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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781611862096 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2017 |
| Series: | African Humanities and the Arts |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 274 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 16.50(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
As She Was Discovering Tigony
By Olympe Bhêly-Quenum, Tomi Adeaga
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2017 Michigan State UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-209-6
CHAPTER 1
It was at Tigony, a town in the middle of a huge valley surrounded by mountains with steep slopes and scattered villages. The Kiniéroko traverses the whole of the country called Wanakawa. At Tigony, the capital, the Kirinikimoja Bridge and the bridge on the Kiniéroko span a part of the river. Rectangular huts on the bank with thatched roofs, perched on the platform on the side of Mount Kiniyinka, give the impression that you climb in a circle, when coming from the center of the town at five kilometers; you enter the village from the northern side.
At each breath of wind, beautiful eucalyptus with voluminous trunks shake their branches with leaves like countless fans in the valley. The forest stretches at the foot of the Kiniyinka on about a hundred hectares and gets blurred along a broad sidewalk of dividers that separate a two-lane road from the river.
From the perspective of the strikers, in front of the Monomotapa cinema, the forest seems to have been rooted on the mountain and its curve before growing several kilometers on the river upon whose phlegmatic waves — except in thunderstorms — sun rays danced about during the daytime and the stars shimmered at night.
Mrs. Dorcas Keurléonan-Moricet, a geophysicist working for an applied geographic, geophysics, and geodesy consortium, was canvassing the region when she received a note from the multinational company, through which the head office wanted her to undertake "a summary investigation highlighting the general information that could not be disregarded."
She was not a sociologist and made this known through an unsubtle fax; in response, the head of the consortium handled her with kid gloves by answering that it was about a duty "that would not be in vain, if your investigations proved to be promising; in doing this, the consortium also falls back on your demographic and statistics skills."
As the situation eased, Mrs. Keurléonan-Moricet used her spare time to survey the roads, the quarters, and the suburbs of Tigony. She went to the province, discovered the country, taking notes, filling untidy pages without knowing what she would do with them. There were no indications from the head office that a report should be sent to them, but having grasped the realities as parts of the problems in the country, it opened her eyes, raising her as if to best understand herself. There came a day when she read her notes again, reflected on them, and sat in front of her computer and began revising the text with the aim of leaving no stone unturned.
After some time, the worms also grow as big as the flies, which lay their eggs on suitable grounds. The area permanently exhales a fetid odor that is not mitigated by the maritime wind, which blows in puffs. Constant like the hands of a clock, malnourished children, with stomachs filled with the same food poor in protein, relieve themselves facing the sea or by turning their backs to it. A beach that could have been beautiful, attractive to tourists and strollers, is thus transformed into a dump where household refuse accumulates, in which big rats rummage, black-skinned pigs and fierce emaciated dogs squabble over leftover food in wild fights. These are more visible than those darker ones, motivated by jealousy and hatred among the people in Wanakawa.
The picture is not better when you casually watch Tigony, stretched on the edge of the ochre fine sands and shores of the Kiniéroko. To prove this, considerable effort has been put in less than a quarter of a decade after independence: 68 percent of the huts with mud walls or bamboo were replaced with cinder-block buildings, even reinforced concrete; tarred avenues, new lined and marked roads; the city gets bigger, hundreds of luxury houses and buildings with more than ten floors are erected all over the place; the provinces become depopulated, unfortunately to Tigony's benefit, where refuse piles up on the street corners of some quarters.
A city without character or original style? In order to appreciate its beauty and charms, it should be discovered by surprising it at dawn or daybreak. It is the political as well as economic capital, but also a cosmopolitan city, with human dregs — scumbags, riffraff, crooks, and human garbage polluting the unfathomable political administration, and even justice. Arbitrarily restricted to residential quarters, middle-class and popular zones, it was not unusual to observe in the former what you would have thought specific to the latter: dumps, wavy lots, inconceivable to link to such areas, refuse, which piles up in easements from which, by nightfall, the least burdened crawl with heterogeneous fauna; the sexually unbalanced; swindlers, drug addicts, harmless fools, as other corners served as the toilets for the demoralized night-owls who would love to produce a picture of these men in a hurry to get rich at the people's expense, instead of providing the country with public toilets."
Suppressed people are rendered powerless and reduced to silence. Would there be a day or uprising like that of May '68? Nothing is certain; it is in fact unimaginable that it could occur with the same violence as in France: Tigony is a peaceful region with a mosaic of ethnic varieties. A route that starts from the bridge on the Kiniéroko at Konioroijé, passes through the European quarters of the colonial period, then spans the area of the railway network like that of the new districts to return to its starting point, touching the river, and circumscribing the Kiniéroko big market, would demarcate the district with unspeakable accuracy in the course of construction.
Not only the non-natives, called the "Westerners," but also the natives themselves know and enquire about it. Is the government aware of it? What solutions does it propose? The "Northern countries" companies, for which Wanakawa is transformed into economic manna, could they propose their intervention collectively, to avoid haste? It would not be in vain that at one point in time or the other, their accomplishments and contributions are obvious enough for the people to be aware of it.
From within the imaginary topographic demarcation, the stench, heavy with miasmas that hang over the city, rises day and night, which the government, supposedly, tries to cleanse; indeed, the project does not focus on Tigony, but its suburbs, to reclaim and transform cultivated lands into building areas, thanks to men who filled and drained immense marshy areas where new districts emerged with modern constructions. Nevertheless, one cannot help but hold one's nose when passing by the gutters in a number of the districts; water stagnates in the drains that smother thick watery grasses, whereas, they could be cleansed with little or no expense by making them push carpets of water hyacinth.
Young goats, pigs, fowls, cats, and dogs crushed by cars and thrown in refusedumps decompose under the sun; such reports are not extremely rare in the city of Tigony, on the side of the big market. The urbanization of the suburb too, as well as the lack of civic spirit, present alarming problems that the press recently deplored: "When will we stop seeing women who urinate upright, legs wide apart, children between five and six years squatted on garbage dumps in broad daylight? The entire country lacks adequate health facilities."
Quasi-daily street scenes prove that freedom of speech is costly: a minister's air-conditioned Mercedes Benz stops without anyone knowing the reason behind it; tramps recognize the politician, look at him, and spit in disgust; three old women curse him in an obscene language; a group of students hurl insults with political implications. "Colonization's rhizome generates neocolonialism that is studded with the little available to the people reduced to poverty."
The minister does not react, listens, looks at the unemployed people passing by, indifferent, crunching maize or sorghum beignets, a piece of coconut, an ear of roasted corn. A brigand relieves a passerby of the proceeds of her business; the fruit of petty theft passes on to the hands of an accomplice and they escape. The Mercedes, about to carry on its way, does not start. The woman who was robbed wails, calls on the gods to come to her aid; the police are absent, and even if present — I've already seen it happen — would be impassive.
Witness among so many others, I approach the official car; I hardly had the time to open my mouth before the minister of Internal Affairs challenged me: "Dear Mrs. Keurléonan-Moricet, I know that you have carried out a survey for a few weeks; it is legal that a consortium that is interested in a country counts on the physical information provided by private sources. Born in this country, I am not unaware of the places that you cover. Before you came here, a gun was held to my throat near the gutters. I saw cadavers of cattle in decomposition, also horrors that escape your wisdom and to which a native of Wanakawa will never draw your attention: we are a proud folk who are reluctant to exploit our poverty and even our obvious problems. If you wish, dear madam, my colleagues from the Ministry of Health, Urbanism, Information, and Communication will provide you with the complementary data whenever you need it."
I thanked him; we went our separate ways and I had the feeling of having been cut into pieces.
"The horrors that escape my wisdom —" Where are they coming from? Deathly stinky odors with an overwhelming filth reach the Kiulari' University Hospital; I felt as if my body were soaked and reeking with them until I got into my car. At the Saïnifuki port, tons of coffee covered with tarpaulin awaited the cargo liners fortheir transport to Inshakiu, which needs them. In Kilakila, the grapefruit province, hundreds of tons rotted in jute baskets or Hessian sacks, whereas there is scarcity in Tigony, where it is still expensive. The fish marketing industry such as the snapper, barracuda, grouper, and shrimp collapsed; no one forgets that hardly a year after independence, Wanakawa froze them and exported them to Europe.
Sprinkled with cynical foreign businessmen who "pump" their resources, sharks lying in wait for economic potential, to dispossess those who should first benefit from it, the country seems to be perched on a steep slope. The downtrodden, those who feel wretched, oppressed, emasculated, and bled white, groan, rendered powerless by the repressive state apparatus, locked by an autocratic dictator.
Plethoric and scrawny, the unemployed cohort, which accounts for 49 percent of the population, gathers on all street corners.
"What did we do to our gods to be where we are in our poverty?" "God himself must be against us, if he exists."
I heard this type of reflection more than a hundred times across the country. An unemployed man with a bony, hectic, scrawny face in a pair of trousers and a colorless, tattered shirt chanted a song that was translated for me:
The earth, the earth no longer turns
Although in my country
My country is
Where I die of hunger
Poverty assails me there
Others have jobs
Even if the job is insignificant
It provides something to eat
When will I get something of my own?
It's better to die
Than to live the way I live.
One of his friends stared at him, making faces. "He! He! Mwuki, you're inspired today."
"It is like this when he thinks of his ancestors," someone else said.
We should leave those who have gone in peace
They profit forever from the sun of death
They no longer need jobs in the country beyond
There is no unemployment in the land of the dead
And me, Mwuki, I say:
The earth, the earth, no longer turns well
It no longer turns well in our country
And ours is that which dies of hunger
Dies of hunger on the garbage dumps
Oye! Listen! Listen! We are dying of hunger, poverty, and death
Of hunger, mass poverty
Oye! Listen, Listen! Our night loincloth is vermin
Oye! Listen, Listen! Wanakawa
Country of riches for the Whites
African country, hostile to the Negro
Hostile to its rejected Negro children
Oye! Listen, Listen! And on the roads where we wander
Dogs without owners
Or slave owners
Foreigners
Oye! Listen, Listen!
"If the translation is correct, the chant is edifying, and there is the need to react: stay, but do not live closed-in and indifferent, or leave."
She left the ergonomic seat on which she liked to work on her knees, with her back straight, arms stretched in the air, and let herself be served a glass of milk. Returning to the computer, she saw herself full length in the living room mirror and eyed the image: big, squared shoulders; discretely luscious sculptured body; sumptuous, plaited chestnut hair, arranged below the nape of her neck and left free, which she arranged in a half-hitch knot or loose braid, or sometimes in a ponytail with an ivory, ebony, or silver ring, except when she gathered it in a chignon, cleverly brought below the nape of the neck like a diva.
Mrs. Keurléonan-Moricet read her notes again, and then adjusted the text that she had taken. The notes, photographs on the sharp realities, seemed to her to be harsher than the text. "Of what use is this? There's the rub," she said in a low voice, turning off the computer.
CHAPTER 2They were six from the same village on the track road on the Northern side of Mount Kiniyinka. Since their youth, each time that they descended it, this road made them feel as if they were moving forward, crouching toward the river on the other side of the eucalyptus forest, and that it unraveled under their feet while they caught sight of water in the river below, packed in the valley where its crested wavelets of scattered scum scintillated under the sun, lapping with a sluggish rhythm against the banks.
"Old n'Ata no longer likes going into town and makes no secret of it," Nakiyinka said.
"We know it, but he does not seem to be fed up with life; he talks about it nonstop and as soon as he opens his mouth, the past returns to the present," Ségué n'Di said.
"After having listened to him, we now look foolish going into town and I wonder what we are going to do there," Foyiola said.
"Grandfather circumnavigated many problems; age counts when you know how to manage them well," retorted Ségué n'Di, turning toward her, a distant first cousin with whom things had not worked out well because she wanted to emigrate whereas he still loved her and a lot kept him close to his roots and his grandfather.
"Experience of age, please; is that enough for him who for years doesn't leave the village anymore, to analyze the present with such accuracy and relevance? That's disconcerting and demoralizing," Nakiyinka said.
"Not me ... not always. You noticed that his face looked like a stunned and sad mask when I referred to unemployment and the unemployed people?" Ségué n'Di — big, muscular, long faced, and poised, with fine features — said.
"As for me — in fact our Old Man's thoughts that clung more to my brain — when he complained that 'too many young people get too much education; I am not sad that boys and girls attend the white man's school; but so much knowledge acquired from these people who have more than us, of what use is that? There are fertile lands, forests, mountains abounding in unused resources; rivers also sometimes offer gold nuggets; I see one on the neck of my little Foyiola. Who among you, young ones, is interested in all that? Even peasants have turned their backs on the land, under the pretext that they work for nothing or for too little; badly rewarded efforts, and this and that. Here, they rush toward the cities in search of employments that they did not learn! My grandchildren, this serious disease called unemployment, would it be less scandalous if people bought the fruit of the peasants' labor at cost price or moderately? Would those who learned from the white man be unemployed, if in addition they had thought of going into our local professions that they could practice? My grandchildren, your problems and emotions —'"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from As She Was Discovering Tigony by Olympe Bhêly-Quenum, Tomi Adeaga. Copyright © 2017 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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