The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

I'm teaching Nervous Conditions by Zimbabwean author and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga this semester, and while creating a study guide for it, I was reminded of the review I had done of the sequel, The Book of Not, on my other blog, originally posted 9 January 2007. It's buried in the archives and hard to find, so I thought I'd repost it on this "literary blog."

The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Here are my first impressions of The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I'd welcome a dialogue with anyone else who has read this book. (Warning: spoilers ahead)

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. The Book of Not. Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke, 2006.

"I was young then and able to banish things, but seeds do grow. Although I was not aware of it then, no longer could I accept Sacred Heart and what it represented as a sunrise on my horizon. Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began."

--voice of Tambudzai, closing paragraph of Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.

I’m trying to figure out whether my disappointment in The Book of Not is that of a literary critic or merely that of a reader who had loved Nervous Conditions and identified with the forceful yet ambiguous narrative of the main character Tambudzai. Perhaps it is unfair to impose my own expectations of a sequel so long awaited on the author, but from the promising tone of Nervous Conditions' last paragraph, this is the sequel I had imagined: Tambudzai continues at the Sacred Heart academy, does well, receives a scholarship to study in England, and discovers in exile the regretful, cynical voice with which she narrates both novels—finding too late that in her desire for advancement in the European world she had lost her connection to family, to history, and to herself. In the second novel, I imagined, she would begin to retrace her steps to find what she had lost. In any case, I expected that I'd still like the plucky yet imperfect narrator, whatever obstacles she may have to overcome.

This is not what happened. Instead the hints at selfishness and the craving for acceptance that we see in Nervous Conditions (her lack of grief over her brother’s death, her relief to get away from the homestead, etc) develop into a character who, by the end of her first person narrative in The Book of Not, is thoroughly un-likeable. Tambudzai dreams of greatness—greatness being that which will propel her ahead of her classmates, to a position where her family have no option but to be proud, a position in which she can have the vengeance of success to hold over her disapproving mother; she will demonstrate to her white classmates and teachers that she is capable of surpassing them. Although Tambudzai is clearly capable of achievement, her frustrating desire to please, her suppression of her rage, results in failure. Tambudzai’s interest in school has little to do with an actual interest in what she is studying but with honours, awards, and exam results. Nervous Conditions is a Dickensonian bildingsroman tracing the successes of the homestead girl who had the support of a benevolent uncle, an optimistic structure ironically undermined by psychological loss of self a la Black Skins, White Masks. In The Book of Not, Dangarembga systematically tears down Tambudzai’s accomplishments achieved in Nervous Conditions. The trajectory of the narrative is a steady descent into lower and lower levels of a self-negating hell.

Like Nervous Conditions, the story is told through Tambudzai’s unreliable first person narration, yet there are fewer moments of tenderness here. The author doesn't seem to like her narrator very much. Dangarembga takes a particularly bitter swipe at Tambudzai when she comes back to the mission on vacation and finds her subdued cousin Nyasha reading Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat. Although Tambudzai has been attempting to memorize the complete works of Shakespeare for her exams, she displays an aggressive ignorance of African literature, saying, “[Nyasha] was reading a book she had not bothered to share with me, which rather than being revolutionary seemed to be about agriculture for it was called A Grain of Wheat, written as far as I could see by someone like poor Bongo in the Congo, a starving Kenyan author” (117). Not only is she ignorant of Ngugi’s work but she disdains the efforts of the other African girls to speak Shona together: “These seniors were planning to spend the entire evening trying futiley to turn back time by speaking Shona! Just imagine! Inviting a mark for refusing to accept which language was allowed and which was not when you were as far as the sixth form!... I was not going to identify with a group that spoke in the only language, out of all the ones that were known at the school, which was forbidden” (169). Success for her is in becoming what she is told to become, in rejecting that which is African to embrace that which is European. To speak Shona is to be out of date, to be insubordinate. Having had her early rebellion over using the white girl’s toilets beaten out of her, she no longer questions any rules placed upon her. This is the point where I miss the fiery character Nyasha, who plays only a peripheral and sedated role in this sequel, and whose blunt observations might have provided a balance to Tambudzai's desperate self-delusion.

The history of Zimbabwe here presented is bitterly cynical. The book opens with Tambudzai’s disjointed, almost incoherent, description of her freedom-fighting sister’s leg being blown off and her uncle Babamukuru being beaten by the villageres for being “not exactly a collaborator, but one whose soul hankered to be at one with the occupying Rhodesian forces” (6). This opening accounts for the terror the elite African students as well as the white students at Sacred Heart feel for the Zimbabwean freedom fighters. Tambudzai locks away her memories of her sister’s leg, until her classmate Ntombi comes to weep in her room about a baby cousin being drowned by “terrorists,” because “[t]hey said my aunt is feeding terrorists… Yes, she talked because of what they did to the baby. But it was too late. My little cousin was broken, just broken!... Then my aunt killed herself, because when it’s like that, you’ll never live… No one is alive!” (172). In an initial reading it is hard to tell whether the “Rhodesian” army or the “Zimbabwean” army has committed these atrocities. Tambudzai’s pain is so deep that she tries not to think about it at all.
Despite the struggle for freedom from white rule, the new Zimbabwe, which has emerged by the end of the narrative, mirrors the old. Language is cloaked in political correctness. At school, the girls are "consumed by ... terror" that they might inadvertantly break the school rules about physical seperation between the white and black students. If a black girl should accidentally touch a white girl in an assembly queue "looks of such horror flooded their faces at this accidental contact that you often looked around to see what horrendous monster caused the expression, before you realised it was your person" (58-9). This history is countered with hypocritical inter-racial hugs between the co-workers at the end of the story. But under this shallow familiarity lurks the old racist structures. Tracy, the white student, who knowingly stole Tambudzai’s trophy for the best 0-levels in secondary school, becomes Tambu’s boss. A white copywriter praises Tambudzai’s advertising copy for a hair straightening product and then takes the copy as his own, going on to win a company prize for the text. (The hair straightening product represents the continued structures of idealizing Europeans ideas of what is good, under new leadership. And Tambudzai’s ability to write sentimental copy about it demonstrates her imbrication in these mental structures.) Tambudzai’s dreams are crushed over and over again. She is the ultimate victim. Although she gets the best O-level results in the class, a white girl gets the prize, while Tambudzai goes unacknowledged. Upon becoming a senior, she chooses to focus on math and science, yet because of her race she is not allowed to attend the national boy’s school the other girls from Sacred Heart attend for the science classes. She is left trying to make sense of the sciences from the handwritten notes of a white classmate. Despite hours of study, she miserably fails her A-levels.

The reader sympathizes with her victimhood, until it becomes obvious that Tambudzai is unwilling to take any action to protest these inequities. She seems to almost aggressively seek a silent martyrdom in pursuit of her own interpretation of unhu, “that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and of how to preserve and accentuate life’s eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now call ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also” (103). Despite her resentment of racist rules which segregate bathrooms by race, she volunteers to knit socks for Rhodesian soldiers in the fight against her “elder siblings,” to comfort the children of a farmer killed by the “elder siblings,” to ensure that she is viewed favourably by the administration. When Tracy is announced the winner of the prize for the best O-levels, most of the girls know it is a lie because they saw Tambudzai’s results. Yet, when her classmate Ntombi urges her to go talk to the headmistress, telling her that she will come along with her for moral support, Tambuzai refuses and silently sits through the award ceremony in an agony of self-mortification. When the white copywriter takes her out for coffee to inform her that he will be stealing the credit for her “brilliant” advertising copy, she deludes herself that it is a sacrifice she must take for future credit. When he receives an award for the copy, she resigns the job, but she does not even take the satisfaction of claiming her rights in her resignation, but lies that she is quitting to get married.

Much of Tambudzai’s problem is the suppression of her rage: she accepts the position given her by the whites, while taking out her aggression on those who have not achieved her level: the chirpy secretary, her vengeful mother at the homestead. Indeed, although Tambudzai has spent her whole life trying to get away from the bitterness her mother represents, Tambudzai has become exactly what she resents about her mother: she is consumed by bitterness, passive-aggressive vengeance, self-defeating negativity. Like her mother, she is so eaten by self pity that she has no friends, nothing that she enjoys except her own martyrdom.

By the end, the reader has become wary. Even Tambudzai’s smallest goals must be viewed with suspicion, since it is obvious that she is to be allowed not even the smallest of triumphs. At the end of the novel as Tambudzai takes an account of her failures, she realizes that “I had forgotten all the promises made to myself and providence while I was young concerning carrying forward with me the good and human, the unhu of my life. As it was, I had not considered unhu at all, only my own calamities, since the contested days at the convent” (246).

The question I had after plowing through this swamp of self pity is whether Tambudzai, whose cycle of self-imposed goals for recognition, victimhood, and aggressive self flagellation repeats again and again with little new insight, has remained an interesting enough person to warrant the 250 pages Dangarembga spends on developing her voice?

Note: 9 December 2007

Today I googled reviews of The Book of Not and came across these three reviews by Helon Habila, Percy Zvomuya, Helen Oyeyemi.

Lomba's Plaigerism

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of my MA thesis on Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel.

[...] The privileging of the imagination is key here. It is the prison superintendent’s lack of imagination that makes him appropriate Lomba’s poetry, oblivious to the possibility that Janice might fall in love with the real poet rather than his gaoler. He cannot imagine that Lomba might use the love poems as a way to escape. This failure of imagination is the fatal weakness of the prison superintendent. From the moment that Muftau reveals his vulnerable side, Lomba takes full advantage of the superintendent’s desire to impress. Much like Lomba’s neighbor on Morgan Street, the illiterate thief Nkem, who had attempted to impress Lomba with his English, Muftau attempts to impress Lomba with his knowledge of poetry: “Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don’t know poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare” (26). Although Lomba cannot express the sarcasm that comes to his lips when he reads Muftau’s first poem, he expresses it in the poems he writes for the superintendent’s educated lady-love. Muftau does not know poetry, but the teacher he wants to marry does. The superintendent’s claim to literacy also unintentionally supplies Lomba with his form of resistance: the first letters of “Soyinka, Okigbo, and Shakespeare” form a perfect “SOS.” Lomba appropriates lines and whole poems from other poets to send to Janice. He slyly undermines the superintendent’s intentional plagiarism by supplying him with already “plagiarized” materials, to act as messages to the educated woman the prison superintendent loves. He appropriates lines from Edgar Allen Poe, John Donne, and the Greek poet Sappho, but their words of love become “scriptive Morse tucked innocently into the lines of the poems” (33). [i] Janice later tells him that she recognized the SOS in the repetition of the line, “Save my soul, a prisoner,” that ran through his poems. The love poetry is turned to a new political and practical purpose. The literary symbol becomes actualized—he is an actual prisoner, not merely a metaphoric one.

The SOS refrain is one of Lomba’s more obvious literary devices, but his use of intertextuality within the poems themselves works both as a way for Lomba to snatch at lines of poetry that lie, like the stars and the rain, beyond the reach of the prison and as a sly indication of Muftau’s inability to write such poetry. Muftau’s blindness to the obvious allusions in the poems that Lomba intentionally plagiarizes points to his stupid deceit. However, the “plagiarism” of classic poems works not just to mock the prison superintendent but to say the things Lomba cannot directly communicate without being discovered. In Lomba’s “bowdlerization of Sappho’s ‘Ode’” (31) the superintendent does not see beyond the conventions of love poetry. He does not imagine that Lomba is writing anything but what he asked him to write: “‘A peer of goddesses she seems to me.’ Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?” (33). What the superintendent does not know is that in other translations of Sappho, the poet speaks of a rival who sits beside the beloved, hearing her laughter and her voice. The author of the poem stands at a distance from the couple, unable to reach the desired lady whose attention is turned to the rival, except through the poem. This reflects Lomba’s own position. Whereas J. Addington Symonds (as well as other translators) translates the poem so that the author addresses the beloved, indicating jealousy of the man who sits so close that he “…in silence hears thee/ Silverly speaking, /Laughing love's low laughter…” (Symonds 69), Lomba bowdlerizes the poem so that the seeming “author” of the poem is the man sitting “face to face” with her, who is entranced by “listening to the sweet tones of my voice, / And the loveliness of my laughing. /It is this that sets my heart fluttering / In my chest,” (Waiting 32). This beginning of the poem points ironically to the self absorption of the prison superintendent who imagines the tones of his choppy voice “sweet,” and his laughter “lovely,” just as he imagines his own poetry “great,” and that he is making Lomba “comfortable” in prison by giving him cigarettes (41). However, following this initial ironic hint, the poem transitions to another set of imagery, which points to the true author of the poem. As with the Sappho, the author of the poem is not the arrogant man who sits “face to face” with Janice, but the one who waits in agonies in the dark. The last nine lines of the poem, like the refrain of “Save my soul, a prisoner,” work to reflect Lomba’s true position as a prisoner:

I am no longer master of my voice,
And my tongue lies useless
And a delicate flame runs over my skin
No more do I see with my eyes;
The sweat pours down me
I am all seized with trembling
And I grow paler than the grass
My strength fails me
And I seem little short of dying. (32)

Here Lomba demonstrates the powerful potential of the love poetry Muftau thinks “harmless.” Using the conventions of love poetry in which the lover often seems helpless and in thrall to the beloved, Lomba reflects the literality of his own imprisonment. Read one way, the poem reflects the metaphoric imprisonment of the gaoler within the structures of his own conceit; in another way, the poem describes Lomba’s own experiences in prison. The two lines, “I am no longer master of my voice, /And my tongue lies useless” (32), reflect his observations in his diary that “[p]rison chains not so much your hands and feet as it does your voice” (14). The master of Lomba’s voice, indeed, is now the man who gives Janice the poem. “The delicate flame” (32) on his skin can also be read as the “acid, cancer” of anger “eating away your bowels in the dark” (15). And if the “lover” claims that “No more do I see with my eyes” (32) then no more can Lomba see in solitary confinement where after removing his blindfold, “the darkness remained the same” (24). As with any prisoner in a Lagos prison, “the sweat pours down me,” and if he is “seized with trembling” (32) it is like the inmate whose “hands shook, as if with a life of their own” (15) whose “strength fail[ed]” (32) him and who “collapsed into [Lomba’s] arms” (16) crying that “[i]f I go back there I’ll die” (15). The cry of the lover is the cry of the prisoner longing to be free.

If the love poem is powerful as a disguise for a more political reality, it is also powerful because it is a form that allows the imprisoned poet to reach out beyond his solitude to an audience that is both real and imagined. His imagination allows him not just to sneak his poems through the prison walls, but also to imagine liberation for himself. Lomba’s metaphoric “message[s] in a bottle, thrown without much hope into the sea” (39), recall the words of the marabout who had once predicted Lomba’s future in prison: “The water … takes away from us what we don’t need, and drops it at another shore where it is needed. Sometimes it returns to us what it took away, refined and augmented with brine and other sea minerals” (47). If read alongside the story in which Lomba’s poems are taken away from him by the prison superintendent and returned to him by Janice, the passage implies not just destiny but also agency. It is not that the superintendent merely “took” Lomba’s love poems from him, but that Lomba intended them as “messages.” His intended audience was not necessarily Janice but “myself, perhaps, written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” (38). Lomba’s use of the imagination is a defiant act of will: writing alone in prison, he imagines an audience for himself. The task of writing for the superintendent’s intended eventually gives him a corporeal presence to connect to his imagined audience. When the prison superintendent first tells Lomba that he gave Janice one of Lomba’s poems, Lomba imagines the superintendent’s rendezvous with her at a Chinese Restaurant. In his imagination Janice is reluctant to become involved with the man. He imagines that “[s]ometimes she is at loss what to make of his attentions. She sighs. She turns her plump face to the deep, blue lagoon. A white boat with dark stripes on its sides speeds past; a figure is crouched inside, almost invisible” (29). The poem “Three Words” that the superintendent later pulls out to give her is a poem Lomba had initially written before the raid that landed him in solitary confinement. The nearly invisible person crouched inside the boat that Janice saw earlier seems to become significant—the fleeting presence of the author of the poem, like that hidden almost invisible poet in the Sappho. That a seemingly futile poem meant only for himself had actually reached an audience indicates the power of Lomba’s imagination. When Lomba meets Janice, he finds that “my mental image of her was almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely” (36). It is as if his imagination has brought her to life, his SOS poems that he sent out into the world through the unlikely courier of the prison superintendent “written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” had been found and brought back. He had dreamed his way out of the prison bars, and had reeled in one of the text’s many angels, who pulls his poems out of her purse and gives them back to him.



Endnotes:


[i] The first line of Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” reads “Helen, thy beauty is to me” (Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy 879); Lomba writes “Janice, your beauty is to me” (Waiting 31). The first line and a half of Donne’s “The Good-Morrow” reads “I wonder by my troth, what thou and I /Did, till we loved?...” (Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy 263); Lomba writes “I wonder, my heart, what you and I / Did till we loved” (Waiting 31). The Sappho is reimagined from any one of many translations. The one I am using for comparative purposes here is J. Addington Symonds’ 1833 translation from Henry Thornton Wharton’s collection Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a literal translation (69).

Works Cited in Excerpt:

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Ferguson, Mary, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

Symonds, J. Addington. “Blest as the immortal gods is he,” in Sappho: Memoir Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. London: John Lane, 1908.

Les Saignantes directed by Jean-Pierre Bekolo

In 1998, Nigeria’s brutal dictator General Sani Abacha died in bed with two prostitutes. The exact details of his death are not common knowledge, but the rumours abound. Some say his death “by heart attack” was Viagra induced; others spin tales of the prostitutes assassinating him with a poisoned apple. The myths that surround this historical incident point to the importance of the event in the national imagination, and have inspired oblique references in quite a few creative works.[1] In “The Last Sleep” a short story by Sunday Ayewanu, several mammy water spirits disguised as foreign prostitutes overcome the evil ruler of “Benueria.” In a sexual/spiritual struggle, they insist on him giving them government contracts and leave him dead with exhaustion.

The sleaze surrounding the corrupt government of the Abacha regime and the almost spiritual nature of his fortuitous death, as imagined in Ayewanu, is what I thought of when I saw Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s striking and disturbing film Les Saignantes, the winner of the 2007 Silver Stallion at FESPACO film festival. Set in the year 2025, the film opens provocatively with an almost naked young woman floating over a stout elderly man.[2] Strapped into a harness, she performs acrobatic sexual maneuvers— pointing her fingers in an imitation of shooting while thrusting her pelvis into his. Although the harness might seem to indicate the servile nature of the woman, here Majolie is in complete control. The old man lies back passively, waiting for her to swoop down upon him. The next thing we know the old man is dead. Whether this is an accident—he died of heart failure and old age—or whether this is a spiritual assassination performed in her shooting position, we are never quite sure, but it soon becomes apparent that Majolie has on her hands the death of a high ranking government official, the SGCC, who had been going to give her a government contract before he died in flagrante. The rest of the film traces the bizarre adventures she and her friend Chouchou go through to first dispose of the body, reconstruct it, and then hold an elaborate W.I.P (Wake of Important Person) to advance their own careers



A futuristic film set in a dystopian Cameroonian city vaguely reminiscent of the dystopian Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s classic BladeRunner, Les Saignantes is shot in high contrast lighting in what seems to be one long continuous night. The throbbing bass soundtrack of the film underscores the pulse of its rapid, jump-cut, music-video style editing. The characterization of the future city is a pessimistic allegory of the contemporary nation in Africa. By the year 2025, nothing has progressed; rather the country is still ruled by abusive power-drunk leaders who promise contracts to their mistresses; the police still take bribes and have no authority to actually investigate the crimes of the rich and powerful. Near the end of the film the smooth woman’s voiceover, which has performed the narrator’s function throughout the film, intones “We were already dead.” Re-watching the film with these words in mind, one wonders if the film, set a few years ahead in the future in 2025, is not the portrait of the spiritual aftermath of nation that has already died.

The entire culture seems to revolve around rituals of death. The W.I.P.’s become the ceremonies where political connections are made. At an elegant cocktail party or at home with Chouchou’s mother, the sophisticated revelers munch distractedly on maggots and drink what looks like radio-active embalming liquid from giant martini glasses. The mysterious women with their uniform of red headscarves, who cluster around Chouchou’s mother, flicker in and out like ghosts. The narrator makes it ambiguous whether any of the women in the film are spirits or ghosts, dead or alive. With the mysterious force mevoungou, referenced throughout the film, there seems to be little differentiation between the two.

Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye argues in Tradition and Modernity that “[t]he conception of modernity may give the impression that modernity represents a break with tradition and is thus irreconcilable with it; such an impression would clearly be false. For one thing, every society in the modern world has many traditional elements inherited and accepted from previous, that is ‘premodern’, generations…” (Gyekye 271). While Gyekye’s conception of modernity is optimistic, Bekolo seems to invoke death to illustrate the end results of a corrupted modernity. He visualizes the “mammy water” universe of “tradition,” in which the spiritual is inextricably tangled up in the tangible. Mevoungou the mystical power that controls the bodies of the young women after the death of the SGCC is a kind of lifeblood that lies at the heart of the society and which seems to provide the only hope for a “resurrection.”[3]

Given, Bekolo’s fascination with the process of filmmaking itself, I couldn’t help wondering if his portrayal of witchcraft and mevoungou does not have something to do with the medium of film.[4] The film opens, like so many other African films, with a voiceover reminiscent of an oral storyteller and is then interspersed with chapter captions: metaquestions about the possibility of filmmaking in postcolonial Cameroon: 1) How do you make an anticipation (futuristic/science fiction) film in a country with no future? 2) How can you make a film in a country where acting is subversive? 3) How can you make a horror film in a place where death is the party? 4) How can you film a love story, in a place where love is impossible? 5) How can you make a crime film where investigation is forbidden? 6) How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards? After the opening chapter heading, almost half of the film passes before the second chapter comes, but the rest follow in a rapid succession, pounding home the point. If none of these tidy European genres (Science fiction, Horror, Romance, Crime/Investigation) can capture the paradoxes of postcolonial Cameroon, Bekolo indicates that he will create an uneasy amalgam of them all. His refusal to follow the “rules” of filmmaking, which has alarmed so many Western critics, indicates the subversive potential available to those who wield the camera.[5]

Les Saignantes references the grotesque humour of Quentin Tarantino and Hollywood horror films in the cliché of the chain-saw wielding cannibal, as well as the excesses of postmodern Hollywood cross-genre films (one of the pin-up posters in Chouchou’s bedroom is of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge), but he also draws on African orality and urban-legend so often captured in Nollywood videos: government officials who use witchcraft to reinforce their corrupt power. Mevoungou used as a counter-witchcraft against the patriarchal order in Les Saignantes, works similarly to the sorceress’s sex-changing challenge to the patriarchy in Bekolo’s first film Quartier Mozart. Filmmaking, Bekolo implies, like mevoungou allows one to 1) expose the decay at the heart of power in the postcolonial nation and 2) to imaginatively overcome the powerful and corrupt leaders of the nation, using the subaltern figure of the young woman. As the girls prepare for the W.I.P., one of them expresses her fear that their plan will fail: “what if it doesn’t work? We’re just two holes that get screwed in the end.” However, if the postcolonial nation is often represented as a woman raped by the military, if in a crime-ridden urban environment, young women find that they are most often exploited for their sexuality, Majolie and Chouchou turn this symbol of the exploitation of women, their sexuality, into a weapon with which to destroy the powerful minister of state. Mevoungou becomes a potent source of agency and of imagination. As the camera lingers on dark city streets, the final few sentences of the woman’s voiceover clinch the parallel between the witchcraft and filmmaking: “It was mevoungou dancing, dreaming. Mevoungou danced, dreamed in technicolour. We were living in 2025, children behaving as if we had no parents, no children. We had to move on. The country could not continue like that. We had to change”

Read through the metaquestions that structure the nonlinear narrative, Bekolo’s film can be interpreted as a call to action. As the gigantic moon sinks behind trees, the final chapter caption emerges: “How can you watch a film like this and do nothing afterwards?” The tangled plot recedes leaving his questions in relief. This is not merely a pessimistic vision of the future but an indication of imaginative possibilities opened up through the medium of film.

NOTES

For a trailer of the film see this you tube clip:

[1]Nigerian novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Purple Hibiscus and Helon Habila in Waiting for an Angel both subtly reimagine what Christopher Okonkwo calls the “woman-implicated death” of Sani Abacha. Okonkwo notes that Beatrice’s poisoning of the abusive and authoritarian Eugene in Purple Hibiscus re-enacts Abacha’s death. I argue in my MA thesis on Waiting for an Angel that the mob of women who break down the billboard with a smug condom-wielding man foreshadows Abacha’s death that occurs on the margins of the narrative.
[2] The costume that Majolie wears in this scene is visually reminiscent of the famous metal bikini Princess Leia wears in George Lucas’s classic science fiction film Return of the Jedi. The intertextual link here is significant in that Princess Leia is also involved in a struggle against corrupt male-dominated government structures.
[3] Chouchou’s mother and the women in her house who appear and reappear on beat visually echo the witches in Bekolo’s earlier film Quartier Mozart. In Quartier Mozart the neighborhood witch and a young girl named Queen of the Hood change sexes to infiltrate the world of men and expose hidden corruptions at the heart of the patriarchy/nation, represented by the policeman MadDog.
[4] My word choice here is intentional. The definition of the medium as a person through which a spirit is channeled and the medium as the material out of which art is created seem to be conflated in Les Saignantes.
[5] In a quick survey of film reviews on blogs, most of the ones I found were overwhelmingly negative--much of the criticism centred around Bekolo’s assumed inability to follow the rules of filmmaking: http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/003429.html, http://www.fardelsbear.com/fn3/archives/cat_les_saignantes.html, http://www.blogto.com/toronto_film_festival_2005/2005/09/les_saignantes_at_tiff/

Works Cited:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2003

Ayawanu, Sunday. “The Last Sleep.” Cramped Rooms and Open Spaces: An Anthology of New Short Fiction from the Association of Nigerian Authors. Ed. Ibrahim Sheme. Lagos: Nayee Press, 1999. 16-28.

Bekolo, Jeanne-Pierre, dir. Les Saignantes. Quartier Mozart Films, 2005.

_____________________. Quartier Mozart. 1992.

Gyekye, Kwame. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi. 1983.

Lurmann, Baz, dir. Moulin Rouge. 2001.

Okonkwo, Christopher N. “Talking and Te(x)stifying: Ndibe, Habila, and Adichie’s ‘Dialogic’ Narrativizations of Nigeria’s Post-War Nadir: 1984-1998” presented at ASA Conference 2005, Washington D.C. 17 November 2005.

Scott, Ridley, dir. Bladerunner. 1982.

Photo Credits: All from Bekolo Films.

La Vie Sur Terre (1998) directed by Abderrahmane Sissako

In Achille Mbembe’s essay, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” he engages with Braudel’s notion of temporal pluralities—that there are multiple kinds of time: “temporalities of long and very long duration, slowly evolving and less slowly evolving situations, rapid and virtually instantaneous deviations, the quickest being the easiest to detect” and “the exceptional character of World Time” (22). In Braudel’s thinking, world time has control over certain spaces, while others completely escape it. Mbembe relativizes Braudel’s thesis by maintaining that 1) temporalities overlap and interact with each other. They are not completely segregated. 2) There is no place completely separate from “world history,” but there are modalities, or categories in which it is manipulated to fit with local variables (23).

Abderrahmane Sissako’s 1998 film Vie sur terre (Life on Earth) illustrates Mbembe’s idea of temporal modalities and plays with the idea of “world time.” In the village of Sokolo, everyone knows what is going on in the outside world. In the local radio station, ancient radios are interspersed with glossy images cut from foreign magazines: including an image of a happy Prince Charles, Princes Diana, and baby Prince William frozen in time years after Diana’s divorce and death. A young man enthuses over a Japanese SUV in a magazine, and tells the photographer about the doors in Abijan that open by themselves. The young men sit all day listening to RFE radio from France, on which the millennium celebrations in New York, Paris, and Tokyo are reported. The voice on the radio says: “Not all countries have the same time, but those that do are celebrating the millennium.” This statement seems to get at the heart of the film in which global knowledge from the outside permeates the village, but in which knowledge from the village cannot be found on a larger global scale or even in the next village. One suspects that in the nearby villages similar young men listen to RFE and know world news but do not know the news of the neighboring village.

This is illustrated in the multiple characters who try to make phone calls but cannot get through. The dusty sign “telephone a priority for everyone” is ironic. While on the “outside” everyone may have a telephone, this is obviously not the case here, where the telephone serves as the metaphor for the “inability to speak” to the outside world. The soldier cannot get through to his camp. Nana cannot get through to a nearby town. The character played by Sissako attempts to make a phone call to Paris, but it is misdirected to London. The characters wait for people to call them back—since the telephone seems to work like the news, only in one direction. When the person from Paris gets through the disabled postmaster leaves the phone off the hook and sets off on his crutches to find Sissako. He disappears into the village, and nothing more is heard of him or of the call. Information seems to be lost in a time warp.

The gap in communication and time is contradicted by the visual movement of the film. Far from being a place where “nothing happens.” Sokolo is characterized by constant bi-directional movement. If communication moves soley from the outside to the inside, the daily activities of the villagers movement of the village crisscross. Throughout the film, if a bicycle or other vehicle passes from the right to the left of the frame, a canoe or a donkey cart, or another bicycle will cross from the left to the right. The visual back and forth of the film performs multiple times on a small scale, what Sissako does on a large scale with the form of the film. The initial opening in the French supermarket fades into the large tree (representative perhaps of history?), and then the old man reading the letter from Sissako in Paris. If the film opens with communication pointed toward Sekolo, The rest of the film is an outward response to this initial letter from the outside. The man dictating the letter to his brother in Paris does on a small scale what the entire form is doing: taking the news of Sokolo to the outside.

At the very end of the film, Nana, with a determined set to her face, pedals off on her bike, apparently to the neighboring town she has been trying to call. If she cannot get through on the phone, she will go there in person. This resolve to take herself there is what Sissako has done with the film: he has brought the village, like a letter, into the global discussions of the millennium, where its existence in time can no longer be ignored.

Work cited in addition to the film:
Mbembe, Achille. trans, Steven Rendall. “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa” in Globalization. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

For more information, see also this interview with Sissako.

Lumumba (2000) directed by Raoul Peck

The following is on the film Lumumba, a historical film based on the events surrounding Congolese independence and the murder of the first Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. The film is directed by Raoul Peck, who ten years earlier directed a documentary on Lumumba's life, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.

(I've reposted this review from my other blog.)

Near the beginning of Raoul Peck’s film Lumumba, as Patrice Lumumba and his political comrades passionately discuss decolonization, the hot-headed Maurice Mpolo exclaims in frustration, “We’ll eat them raw!” “Be careful,” Lumumba replies with an ironic smile, “They’ll take you for an anthropophage.” The idea of cannibalism that Lumumba invokes here is a joke, yet it also provides a potent historical metaphor that is subtly reflected in images throughout the film. These images of “cannibalism” allude to the larger cycle of violence and suppression that is shown as thematic of Belgium’s historical relationship with the Congo.

One of the stereotypes of Africa cultivated by the Europeans for centuries was that of cannibalism—the stock character of the missionary in the large black pot. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness lauded as one of the “greats” of the Western canon, the narrator Marlowe calls the “natives” he sees, as he steams up the River Congo, “cannibals.” When Marlowe asks the “native” headman what they’d do if they caught one of him, the man says “Eat ‘im!”1 However, if the stereotype was used by racist Europeans to indicate the “savagery” of their colonized subjects, it was also deftly turned into a metaphor for the brutality and exploitation characterized by slavery, colonization, and subsequent European meddling in African affairs. The 18th century Igbo writer Oluadah Equiano writes of his fears when taken aboard the slave ship and seeing the large copper furnaces he asks “if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair?”2 In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross, he imagines a grotesque competition of thieves and robbers in which fanged politicians propose creating a pipeline of blood from Kenya to the West. The violence against and exploitation of fellow human beings for economic gain both in the colonial era and the neocolonial era is the cannibalism that they project upon those they exploit.

In the film Lumumba, images evocative of cannibalism are shown in association with the supposedly departing Belgians. Framing the film are images of a celebration over which Mobutu presides; white women in queenly hats clink wine glasses and cut into a slab of meat. This opening celebration is interspersed with old photographs of Congolese enslavement under Leopold II and the Belgians. Resigned eyes in skeletal faces, naked chests. Chained hands. The image of cutting into meat is repeated when the two soldiers pull shrouded corpses out of a shallow grave, chopping into sheet covered flesh, sawing at it like tough meat. This hidden butchery symbolically provides the “meat” for the celebration. Although the celebration takes place several years after “independence,” the Belgians don’t seem to have gone anywhere. They continue to enjoy the “fruits of the land.” Moreover, by invoking Lumumba’s spirit, Mobutu cannibalizes his life and vision—using his death, which he had symbolically participated in, to provide the authorization for his own rule.

Mobutu merely continues in the structures (and cycle of violence) laid out for him by the Belgians. By refusing to allow Lumumba to do more than official “information gathering” until the official handover, the Belgians have effectively hamstrung Lumumba’s government. As the investors note during the meetings in Brussels, the entire civil service was Belgian—the Congolese had been deliberately been kept in inferior positions; with the departure of the Belgians, the system for the operation of the nation collapses. The investors in Brussels seem to delight in these visions of chaos. Not only do they set the newly “independent” state up for failure, the Belgians and their allies continue to undermine the authority of the new government. The outside advisors are patronizing to the new prime minister and president to their face, and behind their backs they make deals that ensure the collapse of the nation—with the leaders of Katanga province, with Mobutu. When Lumumba’s plane is diverted and Lumumba orders the pilot to turn around, the pilot maintains that he is Belgian and defies the prime minister, obeying the orders of his Belgian superiors to land. When Lumumba is being smuggled out of his house, the soldier who inspects the car mentions that he is “smoking American cigarettes.”

General Janssens maintains that the army will always be under Belgian control and tells the soldiers that any indication otherwise were merely the lies of politicians. The discontent of the soldiers ripple out from this scene: the rape and killing of Belgians who had remained behind, the invasion of the government house, the massacres carried out under Mobutu’s leadership, and the final abduction and murder of Lumumba and his comrades. The Belgian soldiers who beat Lumumba in prison before independence are echoed in the soldiers who beat him on the plane and the leaders of Katanga who beat him in prison right before he is murdered. But behind this seeming “native” unrest are Belgian “puppeteers.”3 Janssens boasts seem calculated to rankle. The American CIA agent meets with Mobutu to assure him of American support. Belgians are present at the execution sight, and it is Belgian soldiers who saw into the bodies and dispose of them in fire. Just as the feast at the beginning was interspersed with photos of those who had been exploited by Belgium, Mobutu’s speech at the end of the film is interspersed with the images of the Belgian soldiers burning the bodies of the murdered leaders. In their prison cell before they are murdered, Lumumba and Mpolo laugh desperately together over Lumumba’s old joke about the “anthropophage.” They understand the futility of their own protest and the way in which they are being used—as Lumumba told someone over the phone before his arrest; they are “a sacrifice for the people of Congo.”

At the end of the film, Mobutu’s call for a moment of silence to remember Lumumba is metaphoric for the silence that was imposed upon the people of the Congo. However, the focus of the camera in the end upon the soldier indicates that though silenced, the truth is not forgotten. The soldier in the final shot resembles the soldier who took Lumumba into custody by the riverside. Lumumba had told him that he would regret participating in his arrest; and the soldier in the final scene stares at Mobutu with the knowledge of the truth in his eyes. The narrative device of Lumumba’s posthumous voiceover indicates that his voice cannot be silenced. Although the evidence is burned and Mobutu has “cannibalized” Lumumba’s memory to lend credence to his own rule, the people know the truth. And as the final voiceover indicates, “one day we will have a new history, not one written by Belgium, Paris, (etc), It will be our history.” The fire that the Belgians use to cover up the evidence of the murders can also be read as the fire of the communal imagination. The narrative device is self-reflexive. If there is to be a new history, then the telling of that new history has begun. The photos taken as trophies of Belgian occupation are used as accusations; the story of Lumumba’s murder is told; the “moment” of silence is over.

Footnotes:
1 Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. Planet PDF p. 82 Downloaded 8 February 2007
2 Oluadah Equiano. Interesting Narrative. “Boarding a Slave-ship.” Downloaded 8 February 2007.
3 There are a series of repeated images that mirror pre-independence with post-independence. A recently beaten Lumumba looking out over the airfield as he descends the plane in Brussels for independence negotiations; and a recently beaten Lumumba looking out over the airfield as he descends the plane into captivity. The Belgian soldiers beat him in prison; then the Congolese soldiers beat him in the plane and in prison.

Image Credits: Zeitgeist Films

Afrika-Vereniging van de Universiteit Gent

Le Déclin de l'empire américain directed by Denys Arcand (1986)

I could not admit this in the reaction paper I wrote for this film, but I walked out of the first half of the film (which our professor stopped early because he had to be at a meeting) reeling. Walking home, I kept being afraid that the people I passed would leap up to make some bizaare sexual confession. When I stopped off at the bank, I expected the teller to burst into a confidance of an orgy. The film leaves you in a bit of a fog, especially since it is set in a university. Seeing it, one starts to madly wonder if this sort of hedonism actually occurs regularly, and somehow one has just been blind and naive. Hopefully not. Set in a Montreal university community, gender roles are switched as the men stay at home to cook a gourmet meal, while the women work out at a local gym. The subject of conversation among both parties is unrelentingly about sex: promiscuous sex, S&M sex, wild orgy sex, interspersed by brief comments about the contents of the refrigerator or the well done-ness of the fish pie, which inevitably turn out to be sexual innuendos. The men are boastful: the history professor gleefully relates picking up “two American girls” one night and then taking the drugs they gave him when he sleeps with his wife the next; the women are ironic: Remy’s wife Louise tells of being stuck with a somewhat lethargic partner at an orgy that Remy persuaded her to go to, and Dominique tells of a under-endowed Italian policeman she once bedded. In both sets, there are innocents who are being educated in the hedonistic ways of their more sexually-experienced friends. The young male PhD student, who initially seems somewhat askance at the confessions of his professors, begins to test out his own dirty stories and ends up laying the recently published chair of the history department, Dominique. The somewhat naïve housewife, Louise, who knows her husband has affairs but has no idea the extent has a more upsetting night when Dominique reveals that not only has she slept with Louise’s husband Remy, but that Remy is the most sexually voracious and promiscuous man in the department. She seeks refuge in the arms of her gay friend Claude, a “cruiser” and art history professor who is worried about the blood in his urine. Claude holds her all night, and the ménage all join each other for breakfast again the next day. Fortunately for a squeamish viewer like me, most of the sex is talk; there are a few flashbacks to illustrate the sexual tales, but they aren’t as alarming as they could be—in fact most of them are rather funny, in a disturbing sort of way. The film is remniscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron—in which a whole party of men and women sit around eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories.

And perhaps this Boccaccio connection is a good way to open my reaction paper since neither my queasy prudery or my summary of the film will be of interest to my professor. So, here is what I turned in:

The Decline of the American Empire directed by Denys Areand (1987)
The medieval Italian writer Boccaccio opens his collection of tales the Decameron with a reference to the black plague, “…in the illustrious city of Florence, the fairest of all the cities of Italy, there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities, … had spread into the West.”Boccaccio’s reference to the Black Plague invokes the end of an epoch—the death of an “iniquitous” society. Fleeing the plague a group of young people seek refuge in the country and spend ten days together eating, going on walks in the countryside, and telling bawdy stories. There are echoes of the Decameron in Denys Areand’s film The Decline of the American Empire, which opens with a long tracking shot that finally focuses on the chair of the history department Dominique being interviewed, by the graduate student Diane, on tape about her new book. Dominique’s interview sets up the philosophical underpinnings of the rest of the film; she speaks of a society in decline, later positing that Marx and Freud based their theories on guilt and jealousy over sex. When their grand theories don’t pan out then, people have nothing to base their lives on. In the face of doom, the reigning order seems to be to eat, have sex, and to, as Louise puts it, intellectualize their misery. The wild sexual tales the groups of men and women tell are devices to combat a “suburban” boredom—the meaninglessness of growing into old age, of pursuing an academic career when there are “17,000 scholarly articles published a day.” The household of bawdy storytellers in the Decameron is reflected in the household of intellectuals who seem to belong to a type of commune, living in neighboring houses and eating meals together. The apocalypse, which has already struck in the Decameron, has not yet occurred in The Decline of the American Empire, but it hangs over the Montreal party like a dark cloud. In the first half of the film as the characters carelessly relate tales of casual group sex and S&M, there is an impending sense of doom. The gay character Claude laughs along with the other men about the STD’s their wives and lovers complain about (“Disease is a part of sex”), but privately agonizes in fear over the blood in his urine. When Claude tells of how he is often robbed while “cruising,” and a little later Dominique tells how she has also been robbed in foreign countries after sex with strangers, I felt uneasily that these intellectuals are living dangerously—that something is bound to go terribly wrong. But then, they know they are living dangerously—the uncertainty is part of what gives them pleasure. Diane, who is experimenting with sado-masochism with her brutish boyfriend, says of their connection, “We could kill each other.” When the sinister boyfriend shows up outside the house and eavesdrops on the men’s dirty stories, it seems as though the “real” thing has showed up and caught them at their game. He embodies the sense of foreboding I felt through the first half of the film. The characters seem so caught up in their dangerous pursuit of pleasure that they have lost any connection to each other. The women sneer at men’s small penises and their obsession over them. The men scoff at women’s desire for romance before sex. Remy delights in “knowing the dinner is on and stopping off on the way” or in “not mixing his sex life with his marriage.” The characters seem to constantly act out of disdain for each other.

However, Dominique’s revelation to the group of friends that she has slept with Remy and Pierre is somewhat of an anti-climatic moment---apocolypse has not happened—she’s just burst what she calls Louise’s self-delusional attempt to find happiness. The reappearance of the sinister boyfriend, ends not in a murder but in a cutting through all the pretence: “They were talking about sex all day. I was expecting an orgy, but now the big deal is a fish pie. When I want sex, I fuck.” His declaration opens up the way for more confessions. Although in the segregated bravado found in the reversed role chatter (the men at home cooking while the women work out at the gym), the men and women seem to joy in putting down their spouses or lovers, glorying in the details of abstract sex, when the party comes back together, we see that there actually are strong emotional connections between them. Suddenly, the sexual talk becomes intellectualized and sentimental confessions are made. Pierre confesses that these friends are his family. Dominique confesses that she has slept with Louise’s husband. Alone with the young PhD student Alain, Dominique confesses that she resents women with “cute little husband and cute little children, who don’t live in reality.” Pierre, who has spent all day boasting about his sexual exploits and his emotional disconnect from his lovers, confesses to his young companion Danielle that he loves her but that he is too tired for sex. The suddenly disillusioned Louise weeps herself to sleep in Claude’s arms, and Claude confesses to Diane that he is worried about the blood in his urine. Even Diane’s rough lover unexpectedly pulls out an absurd gift wrapped in heart-covered wrapping paper, attached to a bobbing heart-shaped balloon. The tough exterior bravado conceals a vulnerable desire for intimacy. The bluster of the day before fades away to reveal connections so deep that even after feeling betrayed, Louise finds herself unable to leave the house, instead joining Danielle to play a stormy piano duet. It was at this moment, that I realized what the piano music bursts at intervals throughout the film reminded me of. It reminded me of Jane Austen films—of those repressed stories of society and manners and the search for love—the house parties of young people who fight boredom by playing piano duets and proposing, as in Mansfield Park, bawdy plays to wile away the time. Perhaps the boredom that the characters express isn’t so new but is, in fact, built into the structure of the American/ European empire.

Edward Said has noted that the genteel life Jane Austen describes in Mansfield Park would have been impossible without the slave plantations that Fanny’s uncle owned and the profits made from a budding British empire.[2] Patricia Rozema has further explored Austen’s references to the Caribbean in her film adaptation of the novel, delving into the wounded psyche of the eldest son Tom who has witnessed and sketched slaves being raped on his father’s plantation. Throughout The Decline of the American Empire are similar sexualized references to the “other”—which conceal objectifications of different races similar to that statement Fanny’s uncle makes in Rozema’s film that “mulatto women are like mules. They cannot reproduce.” Remy opens the film with leering references to a Vietnamese girl in his class. He catalogues the distinct pleasures and scents experienced when sleeping with women of various ethnicities. When the young Alain good-naturedly accuses him of being racist, Remy laughs that “there is no better friend to the Negro,” relating a time when he took a distinguished visiting professor from Burkina Faso on the hunt for prostitutes and tried to haggle the price down by claiming it would be “aid to Africa.” On the women’s side, Dominique smirks at what she sees as the social climbing of the two Martiniquean men she paid to sleep with her, and Diane maintains that she likes the “African blacks” better. These distinguished professors speak knowledgably about oppression and racism in South Africa; yet their academic concerns seem merely a sham (as Dominique theorizes on Marx and Freud) to cover their ravenous sexuality. That their racist sentiments slip out along with their tales of sexual escapades indicates that perhaps their identities are as much caught up in the ideologies of superiority, as Jane Austen’s characters. Since these characters are Quebecois who are themselves postcolonial figures, in the struggle against being incorporated into an “American empire,” their “colonial” language is doubly ironic. Even more than the unihibited sex talk, this need to define oneself against the “other” marks the fundamental weakness in their society.

[2] Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993

translation of chapter 1 from Kaico! by Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino

The following is a working translation of chapter 1 from Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino's novella Kaico! The novel is originally written in Hausa. Although I cannot change the trajectory of the story or the paragraph order, I welcome feedback on wording and minor editorial issues. For example, I don't know whether I need to keep all the to-ing and fro-ing--descriptions of people kneeling and rising etc, that is in the Hausa original (but then maybe it is important to preserve cultural values). My translation process is to do a handwritten metaphrase--translating pretty much word for word on my first round. Then when I type it up, I pretend as if it is my own story and I take more liberties with changing sentences around, deleting redundant phrases, and reworking wording--and occasionally adding an explanatory detail (trying to keep it as unobtrusive as possible). Because I'm trying to stick as close to the original as possible, especially the use of proverbs and colloquial language, I think that what in the original is rich and mellifluous, sometimes comes across as stiff in translation. (Case in point being the first three or four paragraphs of the chapter--also sections of conversation between Kabiru and Baba.) I'd appreciate any feedback on sections that sound particularly stiff and any suggestions on how to improve them. Also, I've tried to keep quite a few Hausa words in the translation with the intention of having a glossary in the final version. However, I'd like feedback on where the Hausa might be distracting. For example, would it be better to just say "prayer beads" rather than "carbi"? Is it ok to intersperse "Allah" with "God," or should I be consistant with one or the other? How many stock phrases like "God protect you on the road" should I translate or just leave in the original?

When I finish the translation, I will likely delete these working sections from my blog before publication.

T-C

Kaico! [1]

By Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino
Translated by Talatu-Carmen

Original Publication information:
Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino. Kaico! Gidan Dabino Publishers: Kano, 1996.

CHAPTER 1


Anya jama’a, how can we keep living like this, as the very life is being squeezed out of us? Every day, prices climb higher and higher. Times have changed, so that now it is every man for himself. We struggle so for money that now everyone just looks out for himself and his children. No one bothers to help his relatives or neighbors anymore. The rich no longer pity the poor. Although Allah has placed on us the duty to give alms to those less fortunate, now people give alms only if they are bothered. Others fly into a temper and energetically refuse to give anything, so that their wealth keeps increasing to no end. On the other side, the poor man has become envious in his heart; he doesn’t want to get up and find work for himself. He prefers to keep hanging around the houses of the wealthy, begging. When he sees beautiful houses or cars, he bites his fingers and says, “If only they were mine.” After he’s gone on like this for a while, you’ll hear him lose hope and say. “Kai, I could never hope to own any of this.” Kaico! What a disaster it is! He who puts his hope in the Merciful Father will enter Heaven. When will he stop loving the things of the world if he doesn’t stop thinking about them? [CK]
Then, too, see how the education and public health systems have collapsed. The government schools don’t have enough qualified teachers. They don’t have enough supplies or work materials. The government hospitals don’t have enough medicine or qualified staff. Most of those who can do the job leave government work and go back to private businesses. Why does this happen? Why is the government less concerned about making things work than those in the marketplace?
Really, there’s nothing left for us to do but pray, because thugs and robbers and thieves and con-men—that is 419—those the government thieves who steal with the pen get away with it easily. If you own a nice car and a lot of money, you can’t sleep at night for fear that robbers will come in the dark and steal them from you. If you are a trader, whenever you travel to another city with money, you can’t rest in peace until you see that you’ve arrived safely and that no armed robbers have attacked you. It’s as if all the stories we’ve heard of other countries are now happening here. The things we’ve seen happening in foreign films have become a part of our own lives.
“Thief! Thief!! Thief!!!” The shouts woke me from a deep sleep. I quickly jumped out of bed, still half asleep, and stumbled to open the door of my room. Outside, people were shouting.
“Just now we followed him, but he disappeared down that ally. Shi ke nan. We looked up and down, but he’s gone. The bastard! It’s as if he had a disappearing charm.”
“What did he steal?” I asked rubbing my eyes.
“He stole a video from Alhaji Sadi’s house.”
“He got away with it?” I asked.
“Since! Ai, it’s easy to take off with a video.”
“God help us,” I said, going back to my room.
Even after I closed the door, I could hear their animated discussion. “Can you believe the brazenness of this thief? It’s only 10:20. It’s not that late yet. We only just got up from watching the video. And he didn’t even break in. The door was still open when he came in. The children saw him when he took it.”
Thoughts buzzed around in my head. It hadn’t been long since I’d emerged from a dream about our country’s problems. So I began to think to myself. “Now after the worries I’ve been having about thugs and robbers and 419 con-men and larceny, it’s happened right here! Yet, all the same, people aren’t bothered by it?” I lay in my bed, listening to the chattering of the voices outside my door until sleep carried me away. I didn’t wake until sahur, the breakfast that we do during Ramadan. After I finished eating, I went to the mosque with Alhaji do the early morning prayers. When we came back to the house I picked up the holy Q’uran to read. At 6:30, I prayed and went back to bed.
“Baba! Baba!! Baba!! Come Hajiya is calling you.”
This summons pierced my sleep. I looked at my clock and I realized that it was past 8:00. Sitting up, I saw my junior sister Bilkisu at the window. When she saw that I was awake, she said “Baba. Come on. Hajiya is calling.”
“Ok, I’m coming now now.” I got up and rinsed out my mouth before going into the house to greet my dad, Alhaji. Then I went into my mom’s room to greet her.
“Here I am, Hajiya.”
“Hurry up and get ready. I’m sending you to Malam Buhari.”
“I don’t need to get ready. I can go like this.” I told her.
Hajiya looked me up and down. “Oh, so you don’t need to get ready, do you? Get out of here and go wash your face. It looks like you just woke up. And put on a hula and babbar riga.”
I looked down at myself and said. “Ok, I’m going.” I went to wash my face and then went into my room to put on a babbar riga and hula. I came out and locked the door. When I arrived back in the house, I found Hajiya sitting on the couch. I sat down and said. “Here I am, I’ve come back, Hajiya.”
Hajiya gave me the message, and said that when I got there I should greet Hajara. I left and got on my Vespa motor bike and headed for Malam Buhari’s house.
While I was on the way to his house to fulfill Hajiya’s errand, I met with a terrible accident that made me weep with pity. A car had run over a little boy and crushed his head. It was an awful thing to see. Everyone who saw it was weeping.
In this state of mind, mulling over the terrible accident, I arrived at the house. “To, God preserve us from disaster.” I thought to myself, “These days, people are always dying in accidents.”
After I parked the bike, I went into Malam Buhari’s shop. We greeted, and I bowed down as I gave him the message from Hajiya. Out of respect I bent my head and averted my eyes.
“I’ll go inside the house and greet them,” I told Malam, as he fingered his carbi.
“Ok, fine,” he said.
I went into the house and found Hajara sitting on a plastic mat. I kneeled down and greeted her.
Tugging her dankwali modestly over her head she called out, “Hindatu, bring a mat for Baba to sit on.”
“Ok,” I heard a voice respond.
Hindatu immediately came out from the room with a mat in her hand. She spread it out for me beside the wall. After I sat, Hindatu kneeled down and greeted me. After she went back inside the room, I continued my greetings with Hajara.
“Hajiya sends her greetings.”
“Ok, tell her I answer,” said Hajara. “When you greet Hajiya Binta, tell her thank you,” she said as I prepared to stand.
“Greet everyone in the house,” Hindatu called. “Allah protect you on the road. Greet Bilkisu for me. Tell her I’ll come soon.”
Since I had finished what I came to do, I said goodbye to Hajara, and I went back out to tell Malam goodbye. He sent me off with a greeting for Hajiya.
I got back on my motor bike and headed home. Exactly at 11:00am, I got back. I went in and told Hajiya that Malam Buhari and his wife Hajara sent their greetings and that he answered the message. Hajiya was very happy to hear Malam’s answer. I also gave Bilkisu the message from Hindatu.
After I finished talking with my mother, I went in to bathe and get ready. I put on a long riga, a cap, and white shoes. Then I went in to Hajiya and told her I was going to the market. She blessed me, praying that God would give me luck and protect the road. After I had gone out and gotten on my bike, my little sister Bilkisu came out and said, “Baba, don’t forget my message.”
I stared at the sky without saying anything, trying to figure out what Bilkisu was talking about. After a minute I looked back down and faced her. “I forgot what you told me. Which message was it again?”
Bilkisu bent her head, showing signs of embarrassment.
“Oh, come on, tell me. What do you mean. Don’t be shy,” I said, revving the bike.
She pressed her hands against the bike and stared at her fingers. “Shoes and a bag like we talked about two days ago,”
“Oho, I forgot. That’s it then. Is that what you were embarrassed to tell me? God willing, I’ll bring them for you today.”
I revved the bike again and headed for the market. She went back into the house, her face covered in smiles to hear that I would bring her what she had been wanting.
As I sped along on my bike, I thought to myself. “What kind of sillyness is this, Bilkisu? You’re embarrassed to remind me of my promise to bring you something you need? Since you’re the baby of the family, is there anything you want that we won’t give you? Unless we don’t have it… but we won’t ever say that since our dad, Alhaji Abdu has lots of money and houses and rental cars and imports clothes like shadda and boyel and waxprints and the rest.”
There were five of us children, two boys and three girls. Zainab and Hadiza were now married. Out of the girls it was only Bilkisu who had not yet married. Of the boys, the elder one of us (Umar) had married. Alhaji Umar lived in a different neighborhood, and he had his own business. I hadn’t married yet, so there was no one left in the house but me and Bilkisu. All five of us had the same mother, same father. And of all five of us, there was none whom my father favoured like me, since he had named me after his father, Muhammadu Auwalu. That’s why the people in our house call me Baba, so as not to say my name. Now, I run the family business with my father. From time to time, when there is travel to buy goods abroad, I go along with him. When my older brother got married, our father let him go into his own business, but I don’t know whether it will be the same for me if I get married. Also, my sisters didn’t stay long after secondary school before they were married. It’s only us boys who stay to do all the study we need before we go into business. My senior brother got his degree before entering business. I got my diploma, but now I’ll continue. Bilkisu is now in senior secondary 5, so she only has one year before she finishes. She is at the same school as Malam Buhari’s daughter, Hindatu.
I gathered my thoughts as I arrived at the market and entered our shop. I greeted Alhaji before sitting down in my accustomed place.
As was our habit, if I was around, he didn’t handle the money. I was the one who did that. In this way we continued with our business until closing time was near. Then, I went to buy Bilkisu the things I’d promised I’d get her. I also got her a few things she hadn’t asked me for and I hadn’t told her I’d get. After I finished up, we left the market.
After drinking water and praying asham prayers, I sat down in my mother’s parlour to watch television. When Bilkisu came in to sit on the couch, she kneeled and greeted me. I answered.
“Go to my room and bring me the large black plastic bag that is close to the door,” I said to her, while she stared past me at the television.
“Ok, (to)” Bilkisu got up cheerfully and excused herself.
She came back holding the bag and kneeled slightly as she gave it to me with both hands. “Here it is.”
I opened the bag and brought out the shoes and handbag and gave her. “Look, here are your things.”
She grinned and put out her hands to collect them. “Thank you,” she said gazing happily at the bag and shoes.
I put my hand back into the bag and brought out a necklace, earrings, bracelets, and a ring and another kind of cloth that women like to wear and gave her. “Here you go, add this to the rest.”
“Oh thank you! God bless you!” She got up excitedly and headed for our mother’s room calling, “Hajiya, look at what Baba bought me.”
They came out of the room together, and Hajiya said, “Thanks be to God who meets all of our needs.”
“Amin,” I answered her. Hajiya and Bilkisu sat down, and the three of us continued to chat.



**

On Monday, the 23rd day of Ramadan, my good friend Kabiru visited our house, after a rain. I saw him as he came into the room, and I quickly got up and grabbed his hand.
“Kai, look who we have here in town today. Kabiru, ashe, are you around? Long time no see!” I said, holding on to his hand.
As we sat down, Kabiru said, “I traveled for a week, that’s why you haven’t seen me. You know that if I hadn’t traveled, it would have been hard to go for seven days without seeing you.”
“I was thinking maybe the fasting was keeping you from going anywhere,” I answered. “You know how the fasting wears you out when the sun is beating down.”
“Well, the sun may be hot, but there’s no sun at night. I was told that you came to my house looking for me while I was gone. Have you forgotten?”
“Oh, I know. I just asked to see what you would say.” We both smiled.
Kabiru looked at me. “Oho, so you want to cross examine me do you?”
“Oh, you know me. If you take the bait, it’s not my fault.”
“Ok, well, jokes aside. I have something important I want to talk to you about.”
“I’m listening. What’s up?”
Kabiru was quiet for a minute and then he turned and looked at me. “You know that if a man’s parents are still living, it is good if he keeps improving and keeps following their commands to the utmost and does not avoid their laws. If he does this, he will find blessing and live in peace with everyone. If his parents give him their blessing or if they die happy with him, all that he attempts in this world will find the greatest success. Most people if you see them fighting against an evil life, you can be sure that they have followed the example their parents have shown them. Then there are others, who don’t respect their parents. They don’t listen to anything they tell them. They don’t consider what they want. It’s because of this I came so that we could discuss what’s going on in my house. While I was on this trip to my senior sister’s place, she told me that they have been discussing with my parents, saying that I should get married since I’ve finished all the things I need to do before marriage. I’ve finished school. I’ve gotten my diploma. I’ve entered the world of business. So, there’s nothing left for me except to marry. At the time, my sister was talking to me about one girl, but I told her I didn’t trust that girl.”
I looked at Kabiru in surprise. “Why didn’t you trust the girl?”
Kabiru smiled. “There is a cause for alarm. The first is that I’m always seeing her with all kinds of different boys, rascals as well as respectable ones. She has no shame. If she quarrels with a boyfriend, you will hear her abusing him and insulting him, and saying all kinds of disrespectful things. Then, too, this girl really wants to enjoy her life. She craves a rich man who has a beautiful house and the latest car. She’s as greedy as a fly. She’s also full of lies; she tells one after another. And, she is not clean. Kai, if you see how slovenly she is. They say a man shouldn’t marry a woman like that. And finally, the parents of this girl are not respectable. They say one thing and do another. One time, they set the date for her to marry one boy. About three months to the marriage another one came along who had more money, so they sent back the kaya the other one had brought. In the end, the girl wound up quarrelling with the second boy. She abused him so much that he picked his things and left.”
“E gaskiya, this definitely is not someone you want as your wife. A man of good character wants to marry a woman of good character. So what did you tell your sister?” I asked.
“What I told her was that she should stop talking about this girl, that I’d look for another one that I liked and I approved of. Then I told her if they discussed the issue again, she should explain to my parents what I told her. Since they didn’t talk to me about it, it’s not me that should talk to them. No matter how far up you throw something, it will still come down. Since they didn’t talk to me now, they will talk to me later. My sister was just clearing the path for me. So, I want to think through my course of action before they come back to the conversation. When they come back to it, you know, I’ll know what I will say to them. We know the direction to face for prayer."
“Everything you say is true, and I think you are thinking things through wisely. So now, since you don’t want the one they picked out for you, who do you love, or maybe I should ask who have you chosen to talk to them about.”
Kabiru laughed and shook his head. “I give you one thing, and you keep begging. Ai, every fool who rushes in will wait to find out. Habba, Baba, you know that I know how you spoil things when you are reckless. Since we were children together, we’ve been lucky that we’ve always gotten along. As the Hausas say, you’ll be close friends only if your personalities mesh. You know as well as I do that there is no girl who can go around beating her chest and saying that I am her boyfriend. I know that you, too, are in the same boat, because we don’t have girls on our mind, we are to busy with other business.”
Before he was finished, I interrupted him, “Daman, what’s the use of going to girls’ houses if you aren’t ready to get married? Two wrongs don’t make a right. You waste your time and you waste the girl’s time. Then also if you play the trickster—today you go to this place, tomorrow you go to that place, you’re always in a different girls house, ai, then you’ll lose respect. It’s better for a man to look for someone to marry when he is ready for marriage. If it is not the proper time, or if he doesn’t know how to settle down with one and be faithful, he shouldn’t keep running around between lies and truth.”
“That’s true, Baba. This is why I don’t want to get mixed up in looking for a girl until I’m ready. So, now, since talk of my marriage has been brought up, what do you advise me to do?”
“My advice?” I think you should tell them the one you love, if there is one. If there isn’t anyone, let’s start looking now. Also, when we go looking, we mustn’t just think about her looks. No, there’s only beauty if there is good character. If she doesn’t have a good character, then her beauty is like a snake. There are other things that we should look for. In the first place, religion and education, knowledge and a good upbringing. Also, we should make sure that she has family who keep their promises and parents who are pleasant and respectable and humble. If we find all these things, then we can talk about other things we may want. If we do not find these things, nothing we search for will please us. So anything else we look for should come after these—it should just be 10 out of a hundred. The attributes I have added on top are 90 out of 100. If a man finds 90 out of 100, he has done well on the exam. If he gets only 10 percent, then he fails.”
“I agree with you. And actually, I’ve got to tell you… There is a girl who I am in love with. I’ve completely lost my head over her.”
I grinned. “Ai, it’s all falling nicely into place. Since there’s one that you love, why not tell them about her if they start talking of marriage again.”
“Yes, yes, I will,” said Kabiru. “But there is one thing I want to be careful of. I don’t want to rush into things because I don’t know if she’ll agree or not.”
I turned and looked at him. “What would keep her from accepting you” I asked.
“Well, there’s a certain relationship that I think might complicate things and keep her from accepting me. On the other hand, if you think about it in a different way, this same relationship could also make her accept,” said Kabiru.
“Who is this girl, and what type of relationship are you talking about?” I asked him.
“It’s a friendship,” Kabiru answered. “Her senior brother is my friend. This is what I think might cause trouble. Since she thinks of me as a brother, she might not be able to think of me as a lover, as well.”
“Oh no, Habba. This type of friendship won’t prevent anything, unless she has been promised to someone else, or if you aren’t equally attracted to each other. But how many times have people in the same situation gotten married, and you see how strong and trusting the relationship is?” I smiled reassuringly at him.
“The girl I love is Bilkisu,” Kabiru blurted out.
“Which Bilkisu?” I asked.
“I mean, your Bilkisu,” said Kabiru.
I didn’t say anything for a minute, as if I were waiting for him to say something else. After a moment, I looked at Kabiru and smiled. “Don’t think anything of it. This is an easy thing. Give me two days and I’ll let you know what she thinks.”
Kabiru’s face showed his delight at my words. “Ok,” he said “Shi ke nan. Everything in God’s good time.”
As we finished up, Bilkisu brought me food. She sat down and greeted Kabiru and saluted us on the breaking of the fast. After we answered her, she looked at Kabiru and said. “So, here you are, now. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”
“Oh I’m around. It’s business that kept me away.”
After we chatted with her for a while, she went back into the house, and Kabiru told her to greet Hajiya for him.
“To,” Bilkisu said and went back into the house. We chatted as we ate, and around 12:15 we said our goodbyes. Kabiru got on his motor bike and went back home.
The next morning, I went into the house and greeted Alhaji in his room and went into Hajiya’s parlour to greet her. After greeting, I went to my chair and sat. Before I could say anything, Hajiya said, “Yesterday, Kabiru came but he refused to come in and greet. He just sent Bilkisu in to greet me.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that he refused to come in. We were talking, and before we knew it, it got late. When he left, you were already asleep; that’s why he didn’t come in to greet you. He was intending to come in, but when he saw how late it was, he said that I should apologize and tell you the reason.” I told Hajiya this so she wouldn’t be offended with Kabiru since she knew that usually every time he came for a visit, he would go in and greet her. I knew what kept him from going in. It was this talk of Bilkisu.
“Hajiya, I was talking with Kabiru and he told me that his parents are pressuring him to get married. It’s gone so far that his elder sister proposed a certain girl, but he told me he wasn’t happy with the girl for a lot of very good reasons. In truth, I agree with all the reasons he gave me. So, now his family is pressuring him to find another one that he likes, since he didn’t like the first girl. At the end of our discussion, he told me who he really likes.”
After I told her this, I stayed quiet and didn’t say anything else.
“So, who does he like?” Hajiya asked me.
“He’s in love with Bilkisu.”
“Which Bilkisu?” asked Hajiya.
“Our Bilkisu.” I said, watching Hajiya’s face. Her face showed signs that she was agreeable to talk of Kabiru.
“Ai, shi ke nan. This is no problem. If she is sure that she also likes him, then he’s already one of the family. Let me talk to her and hear what she says. If luck has it that she’s interested, then we’ll discuss it with Alhaji.”
“To, shi ke nan. I told him if he gave me two days, he’d hear what was going on. He was doubtful about whether or not she’d love him, since he’s my friend.”
“Habba, friendship does not prevent marriage. It happens all the time,” said Hajiya.
Since Hajiya was showing all the signs that she supported the matter, it was only left for Bilkisu to tell us her mind.
After I finished discussing with Hajiya, I got on my bike and headed for the market.

**

On Wednesday, the 25th of the month of Ramadan, in the morning, Hajiya told me that Bilkisu was agreeable to the intentions of my friend Kabiru. Hearing this put me into an excellent mood. It would be no small problem if your best friend said that he loved your sister and she said that she didn’t love him. As the Hausas say, “it’s a lucky find, if you come across leftover chicken in the bowl.” Others also say, “It’s a lucky find if your neighbors pay for your wife to go to Mecca.”
I left the house, and headed straight for Kabiru’s house. I called out my greetings as I entered his room. When he saw me, he got up quickly and extended his hand. After we sat, he asked me. “Where are you going from here? I see signs that you have somewhere else to go.”
“I’m going to the market from here. But I came this way to tell you that I’ve passed on your message. And all is set. Hajiya has already told Alhaji, and he is very happy to hear the news.” I grinned as I saw his expression.
Kabiru burst into happy laughter. “Alhamdu lillahi. Allah has assured me his blessing. Now that I’ve found a strong support to lean on, I need to tell my seniors. It’s important that nothing is started until they know. Since the negotiations have already gone far, I’ll inform my senior sister. Once we discuss, then I’ll tell the others.”
After Kabiru and I finished this discussion, I went in to greet the house. From there I came out to say my goodbyes and left.
No doubt about it, I was filled with happiness about the union we were plotting to build between my little sister Bilkisu and my best friend Kabiru—if not for anything else because I know his character.
Kabiru and I had been friends since we were children. We had gone to primary and secondary school together and also to the College of Education, where we both got our diplomas. He is an extremely religious man, putting nothing before his devotion to God. Worldly things have no place in his life. Our friendship had connected our parents in friendship because when we were children, I’d go to Kabiru’s house and spend the night, and he’d come to our house and spend the night. His father Alhaji Sani was a businessman. His mother’s name was Hajiya Nafisa, and her co-wife was Hajiya Habiba. He had lots of brothers and sisters. In fact, there were ten of them in the house.
On Friday, the 27th of Ramadan around 9pm, Kabiru came to our house. He came into my room, and we greeted as he found a place to sit. We talked for a while before I went into the house and sent Bilkisu out to him. Before Bilkisu finished preparing to go out, Kabiru came in and greeted Hajiya. Then he went back to my room. Bilkisu finished getting ready and went out to Kabiru, while I kept on talking to Hajiya.
Around 11 o’clock, Bilkisu came back into the parlour. “Baba, go, you’re being called.
Bilkisu sat down and I got up and headed to my room where I found Kabiru. We chatted until around midnight, then we said our goodbyes. Kabiru went back home, and I went to bed.


END OF CHAPTER 1

[1] Kaico translates something like “Disaster!” Or “Alas!” But I think it would be better to keep the title the same in the English and Hausa version, and put a footnote in the introduction about the meaning.

Purpose of Abubuwan da nake rubutawa

Abubuwan da nake rubutawa: things that I am writing

I decided to create this second blog in order to post longer things that I am writing. I don't like to bog down my everyday blog with long posts, but this one will be specifically dedicated to things that I am working on: short stories, film/book reviews, poetry, maybe even a few photos. We'll see... All comments welcome.