Transit Read online

  Abdourahman A. Waberi

  TRANSIT

  A NOVEL

  TRANSLATED BY

  DAVID BALL AND NICOLE BALL

  Indiana University Press

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  Paris, 2003

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  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Waberi, Abdourahman A., [date]

  [Transit. English]

  Transit : a novel / Abdourahman

  A. Waberi ; translated by

  David Ball and Nicole Ball.

  p. cm. — (Global African voices)

  ISBN 978-0-253-00683-7 (cloth

  : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-

  00689-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN

  978-0-253-00693-6 (e-Book)

  I. Ball, David, [date] II. Ball,

  Nicole, [date] III. Title.

  PQ2683.A23T7313 2012

  843'.914—dc23 2012016244

  1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

  Cover illustration: Sunset behind the mountains near Djibouti.

  Photo by Guenter Guni.

  To Émile Olivier,

  IN MEMORIAM

  To my mother and my brother Ahmed

  and to Lucien and Azeb Roux,

  Jean-Dominique Penel,

  and Ali Coubba,

  AS A TOKEN OF FRIENDSHIP

  Thank you, my land; for your remotest

  Most cruel mist my thanks are due,

  By you possessed, by you unnoticed,

  Unto myself I speak of you.

  And in these talks between somnambules

  My inmost being hardly knows

  If it's my demency that rambles

  Or your own melody that grows.

  —VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  From The Gift, translated from the Russian by

  Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the

  author (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), p. 68.

  Contents

  Preface

  TRANSIT • A NOVEL

  Glossary

  Preface

  Transit is as fresh and relevant today as when it first appeared in France in 2003. This is a terrible—and wonderful—thing to say.

  Terrible, because its picture of an impoverished country ravaged by war and repression is still the reality of life in Djibouti, that little country squeezed between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea at the edge of the Horn of Africa. The drought that devastated these countries was not the only cause of the famine that reached catastrophic proportions in 2011; it merely aggravated the conditions we see through the eyes of the characters of Transit, even if those characters were created nearly a decade ago. Terrible, too, because its portrayal of their desperate attempt to flee the country is still relevant today—and not only in Djibouti.

  But the freshness and relevance of Transit is also wonderful, as Waberi's creations live in our minds the way characters in real works of literature do. The chapters in Transit are a succession of monologues by each of the characters in the novel: Bashir, a very young veteran of Djibouti's civil war; Harbi, a Djiboutian intellectual and an opponent of the regime; Harbi's French wife, Alice, and their son, Abdo-Julien; and Abdo-Julien's grandfather Awaleh. Their interlocking voices, by turns poetic and critical, tell their stories and the story of their country, giving us Djibouti's history, politics, and physical, economic, and moral landscape in their own language, their own style. All of them propel the action toward its end—an end fraught with political meaning.

  One character gives us the same kind of pleasure we have in reading great tragicomic works of literature: Bashir, the poor, adolescent ex-soldier. His monologues are delivered in a slangy, comical language very much his own, a mix of naïveté and sly, often cynical, observation. He's the one who reveals the real condition of the country and all the horrors perpetrated during the civil war and after—child soldiers, arms trafficking, drugs (the ever-present khat and “pink pills”), random killing, hunger—and exposes France, the former colonial power, as a hypocritical arbiter between the warring camps.

  As translators, we must say Bashir gave us a hard time. How to turn into English Waberi's invention of a spicy, lower-class, “incorrect” French spoken by a shrewd but uneducated boy? Our admiration for Waberi's creation was mixed with anxiety. The worst thing one could do, we felt, would be to flatten him into ordinary normative English: the character would simply disappear. On the other hand, we didn't want him to sound like one of the ghetto characters in the HBO series The Wire: he's not an African American kid from the projects but an adolescent from Djibouti. And somehow, he should sound like that in English. The author suggested we turn to Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy, another first-person narrative of civil war in Africa, and that did help in a number of ways. First, Sozaboy gave us a model of “incorrect” African English (“A Novel in Rotten English” is its subtitle), which, like Bashir's French, seems spoken rather than written. (But here, too, we had to be careful; unlike Saro-Wiwa's narrator, Bashir is not a Nigerian, and there's no reason why he should sound like one.) And then, we could see how Waberi was inspired by that magnificent novel: in Sozaboy too, the horrors of war and the abuses of power are related with great simplicity by a very young man. Comparing the two works increased our appreciation of the essentially comic nature of Waberi's invention, however dark the comedy may be. Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy is, finally, a harrowing and depressing novel; Waberi's Transit has something almost upbeat about it—above all, paradoxically, Bashir's account of murder and mayhem. His satiric relation of the recent history of the Horn of Africa and his quick portraits of Djiboutian political leaders are often quite funny: the use of the faux-naïf to deflate political pretense is a tried and true satiric technique, and Waberi does it well. We can only hope that we did him justice when we brought Bashir's voice into English.

  Not everything in the literary universe of Transit is dark comedy, far from it. The voices of other characters are often lyrical, and here, too, we can only hope that we were able to render that very different tone in English. The novel also presented us with bitter evocations of Djibouti's colonial past and sometimes nostalgic evocations of the nomadic past and the customs of its people, themes that appear again and again in the author's work.

  It is worth noting that Waberi gave his collection of poems a title that might be translated as The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (Les Nomades, mes frères, vont boire à la Grande Ourse). This element of the traditional life of the region is transmitted through the grandfather, Awaleh. Under different names, the grandfather figure, a transmitter of tradition, appears as a recurrent figure in Waberi's work. He is a teller of tales. A former nomad, Awaleh deplores colonization and progress, both of whi
ch have led to the loss of cultural and tribal identity. “Luckily I'm here to connect the threads of spiritual and temporal things, the visible and the invisible,” he says. He is a pious, tolerant Muslim. In one poetic chapter addressed to his grandson, he celebrates the nomads and their resistance to the colonial administration. In another particularly eloquent chapter, he describes scenes of famine (and takes a dim view of international aid organizations). One of his favorite interlocutors is Harbi's French wife, Alice. She and their son, Abdo-Julien, transmit through their discourse—and their very existence—other themes and ideals dear to Waberi's heart: multiculturalism, tolerance, and métissage.

  Two of the main characters (Harbi and Bashir) are speaking from the Roissy airport. The overarching structure of Transit, and the connection between Bashir and Harbi, is only revealed in Bashir's last monologue, although there are hints of it earlier. The structure is a cleverly devised loop, as the reader will discover. After Bashir's last monologue, at the very end of the novel, we find a poetic epilogue that takes us back to the prologue: Harbi, speaking for all the exiles on our planet, is in the airport of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, waiting—waiting to enter France, like Bashir, where they will live the lonely, miserable life of most refugees, as we sense from what Harbi has already told us about his fellow exiles. We have come full circle.

  Abdourahman A. Waberi was born in 1965 in what was then French Somaliland (the French gave it another name in 1967); it became Djibouti when it gained its independence in 1977. In 1985, Waberi won a scholarship to study in France. He lived, studied, and worked there until 2009, when he became a Fellow in the Humanities at Wellesley College and then accepted a position at the Claremont Colleges in California, where he currently teaches. He spends his time between the United States and France and remains a nomad at heart, as he likes to say: he travels widely, and Africa is often one of his destinations. He has written four novels, three books of short fiction, a book of poems, and numerous articles and essays. Waberi is one of the leading francophone writers of his generation, internationally recognized, one of those to whom the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio dedicated his Nobel Prize for Literature in his acceptance speech. Translated into over half a dozen languages, Waberi's work explores the themes of migration, colonial and postcolonial suffering, and resistance with great linguistic invention and originality.

  Waberi has won many literary prizes and honors in France, Germany, and elsewhere. His satiric In the United States ofAfrica (in which Africa is rich and bloated, while the wretched of the earth live in war-torn Euramerica and desperately try to immigrate to a united Africa) appeared here in 2009; he received lavish praise from the major literary journals in France for his latest novel, published in 2011, Passage des larmes (Passage of Tears), a grim dialogue of the deaf between two brothers in Djibouti, a fanatical Islamist and a North American exile who works for a private international intelligence agency. We are delighted that Indiana University Press is now publishing his second novel, Transit, one of Waberi's most important works.

  David Ball

  Nicole Ball

  PROLOGUE

  Never again will a single story be told

  as though it's the only one.

  —JOHN BERGER

  BASHIR

  I'M IN PARIS, warya*—pretty good, huh? OK it's not really Paris yet but Roissy. That the name of the airoport. This airoport got two names, Roissy and Charles de Gaulle. In Djibouti it got just one name, Ambouli, an I swear on the head of my departed family, it's much-much tinier. OK, this trip here, everything went all right. I gobbled the good food of Air France. Went direct to the war film before I fell into heavy sleep. I was stocked, no I mean scotched—taped—in the last row of the Boeing 747 where the cops tie the deportees up tight when the plane goes back to Africa. That's true, that the way they do it. Moussa he told me that a little while ago. Moussa, you know he can pray the good Lord sitting down without lifting his behind from the seat of the plane, believe me faithfully. He travel a lot, Moussa, helps guys discovering travel like me. He calm all the time. He talk so soft-soft you'd think he got sore tonsils. Wait, I'm gonna follow Moussa, pick up baggage. My bag blocked between two big boxes of French military, label says it: “AD 188,” I know what that is, it Air Detachment 188, navigation base right next to airoport in Ambouli as a matter of fact. I pulled the bag hard. A white lady looked at me, you know, with her eyes in the air like white marbles. I picked the bag up hard like we did with our gear when I was mobilized in the army. I put my bag on my back. I looked right-lef. I see Moussa, I walk behind him. Act dumb with the cops, Moussa he confirm it to me. Main thing, don't show you speak French. Don't mess things up, so shut your trap. Or cry, to fish pity from French people. French in France nicer than French back there, Moussa don't say that, I know by myself. I stocked the esperience. OK I don't say nothing cause Roissy's danger, they might say Africans, pains in the ass. I look right-lef again, I walk behind big Moussa. Shut up. Nod head yes, shake head no, and that's it, OK? Shut trap, waggle head, or cry a lot to fish pity. That's it. Period. I walk forward a little, follow Moussa.

  Oh yah—I dropped my real name, Bashir Assoweh. For six months now my name been Binladen, Moussa he choked on his coffee in plastic cup they give you. Never say that again here he say. That get the French fierce, and the English, and the Americans, and even the nice Norwegians who pay the NGOs for us and keep their traps shut. But me, I like that, you say Binladen and everybody drop dead with panic like I'm real kamikaze they stop in front of barbwire and sambags of the American Embassy in Djibouti. Binladen, dunno who he was before but anyways he look great. Bushy white beard with black thread, white horse not like the gray camel of our Bedouins and specially that Kalashnikov on his shoulder. His beard real-real nice but hey he not really prophet cause true prophet has no photo. In Djibouti, they said, yell “Long live Binladen” everywhere, that's how I know his name, then stop right away or else it Gabode prison for everybody, mamas, uncles, kids, everybody. But that still secret. I didn't say a thing, right? Djibouti over, Roissy here, gotta watch out saying anything come into my head.

  * * *

  * Words marked with an asterisk are translated in the author's glossary at the end of the book.

  HARBI

  ROISSY. Air France. Daily flight to Saint-Denis de la Réunion via Cairo and Djibouti. The overbooked, overwhelmed airline is transferring some of its passengers to other airlines like Air Afrique. People willing to switch can make up to a thousand francs on the deal. OK? OK! You did the right thing. New situation. The line there is ten times longer. A mountain of luggage. Huge crowd. Everybody chewing gum with great energy. I spot Kaba Something-or-other, a guy with the look of a Sahelian Mafioso; he's knocking the whole line about with his cumbersome bags and wants to charm me into giving him a hand. Boarding time for the Africans being deported “of their own free will.” A dozen or so scheduled to be transported the usual way; three male individuals will be locked up in the cramped space of the restrooms, piled in and immediately incarcerated quick as two whiffs of a cigarette. A man wearing a glaring yellow vest with the word “technician” on his back, helped by three PAF 1 agents, has stuck a thick roll of gray tape on the restroom door so the passengers who happen to have missed the caging or whose eyes had avoided it won't venture into those restrooms. Strange how the same scene keeps being repeated almost every day on other flights always bound for some African destination. Each time, the unfortunate deportee tries squealing like a tortured whale just to stir the conscience of the ordinary passenger, usually a tourist. Today's deportee is Congolese, supposedly a shopkeeper from Pointe Noire, and his fate seems sealed. A few moments later on the Airbus, there are some angry reactions among the passengers, followed by a nauseous feeling culminating in a widespread urge to throw up. And considering the passenger's extreme state of agitation, the captain finally gives in after some heated negotiations and the troublemaker is taken off board, returned to his cell, and put back into the retention center
in a waiting zone of the airport. At least he's alive, luckier than the ones who die of dehydration in the Arizona desert or freeze to death inside the undercarriage of some cargo plane.

  I'm alone now, alone without Alice, my dear wife, without Abdo-Julien, our only child, without my father, Awaleh, who used to travel along with us in spirit. Lost in the bowels of Roissy airport. I went through them often when I was a student, or on business trips or, more frequently, when visiting Brittany. I have an old debt of memory to settle with France; people think migrants arrive naked in a new land at the end of their odyssey; yet migrants are loaded with their personal stories and heavier still with what is called collective history.

  That shrinking land of ours is crisscrossed with people in perpetual motion. Not a week goes by without some African team back from a sporting competition unanimously asking for political asylum in Frankfurt, Athens, or Glasgow. There are glorious sunrises, happy times ahead, bursts of light that turn, alas, into water and mud. Happiness? Don't make me laugh! It all makes me dizzy. For now, I'm going to take a rest. It's like the silence of the desert here; the hours go by in neutral. Nothing to do except think, rehash the past, obsess over it endlessly, come up with projects that may or may not see the light of day, not to mention that little voice whispering you have no right to forget the ones who're still in jail, how can you drag your body around without feeling guilty? I left my heart at home, I only have my body to care for now, and for that, I'll have to find some good soul to help me apply for political asylum and guide me through the bureaucratic labyrinth, like that damn OFPRA,2 the open sesame for any aspiring candidate for exile. For a long time now, I've accepted the idea that I'm going to die like everyone else and I'm not about to change my mind. I cannot wait to find peace of mind and body again. To tame my mind where morbid, incongruous ideas keep running wild, and snuff out that snickering little voice. Glue the pieces of my dislocated being back together. In short, get used to my new identity. A memory anchored deep in the nest of my brain is coming back to me. I must have been a child of four or five then, and I can recall the frightened look in my eyes very clearly. One day, as I was walking with my aunt along one of the avenues in our neighborhood, I passed by a military patrol. Like a chrysalis about to burst, the question popped out instantly: