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SIX

Writing in Limbo

NOT LONG BEFORE PAULINE AND I WENT to Sierra Leone, a story broke in the English Sunday Times about the fate of an English yachtsman called Donald Crowhurst.¹ His trimaran ketch, Teignmouth Electron, had been found adrift in mid-Atlantic. The life raft was lashed in place, the helm swung freely, and the sails lay folded on the deck ready to be raised. But Crowhurst had vanished.

Three blue-bound logbooks on the chart table revealed what had befallen him.

On October 31, 1968, Crowhurst had set sail from Teignmouth, Devon, in a bid to win the Golden Globe single-handed round-the-world race. His trimaran had been built and equipped in a hurry. There had been no time for intensive sea trials, and Crowhurst had sailed late with his course unplanned. To make matters worse, hatches leaked, steering gear malfunctioned, and the electrics failed. The reasonable course would have been to abandon the voyage. But loathe to admit defeat, Crowhurst began to work out an elaborate deception in which he would calculate and radio false positions, giving the impression that he had rounded the Horn in record time and was making excellent progress across the Pacific. In fact, he was sailing in circles in the South atlantic, well away from shipping lanes, awaiting an opportune moment to announce that he had reached the Cape of Good Hope and was again in the Atlantic on the final leg of a circumnavigation of the globe.

What brought Crowhurst to the realization that he would never be able to pull off the deception? Inconsistencies in his carefully forged logbooks? Guilt over having deceived those who loved him and had supported his enterprise? Doubt in his ability to remember every detail of his concocted story and remain consistent in everything he said on his return to a hero’s welcome in England?

In the ineluctable silence and solitude of the sea, the yachtsman began to lose touch with reality. Entangled in the web of lies he had spun, he saw that his voyage was doomed. By the time he sailed into the Sargasso Sea, he had retreated into a wholly private world. Becalmed, and having lost all track of time, he began to imagine that he could leave his body at will and make himself divine. Surrounded by a debris of dirty dishes and dismantled radios, he penned one of the last entries in his log:

It is the end of my

game the truth

has been revealed

A few minutes later, he climbed the companion ladder to the deck, then stepped off the Teignmouth Electron into the sea.

As Pauline and I stepped from the aircraft, the hot soup–sweet African night enveloped us. My body felt swollen. My shirt stuck to my skin. Inside the airport terminal, African bodies pressed around us, pungent and cloying. It took two hours to get our passports stamped, to reclaim our baggage, and to clear Customs. We moved in a state of torpor, saying nothing, as if we were strangers to each other.

It was after midnight by the time we got away from the airport. Lightning flashed along the Bullom shore, and the humid air was heavy with the stench of decomposing vegetation and the sea.

In the taxi, the breeze through the open windows revived me. But I was beginning to rue the promise I’d made to my friend Alex Guyan in London. Alex had insisted that when we arrived in Freetown we stay at the City Hotel. Graham Greene had killed a lot of time there during the war, and Alex was an avid fan of Greene’s. It amused him to think of me sitting on the same balcony where Wilson sat at the beginning of The Heart of the Matter, “his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork... his face turned to the sea.”

I asked the taxi driver if he knew the City Hotel. Sure, he knew it. He could take us there for only thirty leones. It sounded like a lot of money, but I didn’t know the exchange rate and, besides, it was a bit late now to negotiate our fare.

Too tired to take anything in, we crossed the Sierra Leone River on a throbbing ferry and were driven through labyrinthine streets, lit by braziers and flickering oil lamps. By the time our taxi set us down outside the City Hotel, our minds were in a fug and we had lost track of time.

In the darkness, the wind thrashed at the palms in the hotel forecourt. Thunder rolled and caromed in the peninsular hills.

We found the main entrance to the hotel barred by a metal grille, and the shuttered windows showed no signs of life. Already we were wishing we had taken the airport bus with the other whites and gone to the Paramount Hotel, even though the cost of a room there would have been prohibitive, and even though we had vowed to steer clear of tourists, to plunge straight into Africa and keep our promise to Alex.

I shouted up at the dark and decaying concrete facade. “Anybody there?”

A first-story window was wrenched open, and a woman called down to us in Krio. At the same moment the rain came bucketing out of the sky.

Pauline and I must have looked ridiculous, soaked to the skin, with our shoes awash in the floodwater sluicing down the street.

The woman at the window was joined by others. They laughed and shouted down at us.

“We don’t speak Krio,” Pauline shouted back.

“Wait,” the first woman said, “I dae kam.”

They all traipsed down, dressed in miniskirts, shrieking with laughter. They held beach umbrellas above their heads to protect their jet-black wigs from the downpour.

They wanted a dash.

I dug in my pockets and came up with some English coins. The women took them gleefully and ran around to the front of the hotel, beckoning us to follow.

The lobby was feebly lit. Off to the left was a deserted saloon bar. Ahead was a flight of wooden stairs. The prostitutes clattered up the stairs in their high heels and fishnet stockings, gales of laughter going into the darkness, the smell of cheap perfume lingering in the clammy air.

When the hotel porter emerged from the shadows, bleary-eyed from his interrupted sleep, I explained that we had come in on the London flight and wanted a room.

“Kam we go,” he ordered. Dragging a bunch of ancient keys from his pocket, he started to climb the stairs, using the banister to pull himself up. Pauline and I lugged our suitcases after him.

Our room was at the end of a dingy corridor on the first floor. It was furnished with a double bed under a torn mosquito net, two chairs, and a chest of drawers. The room stank of mildew and excrement.

I went into the bathroom. The toilet hadn’t been flushed, nor would it flush. When I pulled the chain, there was a noisy gurgling in the pipes and a mess of paper pulp and shit disgorged into the stained bowl.

We were too tired to care. I bolted the door and we stripped off our wet clothes, toweled ourselves dry, and crawled under the mosquito net onto the bed where we lay jarred and spent from our journey. I thought: We have done what Alex wanted us to do. I can write him tomorrow and say we have experienced Greenland in all its seediness. Then we can find somewhere else to live.

We woke at first light to the jangle and blare of hi-life music. I went to the louvered window and looked down into the street. Several Toyota and Datsun taxis were parked at an angle to the curb, and the drivers were washing their cars with buckets of sudsy water. I was reminded of the way young men in the Congo used to wash their bodies, soaping themselves until they were all but invisible for lather.

Beyond the intersection, over laterite stonework and rusty roofs, I glimpsed the sea. Far out, a sunken freighter showed only its funnel and mastheads above the surface of the ocean. It must have gone down during the war, when Atlantic convoys used to assemble in the harbor. I made a mental note to mention this in my letter to Alex.

“What are you looking at?” Pauline asked.

I told her about the taxi drivers and the sunken freighter on the sand bar. Then I asked if she felt like getting up and going downstairs, to try to find something to eat.

“Don’t even talk about food,” Pauline said. She was suffering from morning sickness. She felt as if she were going to throw up.

“We’ll move out of here,” I said.

“At least let’s get a room with a toilet that flushes. I’m going to try to get some more sleep,” Pauline said. “If you go out, try not to make too much noise when you come back.”

I lifted the mosquito net and kissed her on the mouth.

I went out of the room thinking we should not have come to Africa. I felt sick in the stomach at the thought of Pauline pregnant and having our baby in such a place. I should have called it off, this year in Sierra Leone doing fieldwork for my Ph.D. I should have come alone or not at all.

In the downstairs dining room, some retired Krio clerks were eating breakfast. No one looked up as I walked in.

When the waiter asked if I wanted an English breakfast, I made the mistake of saying yes, and was served braised spam, glutinous eggs, and chips fried in rancid oil. The cook had been with the hotel since colonial times. Like the ex-clerks in their English serge and bowlers, his menu parodied the world that Sierra Leoneans had once been encouraged to emulate.

I had no appetite for the food in front of me and was beginning to think that my dream of returning to Africa, which had sustained me for five years, had been as absurd and anachronistic as the idea of Empire. When I tried to imagine myself in a remote village, speaking an African language, asking people to tell me about their lives, a terrible sense of despair came over me, such as Malcolm Lowry described in his story ‘Through the Panama’: “the inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are.”²

In the days that followed, I filled my notebooks with such misgivings, panicking whenever I thought of the journey I had embarked upon. And each night I was tormented by the same dream, in which I wandered disoriented in an immense building, looking for a room where I was supposed to enroll.

Pauline grew impatient with me, and recollected the series of events that had brought us to Freetown together—the month we had spent in Copenhagen where she did an intensive course in Danish, the modern language most akin to Old Icelandic, the weeks in Paris waiting for a sailing from Le Havre to West Africa, and finally the flight back to London when she fell ill, and where, in the course of an operation to remove an ovarian cyst, she was found to be six weeks pregnant. “I want to be here,” she assured me. “I want to have our baby here, in this climate, with you!”

Vultures wheeled high above the city. In the street markets, peddlers cried, “Biscuit dae! Five five cents.” We tried out our Krio, “Omus for da wan dae? Omus for dis,” buying pineapples, bunches of bananas, and scoops of groundnuts wrapped in funnels of brown paper. We went to Immigration to get our visas. In the piss-soaked alley outside the Immigration Department, a sign had been posted: URINATING PROHIBITED IN THIS AREA. We found a pharmacy with the improbable name of Vulga Thera.

Beggars crowded around us. Some leaned on staves, their legs like burnt matchsticks. Paraplegics sat in little carts and shoved themselves along on their knuckles.

Pauline pressed coins into the fingerless hands of a burnt-out leper. In the street, a Toyota Coaster moved slowly through the traffic, a logo above the cab saying SWEET ARE THE USES OF ADVERSITY.

Now reconciled to remaining in our hotel, we sat on the hotel balcony in the cool of the evening, drinking tonic water and writing postcards home. The sad-eyed Swiss proprietor, who had run the hotel in Graham Greene’s time, limped to and fro behind the bar.

Our waiter was a thickset man with a coarse-featured, morose face. He derived unending pleasure from prying caps off bottles of Star beer with a grand and sweeping gesture, then watching as kids scrambled around his feet, fighting for possession of the bottle tops. If there was a blue star printed under the cork inlay, you won a prize.

“Fortunes are precarious here,” I wrote to Alex. “We met a deaf mute boy on the street today who thrust a scrap of paper under our noses and urged us to read what was written on it: ‘Good morning I am no hable to spick and I can not find chob Please will you help me Tankyou God pless...’”

I was going to add something about the inescapability of poverty when I became aware that a boy was standing close to me, watching me write.

“Kushe,” I said, and hoped he would go away.

He said his name was James. He had been attending school but could not continue because his family did not have the money to pay his fees. He begged us to help him out.

“Wusai you dae?” I asked.

James said he lived in the East End. His expression wavered between shiftiness and shame.

“Can you come and see us in the morning?” Pauline said. “If you bring your school books, I can get some idea what you’ve been doing.”

James said he would come early. Then he announced that he was going, and disappeared into the street.

“Do you think he’s on the level?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea. Does it really matter?” Pauline said.

A couple of days later, I was lying on the bed in our hotel room reading Melville’s Typee. Pauline was sitting at a desk near the window, turning the pages of a cheap cahier, correcting James’s exercises. James stood stock-still beside her, chewing his fingernails.

“Do you prefer reading books or listening to stories?” Pauline asked.

“I like to read books,” James replied.

“Why?”

“Because they’re true.”

“Do your mother and father tell you stories?”

“Yes.”

“Do they tell you stories about Conny Rabbit?”

“I know those stories.”

“Aren’t those stories just as interesting as the ones you read in books?”

“No, people always tell them in different ways and change them, and you never know which one is true.” “Aren’t they more exciting and interesting like that—when they’re different every time?”

James shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because you never know which one is true.”

“Are all books true?”

“Yes.”

My ears were ringing. I was bathed in perspiration. I pushed through the crowded streets, determined to finalize the business of getting our Land Rover released from Customs. But no sooner was one obstacle overcome than another arose. Day after day, I trudged from one Port Authority office to another, collecting Customs clearance certificates, import-duty exemption authorizations, set surcharge forms, insurance schedules, shipping notes, delivery and condition reports, and certificates of importation and release. Then there were letters of affiliation to the university, residence permits, vehicle registration and insurance, a driver’s license, more visits to dismal offices where clerks sat slumped over their desks and some taciturn minion would want his palm greased with a dash.

I began to think seriously of abandoning my plans to do field work. I imagined myself holed up in the City Hotel, drawing on my scholarship money to write an ethnography of an entirely fictitious society. The task did not seem too daunting. The Fourah Bay College library was well stocked with monographs from which I could glean the formulaic patterns of structural- functionalist ethnography. To invent a society, one had only to decide the nature of the economy, the mode of descent and inheritance, and the principles of legal and political life; everything else could be deduced. Since conventional ethnographies were generally so devoid of in-depth descriptions of actual individuals, I need not concern myself unduly with details of real lives. Stereotypes would suffice. And sweeping generalizations would gloss over the subtleties of lived experience and give my account an aura of objectivity. Even the language of my make-believe world could be concocted as a dialect of some actual West African language. Hadn’t Jorge Luis Borges done something akin to this in his account of the world of Tlön?

The more I pondered my idea, the more it engrossed me. But when I confided my scheme to Pauline, she said I should not let myself be disheartened by the weeks we had been stuck in Freetown. It was hard not knowing where we were going or what we were going to do, but shouldn’t we give ourselves time to get acclimatized and find our feet?

What brought me back to reality was a map. The map was stapled to the wall of the corridor in the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College. It showed Sierra Leone divided into tribal areas. The research I had proposed at Cambridge for my Ph.D. would have meant living among the Mende in the southeast, studying the impact of literacy on village life. I had never been entirely happy with this plan—a continuation of research I had done for my M.A. on the impact of literacy in early nineteenth century Maori New Zealand—but I had not been able to come up with anything else.

The map showed a region in the north, defined by a dotted line. Across this blank space was written KURANKO.

I do not know why I responded as I did to this map. All I knew was that this remote region was where I wanted to go. I told the director of the Institute of my plans. He said that very little was known about the Kuranko. This was all I needed to make me absolutely sure of my path. A few days later, Pauline and I loaded our supplies into the Land Rover and headed north.

A warm wind flowed through the cab of the vehicle. Grasslands stretched away under an immensity of sky. For a moment I was back in the Congo. The road behind us was lost in billows of red dust.

We were going to a town called Kabala. We were enamored of the name. It invoked the Hebrew qabbalah and its esoteric traditions of cosmic union. But we couldn’t be sure where we would end up at the end of the day. Few roads were signposted, and north of Makeni the road degenerated into a tortuous and eroded track.

We passed through towns where people were celebrating the end of Ramadan. Women danced in tight circles, resplendent in voluminous gowns and high silken kerchiefs. Men lounged in hammocks slung under the eaves of verandas.

We crossed turbid streams where butterflies danced in shafts of sunlight. In the lophira plains, the air was singed with the smell of burned elephant grass.

I reached for Pauline’s hand, and we glanced at each other and smiled. “It’s hard to believe I seriously thought of staying on in Freetown and writing a fake ethnography,” I said.

“The trouble with lying,” Pauline said, “is that you always have to make a mental note of everything you say, so you won’t be caught out in the future. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. You are free to live.”

It was then that I remembered the story of Donald Crowhurst and became aware that for as long as we had been in Freetown, this story had been at the back of my mind, casting its shadow over everything I thought and did.