Читать книгу The Other Shore - Michael Jackson - Страница 14

SEVEN

The Magical Power of Words

FOR SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE GOING TO SIERRA LEONE, Pauline and I had camped in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, awaiting word of a cargo sailing from Le Havre to Freetown. It was an Indian summer, and I should have been grateful for this period of idleness. But our delayed departure only intensified the anxiety that oppressed me whenever I contemplated returning to Africa as an anthropologist. I had glimpsed this future for myself in the Congo, five years before, and it had been in Paris, penurious and disoriented, that I had begun to see that ethnography might be my vocation, my way of entering into another world, and my literary path. But now, standing in the wings, I was seized by stage fright, and I had mislaid my script.

To distract myself I would take long walks to Puteaux and Suresnes, oft en finding myself at the old Fort Mont-Valerien, where I would sit and contemplate the haze-blurred city, only the upper level of the Eiffel Tower visible above the smog. Or I would lie in the grass outside our tent in the Bois reading of Chagall’s first enraptured impressions of Paris: “I knew I could work in this light and that my dreams would take shape in it. I was overwhelmed by it all. When I saw Seurat I was dazzled. When I saw Monet I could have wept.” Yet, even in these luminous recollections, Chagall cautions that it is not art that inspires great art but immersion in the world. “Theory and technique have not enabled me to advance one step. I owe everything to life.”

Our indolent days in Paris ended abruptly when Pauline fell ill. After consulting a gynecologist we were advised to return to England, where she could receive free treatment under the National Health Service. Within twelve hours of flying back to London, Pauline underwent an operation in Middlesex Hospital for the removal of an ovarian cyst, and she was found to be pregnant. While she recuperated in hospital and we rethought our plans, I imposed on the hospitality of our friends Alex and Meg, who only a few weeks before had sent us on our way, not expecting to see us again for at least a year.

One afternoon, I came back from visiting Pauline to find Alex, Meg, and several of their friends sitting in the kitchen with cans of beer and looking as though they had just received bad news. “Come on in,” Alex said. “There’s a problem you might help us solve.”

I was introduced to Matt, Jay, and Jay’s wife and child. They all shared a house in Swiss Cottage with a guy called Andy. Andy had suffered some kind of mental breakdown; they had panicked, not knowing whether to call a doctor or ambulance or simply wait for Andy to come to his senses. In the end they had driven to East Finchley to ask Alex and Meg for advice.

“Where’s Andy now?” I asked.

Matt said that Andy had locked himself in his room.

I urged that we drive back to the house immediately. I was not impressed by any of them. Jay took an aggressive stance, saying they should get Andy to move out. Matt was in a daze. “We just want to make the scene again,” he said. “We want him to be the real Andy again.” Jay said Andy might trash the house or even kill himself. And he was concerned that if the police or paramedics were called they would find evidence of drug use in the house, and everyone would be incriminated.

As we climbed the steps to the front door, I was as nervous as anyone. The others stood behind me as I rang the doorbell. Without any explicit negotiation it had been decided that I was best equipped to handle the situation.

Andy opened the door with an inane grin on his face.

I felt like George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant”—the expectations of Andy’s friends behind me, Andy grinning roguishly in front of me, the burden of what to do falling squarely on my shoulders. I introduced myself and asked Andy if we could talk somewhere in private.

I didn’t know what to expect. As Andy led the way upstairs, the others remained downstairs, talking (so Alex told me later) about the Rolling Stones, how to procure the best weed, anything but Andy’s plight.

Andy sat on the edge of his bed. I took a chair nearby and listened attentively as he told me about this organization he and the other guys had got going. It was called J.A.M.—the initials of Jay, Matt, and Andy. He then explained that my name was compatible with this acronym. MIKE—the M corresponded with the M for Matt, then I, Kay, and Ego. I warily asked who Kay was. Kay was a friend of Brenda’s. Brenda was a Rhodesian girlfriend who had married another guy. B for Britain, where they were lived together and were happy, R for Rhodesia, and the END of A for Andy. As he rambled on, sharing his word salad with me (Wother, for example, was a portmanteau word, combining mother and wife) I tried to get the hang of his impenetrable logic. And Andy did his best to guide me, using such cryptic phrases as “Mental guts hanging out,” and “Skeleton becomes exoskeleton.” I must have listened to Andy for an hour and a half before I felt confident enough to broach with him the possibility of seeking help and to assure him that I would make all the phone calls, ensure that he was treated well, and accompany him to the hospital.

I never saw Andy again. And within ten days of Pauline’s discharge from hospital we were on our way to Sierra Leone, this time by air—on a dilapidated DC8 that had a plaque on one of the bulkheads that read This Philippine Airlines DC8 flew nonstop from Tokyo, Japan, to Miami, Florida, a distance of 8705 statute miles, in 13 hours and 52 minutes, establishing a world distance record, Feb. 22, 1962. It made me think of Andy’s schizophasia, and it brought to mind the way we deploy words magically to echo events, create semblances of order in a sea of chaos, and give the impression that we actually grasp the hidden meaning of the world in which we move, ships that pass each other in the night, or aircraft climbing above the pack ice of cloud into air so cold and rarified that if we were exposed to it we would not survive. Would the language of anthropology prove any different, or would it also be little more than another form of sorcery, restating the obvious in a nebulous language, writing more and more about less and less, losing touch with reality, confusing words and things, an arcane technique for consoling lost souls that the world was indeed within their grasp?

In Sierra Leone, where only a minority of people could read or write, some of the only text you saw outside Freetown was on the cabs of trucks or the washstrakes of canoes, succinct pleas or hopeful signs that off ered the Western visitor glimpses into local preoccupations. God is Great... Justice... Nar God Go Gree [God Willing]... Look For Me... Loose You Face [Cheer Up!]... Judgment Day Is Coming... No Justice for the Poor... Power Vision... Patience Is a Virtue.

I used the last of these slogans in my first essay at ethnographic writing—an exploration of the magical power of words, and of the stoicism and patience so often characteristic of those living in the world’s poorest societies.

It is not unusual for anthropologists entering the field for the first time to wind up in the company of people who have been marginalized in their own communities. So it was for me. Linguistically inept, socially disoriented, anomalous in appearance, and possessed by questions the point of which no one could grasp, it was inevitable that I would end up with Mamina Yegbe.

He was at least seventy—small, spry, and always, it seemed to me, slightly bemused. Though my field assistant warned me that Mamina Yegbe had lost his marbles, and tried to dissuade me from setting too much store by what he told me, I felt at ease in the old man’s company and often sought him out at the town chief’s house near the Kabala market, buying him packets of tobacco in gratitude for his tolerance of my stilted Kuranko.

“The world began in Mande,” Mamina Yegbe said, alluding to the great fourteenth century empire that had dominated the West Sudan. “But yesterday and today are not the same. Whatever sun shines, that is the sun in which you have to dry yourself. We are now in the period of the white man’s rule.”

He remembered when this period began before the Cameroon War (World War I), and recalled the names of Palmer and Captain Leigh, who built the barracks at Gbankuma before the British moved to Falaba. He also described the first barracks at Kabala, built on the site of today’s town market, and told me when the frontier was fixed, and when the Court Messenger Force and the Chiefdom Police were established. And he recounted how taxes were paid to District Commissioner Warren—or Warensi, as he was known. Initially, the annual hut tax was two shillings and sixpence, but later rose to five, then to nine shillings, and finally to one pound five shillings, and one pound ten shillings per head.

“In those days, people were happy,” Mamina Yegbe said. “We were happy with our government. All the chiefs had their favorite music, and whenever the chiefs assembled, the jelibas would play. Chiefs Belikoro, Konkofa, Sinkerifa—I knew them all.”

At the District Officer’s office one morning, I was working through a stack of intelligence diaries and daybooks from the colonial period, hoping to corroborate Mamina Yegbe’s recollections of local history. Around me the clerks were busy with their own bureaucratic chores, filing memoranda, moving dog-eared files from the “out” tray of one desk to the “in” tray of another, sharpening pencils, or fetching ice-cold Coca-Colas for the D.O.

Before being allowed to inspect the records, I had been obliged to submit five copies of an application, all typed, signed, sealed in official envelopes, stamped, and countersigned. It was not long, however, before I was ruing the effort, and my eyes wandered to the whitewashed wall where two wasps were adding yet another accretion of moist red clay to their nest and beyond the barred windows of the office where the leaves of an enormous mango tree hung limply in the heat. I closed the daybook and made to go, already anticipating a few relaxed hours at home talking with Pauline over a simple lunch of bread and peanut butter.

At that instant, two clerks deserted their desks and asked for a lift to the market.

As I switched on the ignition I caught sight of Mamina Yegbe sitting on a rock under the mango tree, smoking his Bavarian pipe with the hinged metal lid.

“Do you want a lift?” I called, and gestured in the direction of the market.

Mamina Yegbe clambered up into the front seat of the Land Rover, beside the clerks. He was wearing an embroidered tunic and a blue silk cap with a tassel and sat bolt upright with an almost smug expression on his face, holding against his chest a large manila envelope marked in capital letters ON SIERRA LEONE GOVERNMENT SERVICE. The envelope was embellished with ornate signatures and sealed in several places with red wax. It resembled a Saul Steinberg drawing.

The clerks were clearly amused by the envelope.

“What’s the joke?” I asked.

The first clerk winked at me, then nodded toward Mamina Yegbe who was gazing straight ahead. The other clerk dodged the question by suddenly recognizing two friends sauntering along the road.

“Mosquito!” he yelled. “Heh! Peacecorps!” And he hung his arm out the window of the Land Rover.

A thin, gangly youth who answered to the first description, and his companion, wearing faded jeans with frayed cuff s, lifted their arms to wave, but the dust in the wake of the vehicle enveloped them.

After dropping the clerks at the market, I sought to satisfy my curiosity about the envelope.

“What is it?” I asked.

The old man continued to gaze straight ahead, but raised a finger to his lips. He then got down from the Land Rover and without a word disappeared into a crowd around the kola-nut traders.

That night I drove back into Kabala from our house at “One-Mile” to buy some cold Fanta at Lansana Kamara’s bar. The bar was a shabby and poky corner room that opened onto a verandah and the marketplace. It was furnished with several warped and dusty shelves, a battered deep freeze, and five armchairs with polystyrene foam bulging out through rents in the red vinyl upholstery. The jangling strains of a hi-life hit issued from a dilapidated record player at one end of the bar. “I really love you, Fati Fatiii...”

Lansana Kamara did not particularly like hi-life tunes, and whenever business was slack he would get out his records from Guinea and, with tears welling up in his eyes, listen to the stirring refrains of praise-songs from old Mali.

On the walls of L.K.’s bar were several fly-speckled calendars showing beaming Africans in open-necked shirts holding aloft bottles of Vimto, Fanta or Star beer. L.K. disdained such drinks.

With a lugubrious air he poured himself another large Martell brandy and a Guinness chaser.

I bought what I wanted and was about to go when I noticed Mamina Yegbe in the corner, surrounded by a dozen boisterous youths, among them the two clerks from the D.O.’s office. One of them made a remark that I could not catch, but it drew a burst of taunting laughter from the others, and the old man shrank back as if from a blow. I saw that Mamina Yegbe was still holding the big envelope, only now it had been ripped open, and bits of sealing wax littered the floor among the beer-bottle caps.

When the old man saw me he seemed to regain his composure, but before either of us could speak one of the clerks confronted me with bloodshot eyes and beery breath.

“He says it’s from Seku Touré and Siaka Stevens!” the clerk roared. “That envelope! He says they’ve given him a big country in Guinea and a million pounds cash! He says he’s coming to the D.O. tomorrow to collect it!”

Everyone broke into laughter. Then they looked at me, waiting for my reaction.

The clerk became angry. “He says he’s going to be appointed to a high position, in the government!” he shouted, as if I had failed to grasp the situation. “It’s all in the letter!”

I glanced at Mamina Yegbe, who raised a finger to his lips and smiled ingenuously. I appealed to L.K. for a clue as to what was going on, but L.K. simply smoothed his knitted singlet over his enormous belly, lowered his eyes, and took another sip of brandy.

The clerk, exasperated by my stupidity, lurched over to the old man, wrenched the envelope from his hands, and shook out its contents onto the bar. L.K. dolefully moved his glass to one side as his customers pawed at the sheaf of papers, spreading them out so that I could see what they were.

I recognized several old G.C.E. examination papers, some official memoranda and letters, and a page from my own field notes. I could not think how it had come into the old man’s possession.

Stabbing at the papers, the clerk drew my attention to a bundle of leaflets, all advertisements for Surf washing powder.

“This is the letter from the prime minister!” the clerk hooted. “Can’t you see what it is?’”

I recalled a Volkswagen Kombi that had turned up outside the market a few days before. A large display packet of soap powder had been fitted to the roof rack, and a loudspeaker blared out hi-life tunes. Four or five men in sunglasses and pale blue shirts had gone about distributing leaflets and occasionally giving away sample packets of Surf. In the afternoon the vehicle, still crackling with canned music, disappeared in a cloud of dust up the road toward Falaba.

“Yes, I can see what it is.”

I knelt down and started picking up the papers that had fallen on the floor. They were already smudged with red dirt from the clerks’ shoes.

The jokers appeared embarrassed by this crazy show of sympathy for the old man. They backed out onto the porch, making half-hearted gibes and clutching their bottles of beer. L.K. stared morosely at his glass of Guinness.

“Do you want a lift home?” I asked Mamina Yegbe.

“Awa.”

I looked down the unlit street, thinking, the generator’s gone again, and wanting to say this to Mamina Yegbe. I also wanted to ask the old man, now sitting in silence in the Land Rover beside me, if he still intended to present his letter to the D.O. and claim his fortune, but it might have seemed like another taunt. What simple faith we all place in the power of printed words, these fetishized markings on a page—the clerks, this benignly deluded old man, myself!

The headlights picked out the mosque and the grove of palms beyond it.

“I’m going back to Barawa on Friday,” I said.

Mamina Yegbe made no response.

“I’ll come and see you before I go.”

In the darkness the town gave forth the sounds of its invisible life: a dog yelping, shouts, a radio badly tuned, an inconsolable child crying, a motor scooter spluttering down a potholed lane, the drubbing of an initiation drum.

I drew up outside the house with the broken verandah where Mamina Yegbe lived.

“Ma sogoma yo,” I said, as the old man got down.

Mamina Yegbe stood on the roadside in the glare of the headlights.

“In the old days people were happy,” he said. Then he turned and drifted into the darkness.

Almost all his life, Mamina Yegbe lived under a colonial regime. He had imagined it to be like chieftaincy—a source of order and benevolent power. If the great chief Belikoro could conjure thunderstorms at will and slay his enemies with lightning bolts, then surely the British Crown or the Presidents of Sierra Leone and Guinea could pay him his due and make good what he was owed. The clerks in the D.O.’s office, who ridiculed him so mercilessly were no less in thrall to wishful thinking. Indeed, it was the maddeningly elusive nature of fortune in the post-colonial world that compelled them to perform their derision of Mamina Yegbe so publicly. But it was Mamina Yegbe’s patience that moved me, his imperturbable faith that justice would be done. He reminded me of the so-called millenarian movements or cargo cults that flourished in Melanesia throughout the twentieth century, in which people oft en ceased gardening and gave themselves up to waiting for airplanes or ships that would magically deliver the material possessions that had been withheld from them, either because of some ancestral error or European chicanery. Many people were convinced that literacy held the secret to the white man’s power. Rather than presume writing to be a substitute for speech, letters were regarded as possessing a sui generis efficacy, “a road to the cargo.”¹ The strange thing was that anthropologists would write about these mistaken ideas without ever reflecting on the degree to which they shared similar assumptions. For did we not also believe that the arcane language we deployed and the publications that gave us such satisfaction were our roads to renown and remuneration, yet no more enduring or less illusory than the cargo cultists’ fetishistic attitude toward words? Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’”² by which he meant that “ultimate and sublime values” had retreated into the intimate spheres of religious, family, and artistic existence. Writing poetry or telling stories would be for Weber, I suppose, among the last refuges of the enchanted. In which case, my kinship with Mamina Yegbe was more profound than I realized at the time I knew him, and my work of words no less a sustained magical attempt to compensate for personal inadequacies and to seek re-enchantment in a world where political economy had come to be the academic measure of most things.