Transit by Abdourahman A. Waberi

Author:Abdourahman A. Waberi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

20

ALICE

WHEN I MET YOUR FATHER, I wasn't looking for some mythical Africa; I wasn't looking for the love of my life, the way others run after a great novelist. To tell you the truth, I wasn't looking for anything at all; I was just dragging myself around, bored and daydreaming away on the banks of the Vilaine River. Africa would come to me all by herself, like a big girl. Alas, my little cactus, it was not the rebellious continent, just the Africa of news reports as they're filtered through the clear conscience of the West. Then it became the Africa of dictators with Swiss bank accounts, the Africa of rickety children and bony old men, the Africa of famine and the shameless looting of its resources, the Africa of squalid huts and gleaming white teeth, the Africa of landless people, the Africa of guerrillas and desperados. The so-called experts who speak about Africa do not think it necessary to know its languages. Can you imagine a Sinologist who can't say hello-goodbye in the language of his studies? But I'm getting off my topic.

At that time, especially at that age, I was constantly fuming with rage, living on a volcano of passions. I wrapped up my studies of history with a college degree, and, disgusted by what they were teaching me about Africa and the French Empire, I registered for the entry examination to the School of Journalism in Paris. I felt ready to land on the burning banks of the Red Sea and examine the Africa I had begun to imagine, a many-layered, historical pastry with unique sedimentation. Your father joined me there, abandoning his band of friends with a heavy heart. He seemed to have grown up: in a few weeks, he had climbed the steps of age it usually takes many years to ascend. The perspective of finding his country still under colonial rule had given him wings, even if he dreaded the ordinary racism on both sides of the fence and what people might say once we were settled there. He lived through the last months of his life in Paris like a passerby, light-heartedly wearing the first wrinkles on his brow and a little paunch in his midsection. He couldn't care less about it, because in Djibouti, when you're married and past thirty, people talk to you like you're a responsible man, the head of a family, an almost-old man. Then, very quickly, came the whirlwind of the return. For the first few months, you don't really know who you are. You go from one house to another, one family to another, one friend to another with the assurance of a tightrope walker. You listen to advice; you collect various views and contradictory opinions with the same ears, without asking yourself too many questions. You don't really know who you are, or who they are. Everything is intoxicating: visiting the country, combing the city. Real life, right? But that feeling won't last. Soon, they put you in a ready-made box: you're the mixed couple people look at suspiciously.

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