Standing Heavy by Gauz'

Author:Gauz'
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2023-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

Send money back to the old country. Part of Ossiri’s job was to patrol the skeletal carcasses of the buildings. Broken windows, missing doors, interminable corridors, rooms with no ceilings, courtyards filled with scrap metal, huge metal ramps petrified by rust, obsolete machines of curious forms . . . Les Grands Moulins de Paris was a magnificent ruin. The glacial winter breezes danced a freezing farandole through this hulking ship washed up on the banks of the Seine. Ossiri liked making his rounds. Aside from the fact that they prevented him from getting a stiff back while spending his nights sitting on an uncomfortable chair in the prefab cabin, often, when he did his rounds, he felt as though he were in one of the Hollywood movies where the lone hero traverses a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of a redemptive truth hidden somewhere above the chaos. He liked the feeling of vertigo when he looked into a tangle of concrete beams and steel tubes. This is where the grain silos must have been located. By the simple laws of gravity, the wheat cascaded from above, through one machine after another, one sieve after another, and arrived at human level in the form of fine white flour, free of all impurities. Ossiri could not imagine the countless tonnes of grain that had passed through here to create thousands of tonnes of bread that had fed millions of people over many decades. It made his head spin, and he enjoyed this feeling of vertigo.

In the old country, there was a Grands Moulins in Abidjan. It dated back to the time when the country was a colony and had probably been built according to the same principles used by the mills of quai Panhard-et-Levassor. And, since in Côte d’Ivoire, bread was also a staple food, there had been no lack of raw materials to build the silos of Les Grands Moulins d’Abidjan. But despite the combined efforts of the engineers from ORSTOM, the Research Institute for Overseas Development and the INRA, the Institute for Agronomic Research, not a single blade of wheat had ever deigned to grow in the hot, humid tropical climate of Côte d’Ivoire. Ossiri and his siblings had sat for many hours of “ex-currics” on dietary alienation. It was a subject that incensed their mother. At home, there was no bread at breakfast. There never had been. Nor was there milk or butter. Yams, manioc, riz couché, bananas in every imaginable form and every possible cooking method: their mother used her fertile imagination so that they never envied classmates who were fed on bread slathered with Président butter, Nestlé sweetened condensed milk or Bonnet Rouge unsweetened condensed milk.

“You need to understand, children, it is impossible to be independent when the food we eat comes from the very people who alienate us. A large percentage of our natural resources is shipped back to the West in exchange for the tonnes of wheat needed to satisfy the whimsical demand for bread. You

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