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TWO

The Red Road

I WAS NOT THE FIRST ADOLESCENT POET, nor will I be the last, to adopt Arthur Rimbaud as an alter ego. In Rimbaud’s resolve to be other than he was, I found legitimacy for my own revolt against bourgeois values. Oft en drunk and confrontational, and possessed by a perverse desire to be different, I cultivated an uncouth and anarchic persona, yet all the while unclear as to what kind of metamorphosis I wished for myself.

It is not possible, of course, to simply walk out on yourself, discarding your first identity as a snake sloughs off its skin. You do not know the secrets for changing your life; all you can do is search for them.¹ What governs you is a craving for “new affections, new noises”,² and you are aware that this work you do on yourself is more fundamental than any work of art. Indeed, Rimbaud’s writing may be read as a commentary on this oeuvre vie, in which poetry will be written only for as long as it takes for the personal change to be effected, whereupon the work of language will come to an end.

For several years you are in limbo. Breaking free, hitting the road, living rough, only to return to the place you set out from to lick your wounds and prepare for another journey into the unknown. But you are stricken by the realization that no matter how far you travel from home, the old self goes with you, refusing to be shaken off by the trick of changing your environs. As Horace put it, ‘Those who chase across the sea change their skies but not their souls.’³ And so you resemble one of Joseph Conrad’s restive characters, drifting from one remote island or port to another, no sooner arrived than departed—whether in flight from or in search of something, no one knows.

At twenty-four, Rimbaud is working as an overseer in a quarry on Cyprus. “The heat is oppressive,” he writes in a letter to his family, and the work is hard—dynamiting rocks, loading stones onto barges, living miles away from the nearest village, tormented by mosquitoes, sleeping in the open by the sea. His life is like a rehearsal for Africa.⁴

At twenty-four, and without the benefit of any rehearsal, I went to Africa as a volunteer with the United Nations Operation in the Congo. I had expected some kind of conversion. Watching the lurid sunsets from the Stanley Memorial high above the Congo River or hearing alarmist reports of insurgencies in the interior, my imagination took fire. But my thoughts turned constantly to home. When the rains came, I retreated to the Palace Hotel overlooking the Congo River and wrote a novel as much to prove myself capable of the sustained and lonely labor demanded of any writer as to unburden myself of recurring dreams of my grandparents’ early married life after their migration from England to New Zealand in 1906. I imagined that in abandoning what they called “the old country,” they were oppressed by nostalgia as well as unsettled by the backwater town in which they now had to make their home. In their separation trauma I wrote about my own, for was I not both enthralled and intimidated by the vast hinterland out of which the great river flowed? And were not my dreams of New Zealand daily reminders of how deeply I resisted the ordeal of passing from the life I had known into this new but unknown life that I associated with Africa? Day after day I wrote in my hotel room as islands of hyacinth slipped past in the swift -flowing river and refugees gathered at a landing stage shaded by mango trees, waiting for the rusty ferry that would return them, by order of the Congolese government, to Brazzaville, whose white colonial buildings were barely discernible through the haze.

When you are starting out as a writer, you tend to write about the inner turmoil and difficulty of expressing yourself, even when appearing to be writing on some entirely objective topic. This was certainly true of my early piece called The Livingstone Falls that conjures the thunderous and unnavigable stretch of water between the Stanley Pool and the lower reaches of the Congo.

I cross a fragile and swaying bridge between two islands, buffeted by spray. I greet two women who are gathering driftwood, their babies asleep on their backs, their voices drowned by the noise of the river. I find myself in a disused quarry and wonder if I have stumbled on that “vast artificial hole” that Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness,⁵ whose purpose was “impossible to divine,” but whose remorseless excavation had cost the lives of countless Congolese, chained together in forced labor and in death. A dead Mamba lies on the trail, an embodiment of that old injustice. I drive back to the city and a café on the Boulevard du Trente Juin. Peddlers show me ivory ornaments, carved tusks from elephants slaughtered near Lac Leopold II, bone ornaments blackened with shoe polish, hand-painted postcards, black market cheese, canned fruit, and cigarettes.

One weekend, a Dutch friend and amateur lepidopterist asked me to accompany him to Pic Mensi, a forested uplands in the Bas-Congo. Hank laid out his baits in a forest clearing—fermented mangoes mixed with his own feces. We watched and waited as rare blues, every bit as brilliant as the ultramarine windows in Chartres Cathedral, fluttered and drift ed through shafts of sunlight before settling nervously to feed.

Hank netted several, and showed me how to handle them, gently squeezing the life out of their bodies before transferring them to a collection box. Each one, he explained, was worth a small fortune on the European market. But this was not why he collected them. He was enthralled by their beauty and fascinated that such beauty had evolved simply to attract a mate, so that in a lifetime of no more than a few days, these creatures were driven by little else than the exigencies of reproduction. Their own life had no other meaning than to create another life, to perpetuate their kind.

We camped that evening on a grassy plain. As night fell, a young man passed up the track, holding a mbira on his head and playing a melody that seemed to mingle with the stars. A warm wind murmured in the long grass.

In the middle of the night I woke to hear an animal splashing across a stream, crashing into the forest beyond. Unable to sleep, I walked out into the grassland and lay on my back, looking up at the stars. I was ecstatically happy. And yet, when I contemplated the conditions that had made that moment possible (Hank’s passion for butterflies, the fruit pulp and fecal matter that he carefully prepared to capture them) and the sheer contingency of things (the swallowtails that survived his net because they were far more common than the brilliant blues, the lives of insects, sustained only for as long as it took to breed, and the countless ants gutting the fallen bodies, tearing the veiled wings, filing away with them along the forest trail), all this conspired to suggest that my happiness had been won at someone else’s expense, and that simply by being in the Congo I was participating in, and perhaps perpetuating, a history of terrible wrongs. And I remember the longing I felt, as we drove past the village of Bibwe and onto the main road to Léopoldville—to live in such a village, to get to know its people, to give up trying to change the Congo for the better and suffer the transfiguration of myself.

Not long after my excursion to Pic Mensi, a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed in Léopoldville. At ONUC⁶ headquarters, several “nonessential” personnel packed up and flew back to Geneva or New York. Travel outside the city was banned. Some of the Haitian girls at Le Royal responded to the curfew by throwing all-night parties. It was fun for a while. A welcome distraction. I would drive my jeep home at dawn. Women would be walking along the side of the road with basins of manioc, firewood lashed with lianas, and bundles of clothing balanced on their heads. I felt like driving out of the city and into the interior, as far as I could go.

I had a companion for a while. A girl I met in a nightclub called Le Carousel—une fille de joie. We would spend the evenings drinking and dancing in the hotel bar, and the nights at cross-purposes. I tried to persuade Sophie to take me on a visit to her home, but her life was off limits, like her real name.

Lips caked with lipstick

and the smell of booze

you dance with the man with 10,000 francs

until the music moves him to

take you to the room where the rite will be.

Preferring him not

to put out the light

you remove a bonnet of dead women’s hair

beneath which you jealously preserve

stiff braids of an African coiffure.

Down to your silken underthings

and his own undoing scarcely seen

you are the cur under midnight heat

of a mad dog doing it

for what in Europe would have been love.

Then I met Dominique at one of the Haitian parties, and I thought I was in love with her. But love was as tantalizing and elusive as the villages I romanticized, the lifeworlds I longed to enter, the rites I wanted to see, the masks I wanted to try on, the drums I wanted to hear.

She was French, and married to an entrepreneur. They had an apartment in Parcembise—a suburb inhabited, in colonial times, by Léopoldville’s élite. Its streets were shaded by jacarandas. Villas were enclosed by high walls, topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Behind wrought-iron gates, guard dogs salivated, bared their fangs, and barked at Congolese passing up and down the street. The air was scented with frangipani and bougainvillea.

I was oppressed by the contradictions. The beauty and order that accompanied such entrenched inequality. The civilizing mission that masked racism, violence, and delirium. I thought of the rare blues in the forests of Pic Mensi, lured to their death by a white man’s feces.

How could I be in love with someone whose lifestyle seemed like a studied insult to the servants who made it possible? How could I attend the cocktail parties at Dominique’s when the man who served us drinks had to support his family on the pittance he was paid? How could I stand in the same room as the gangly Australian complaining about the roadblocks, telling us that the Congolese had been in the trees so long that they all wanted to be branch managers? How could I give friendly pats to the dog that had been trained to fly at the throat of any and every black man? And how could Dom respect a husband who was doing everything in his power to obstruct her brother’s marriage to his Rwandan fiancée?

Though I had been admitted to this social circle on account of my color and my work, I nonetheless tried to stand apart from it. Like Sophie, I suppose, keeping from me her thoughts, her family, her village, her name.

It was about this time that the Congolese Prime Minister, Moïse Tshombe, hired an Irish-born mercenary, “Mad” Mike Hoare, to lead a group of 300 South African mercenaries against the rebel Simbas in the eastern Congo. The rebellion was momentarily and violently suppressed, but it took a terrible toll. As the mercenary columns drove along potholed roads between tall brakes of elephant grass and through remote villages, they made no attempt to discriminate between friend and foe. An African was a savage: stupid, ungovernable, and untrustworthy. And so the mercenaries opened fire on whoever hindered their progress or was seen as a potential threat or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With Kasai “pacified,” I was dispatched to the region on a reconnaissance tour, to see whether any ONUC projects had survived the war.

I remember the stench of death. Outside Albertville, there were corpses on the roadsides. Emaciated dogs fought over the bloated bodies, snarling and scavenging. In the main street, not a building remained unscathed: windows had been smashed, interiors looted, buildings torched. The town was deserted, save for groups of gun-toting boys in ill-fitting fatigues, half-crazy on hemp, who mimed what they would do when they got their hands on anyone who had consorted with the rebels.

One afternoon, I went down to the lake. Though the dead had now been buried, the sand hills were still littered with shell cases and scraps of clothing.

A small boy approached me with cupped hands. He was indistinguishable from all the other orphans that begged or hung about us as we worked, except he was alone like me, in a place where no one now set foot, and he held out his hands in fatalistic submission. I said I had nothing, but if he accompanied me back to town I would find him some food. I asked, as one did through habit, the pointless question, Where is your family? And he told me, as if I needed to know, that they were all dead.

That night he slept outside my billet, and for the next two days he dogged my heels, until it was time for me to leave.

He wanted to come with me. “That isn’t possible,” I said. “I have to go far away. I cannot take you.”

As I crossed the tarmac to the UN C-130, he clawed at my sleeve, imploring me not to desert him.

On an airplane, high above the Katangan plateau, looking down at the deceptively peaceful manioc gardens, red roads, and thatched villages, I told myself that he was better off in that place where he had a life, than in any mission or orphanage where I might have taken him. But he followed me just the same—his spectral presence weighing on my mind—because he had offered me my only opportunity for redemption in that dark time, my one chance to make a difference. And every time I thought of him, I experienced my appalling passivity and impotence, like a dead albatross around my neck.

Like Rimbaud, I finally found my second self in Africa, though I remained haunted by the impossibility of ever really losing myself in that so-called dark continent, shucking off my first life like a suit of ill-fitting clothes. Strange, therefore, that one of my first Congo poems should use the same image that appears in Rimbaud’s enigmatic line, “You follow the red road to arrive at the empty inn.”⁷

The Red Road

The red road led to nowhere I could go

Nowhere was a village I would never know

For days I drove companionless along it

The forest had no horizon

I wore a mask of red dirt

The wheel steered me

My body ached

At night I lay awake in terror at the night

People everywhere

Saw to me with the same indifference

They shared their food

I passed through country

Only on a map

And came back along the same road

Nothing in particular fulfilled

The red road led to nowhere I could go

Nowhere was a village I would never know.

It is oft en overlooked by those who mourn or are mystified by Rimbaud’s contemptuous dismissal of poetry that the man who spent much of the last ten years of his life as a trader in the interior of Abyssinia became as well versed in local custom as any ethnographer—acquiring fluency in local languages, “orientalizing himself,” and becoming respected for his knowledge of the Qu’ran and Islamic philosophy.⁸

As I would discover in the Congo, the red road did not necessarily go nowhere. But to find those unmapped destinations I would have to abandon the purposes that first drove me down that road, and learn to ask directions from those who lived along it.