Feasting Wild by Gina Rae La Cerva

Author:Gina Rae La Cerva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2020-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

A few nights later, Lucian, my driver from the conservation organization, takes me to a spontaneous after-work happy hour. Lucian is a rotund man with an equable face and a wide smile. He’s dressed in a grey imitation Louis Vuitton suit. He is almost always dressed this well, as if his fashion is a form of resistance against the mundane realities of his life. Even when he is just taking me around to the bushmeat markets in the old white Land Rover with the dented passenger door, he arrives buttoned up and busting out of his seams, attired as if he is going out on a date and not about to fix a car that is always breaking down.

In fact, the only time I saw him out of his fancies was the morning he escorted me on a walk along the Congo River. He was dressed in a red tracksuit, like a jogger. As we strolled, Lucian confessed to me that he was having marriage problems. He was very much in love, but he worked a lot and when he wasn’t working he was often sick.

Lucian has two daughters and a son. He had been studying to become an electrical engineer, but life happened, and then he no longer had the money to pay for his own education. He took great pride in his job, knowing that in Congo the work could always be harder, and that despite his small two-room house and his meager salary, his children had the opportunity for lives bigger than the one he had lived.

On this evening, I sit with Lucian and four other Congolese men from the office on a dimly lit concrete porch. Moths and beetles flutter around us like bursts of tinsel.

“Raphael’s neighbor will buy a monkey, or a small piece of antelope, and cut it into tiny pieces to sell to others in the neighborhood,” Jasper says, translating for Raphael, an older man who seems to do whatever extra tasks are needed around the office. “He makes just enough money selling it to pay for his own small consumption. An occasional morsel, a tiny snack.”

Jasper grew up in Kinshasa but went to Belgium for his university studies and is a master of languages, GIS spatial analysis, and witticisms. He has an easy charm and a generous laugh.

“Underneath the skin, our blood runs the same red color,” he says, pointing to his arm, and then mine.

“Yes, of course,” I reply.

“Precisely! And so you and I are the same,” he says heartily.

We smile at each other, acknowledging this shared feature, perhaps in the hopes that we might blow apart the patriarchal and racist structures that have kept men like him and women like me separate and considered different. But this phrase is sticking to my guts, because it seems both true and false. On purely mechanical terms, it is utterly honest. Human blood is human blood. But oppression is a long game. Despite both our wishes, his statement cannot erase history.

As I finish my beer, my thoughts turn to the Hunter.

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