, at least.

You asked about the school I’d just begun. You talked to me about White women and the Yellow women of the People’s Republic of China, who were involved in the same things as men: warfare, politics, trade, and technology. Some of them actually commanded battalions and flew airplanes. You told me that only the school of the White people would liberate Black women, because then they wouldn’t be compelled to marry and become submissive to a man out of habit.

“Take your mother, for example. She shouldn’t be in a position to need me; she is much too intelligent for that. But she believes the contrary out of habit, because that’s how she was raised. If you continue to be serious about your studies at the White school, you’ll acquire new habits and won’t need to slither around like a snake, the way she’s doing right now for no good reason.”

I didn’t understand what you were alluding to, but I remember that you said you would help me study at the White and Yellow universities as long as I passed all my exams without failing. You told me you’d be going away for a while, but that you’d come back in time to keep your promise.

I was so thrilled that I danced the Nding behind Great-Aunt Kèl Lam for the first time, copying her steps and her mysterious cries. She announced she had found her replacement, and everyone congratulated me. I don’t know why, but at the end of the ceremony I had the impression that it was actually I who had been honored more than my father, for my bliss was greater than that of all the others put together.

• • •

Because I wanted to know so much more about the Lôs, I still remember that you, Father, told me this by way of explanation the next day: “A Lôs is someone who, without any special training, seizes enough power and strength from the forces of nature to change the course of his life. He can speed up the evolution of things and people in time and space, and he can impose his will on human beings and on the elements. He can also slow them down, impose his own rhythm on time and people. For example, Dimalè, or ‘Catastrophe,’ as his name implies, really is a disaster for the ordinary man who runs up against him, because for the ordinary man the unexpected is always catastrophic. The ordinary man loves his habits, his tranquility, and his routine. The relatively exceptional man, however, who sees all of life as a pathway of initiation, is always interested in coming up against the unexpected. Catastrophe is the sign that renewal is underway. And the Lôs, the ‘Ultra-powerful’ who is necessarily exceptional, greets catastrophe gladly, for it will allow him to evolve.”

I then remembered that they said Dimalè had a genie inside him that gave him the power to impose his will on people ten times stronger than he. He would even put the village chief to work to carry out every one of his new desires: a piece of land he liked on which he wanted to establish new plantations, a new woman he’d seen somewhere whom he wanted to marry, a new friend with whom he wanted to join forces, even if he lived more than ten villages away. All the men who lived along that route would have to congregate, along with their wives and children, to install roads, lay out and dam up new paths, build bridges, work his new lands and those of his new allies. Obviously this was catastrophic, and turned everyone’s life upside down.

But Dimalè was generous enough to let the land of those he forced to work for him be cultivated by the collective members of these new communities. As a result, and in spite of the fear and humiliation of forced labor, everyone ended up by having a share in the interest; everyone wound up with large plantations, while the bridges and roads were beneficial to all. A whole new way of life was thus born from the actions of an ultra-powerful man named Catastrophe. It was the reason why, in spite of his unsettling appearance, Dimalè had the support of a large section of the community, which found him more worthy of their admiration and respect than the “great and grand chiefs,” as they were known then, who looked like scarecrows.

“Some of these heroes stand out because of the power of their mountainous muscles and the strength of their steely nerves, like Bitchokè. Others because of the tenacity of their desire, the strength of their conviction and will, the wealth of their dreams and aspirations, like Dimalè,” you concluded, Father.

In contrast to Dimalè, you, Father, were tall and physically strong. You were handsome, and people were inclined to approach rather than withdraw from you. The Lôs, however, should always have something a bit repulsive about him, and you had nothing of the sort. You could permit yourself to unite strength and charm, and alternate between them as you wished. Why, then, did you create that need for those fits of brutality, which terrorized women and senselessly humiliated men? No doubt you were already trying to figure out how you might surpass Bitchokè, whom they called a ferocious animal, and in so doing you practiced to gain power by means of the absurd. If your father had ever dreamed you’d be a Lôs, the way Dimalè’s father surely had foreseen, he would have named you “Absurd,” instead of giving you a name as ordinary as Njokè, “The Elephant.”

What can I say today about your life as a Lôs? Did you slow down or accelerate the evolution of the world? Did you suspend or erase time? I’d give anything to hear your own perception of yourself, you whom I never heard express regret about anything at all—not about the worst of your blunders, or about any sorrow you may have endured. I wonder if you ever experienced remorse.

I could convince future storytellers, Father, that what guided you was the desire for beauty and greatness, a thirst for the absolute. It doesn’t really matter where it leads us; we all decide what we want to keep in our bag, rags or riches. The truth is not always pretty or merciful.

• • •

The new woman preceded you like ground hot pepper cast to the wind of a whirling harmattan, making one weep, sneeze, and cough: You came back with a White woman snatched from her husband. She owned cars, and so she had to have a paved road at least twenty-five kilometers long to go from the district’s central town to our village. Everyone knew that now the problems would really begin. Some decided to go and visit their maternal families where, in our tradition, one would be safe. But when you arrived you brought them back by force, and didn’t stop at whipping and recruiting their maternal uncles, a violation of the taboo that had never before been committed. From then on, no one anywhere would be safe.

You emptied out the fields and schools; you compelled women and children to clear the earth. And so Aunt Roz, my mother Naja, my sisters, and I found ourselves building a road to accommodate the arrival of your White wife and her vehicles. Your parents were the only ones who didn’t come to the construction site, but at least you didn’t have the nerve to beat them. They sat down on the ground in front of their house, legs stretched out in front of them, and they covered themselves with ashes as a sign of mourning. They kept a semi-fast for as long as the work went on, neglecting their own labor so they could devote themselves to prayer.

Once again I was infinitely lucky, since I was grooming myself to be like a White woman but had never seen one in the flesh. I wanted the road to be finished soon so that I could become enlightened. As a result I was the only one who, of my own free will, worked on the road with enthusiasm and zeal in order to attain my goal, and therefore I was the only one who actually enjoyed working there. For everyone else it was forced labor, slavery, and pure hell. They suffered insults and were whipped, felt humiliation, anger, hate, and ill will.

That is why all of them endorsed Mpôdôl when he stood up in the National Assembly meeting that was to consecrate our country as an Overseas Department of France, and said: “Down with colonization, down with the colonizers and their collaborators, down with forced labor and exploitation, long live liberty and our rights, long live ‘Independence!’” It was broadcast live on the Telefunken radio. Everyone stopped to listen because you had raised the volume, impatiently waiting for the moment that would make you a French citizen and break the barrier you’d been feeling between your White wife’s fellow citizens and yourself. It was a dreadful shock to you, who didn’t understand “that a Negro could stand up right there in the Assembly full of White men and question the already established rule.” You rose and declared that Mpôdôl was an outlaw and should be thrown in prison for the rest of his life—and at that very moment the voice from the Telefunken box repeated the same words, as if you’d crawled in to possess it the way a bissimè spirit possesses a woman in a trance.

We heard a huge hubbub inside the box.

“Where did he go? How come he’s ‘disappeared’? He’s not some spirit, after all! Get him back and bring him here dead or alive, even if that damned Elephant Forest has to be combed in its entirety!”

A loud noise followed, and then the box fell silent. You gave it a terrible kick, and it cracked open into a dozen pieces. All the people in the crowd took to their heels, scattered in different directions toward the forest, including my mother and Aunt Roz, while you, the “ultra-powerful” one, were unable to follow sixty adults taking off in sixty different directions at the same time, like the rays of a black sun. Only the children stayed, frozen, overcome by the sudden speed of the events. Time seemed to have set out on a madly accelerated course toward an unknown destination, where a trophy that should not be missed stood waiting.

How disarming you could be, Father! You didn’t seem concerned; you picked up the smallest children, one on your back, one on your shoulders, one by the right hand and one by the left. They clung to you like little monkeys. “It’s all over, children, we’re going home,” you said softly. All the other children followed your lead. You dropped each of them off in front of her or his parental home, and only my sisters and I were left, right behind you, when you arrived before your parents, who were in prayer and covered in ashes. We stood in front of them for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Grand Pa Helly raised his eyes and seemed to recognize something. You calmly told him: “It’s war, father, I have to leave. But don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.”

You went to get a bag from your bedroom and then departed from the village. A silent tear etched a path of its own through the ashes on Grand Madja’s right cheek.

You were the only one, Father, who used the word war. Nevertheless, a huge massacre followed, and cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand Bassa and Bamileke men, women, and children. Entire villages were burned and pillaged, women were raped, entire populations deported and confined to what they called “relocation camps,” where they were subjected to brainwashing sessions meant to convince them that Mpôdôl was their personal enemy, the enemy of their own evolution and global development—in short, the enemy of their happiness. A large part of the Elephant Forest was cleared and ravaged. None of this appears in official discourse or history books, which occasionally and only vaguely allude to “the events of independence.” Sooner or later, however, all of us had to count our dead and try to describe what had happened at home. Here is my account.