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  24

  AWALEH

  THE TREE OF NIGHT grows in secret. It sees its shadow getting longer or shorter and swallows the day and the night in one gulp. The traveler tree relieves man from the scorching heat of summer—a veritable open-air hammam. The tree of the monsoon turns itself into a vaporizer, an atomizer; the spirits of the ancestors weave hosannas for it to add to its laurels. The palm tree of the city gives a bit of shade to the white uniforms staggering around Place Menelik at noon. Happy today as it was yesterday, the mangrove tree takes under its wing mud crabs, leeches, and knotty eels. The ocean tree protects madrepores, sponges beneath the swell, and moving corals—a whole maritime orchestra. Here, the earth, too, writes history, with its aftershakes, its down-strokes and up-strokes, and its bubbling slaver. The madrepore reefs are the tales told by the sea and by an omniscient sun. The mountain tree, you'll find it farther north. The tree of the dried-up wadi lashes your face. The tree of the stony field flecks the flint-colored landscape with touches of green. The tree of the wind, pilgrim of the hills, turns right, turns left. The tree of the sands will smile under your soles if you're willing to pay attention to it. We use the dung of cows and the earth of anthills to fertilize the fields, and the song of the moon trees rises from them, did you know that, my boy? The dwarf tree of the undergrowth saved the life of the mythical Accompong, the runaway Jamaican slave still alive in the heart of the Rastafarians. (Are you a slave? No, I am an Ethiopian. Down with Babylon! Hail Haile Selassie!—a Rasta with super-thick hair and a mellifluous voice, a dubber, as you hummed to me only yesterday, my seraphic grandson. I was wondering where you get all that stuff.) The generation tree par excellence, more than the lantana, is the banyan, of course. The tree of your placenta, the womb of your being, the embryo of your future history, is safely buried in the courtyard of the house. And the little tree of memory, can you guess? The cactus. That's you, my little cactus.

  25

  BASHIR BINLADEN

  NOW I GOT BAD NEWS, too-too bad, dunno if I should blurt it out in front of everybody. Scud 3, it took back more positions, As-Eyla, Bolli, Ripta, Weima, an all. So us, we use a lot of helicopters for supplies cause rebellion has good field position. Day, Goda, Mabla, all that, it mountain an mountain. Score: 1–0 rebellion, you got me? But OK, all that, it not too serious. One day win for goverment, tomorrow for rebellion. All that same an one, man. French referee, he watched game from sideline. Everybody said loud: you help him an not me. So you, you get out of minefield fast or watch your white ass-there. Referee he got out quick-quick with dumb moron smile on his face an look of someone who grazed too much. He went hide in French Consulate. From there he gonna yell funny dirty words: summary executions, torture, rape, arbitrary arrest, child soldiers, pogroms (that word weird, seem not too-too French), purges, barbarous practices, massacres, ethnic cleansing, etc. His language-there too funny; sounds like medicines. Doctor or referee, gotta choose. Who cares; he gone now. Good for him, he in safe place now, cause on the field, stray bullet come in real fast.

  So, the too-too bad news you trying to find it, right? No, not Scud 3 just won battle of Assagueila. No no, not white coward referee either. The not-so-nice news, it's our friends demobilized. You forgot demobilized draftees already or what? That demobilization business don't work right cause goverment refuse to give money to guys not in uniform no more. It don't refuse right out but play for time too much, you know, like when Brazilians ahead 3–0 fifteen minutes before end of game. Before that demobilization business, there was that displacement thing, really made soldiers head too-too hot. Lot of demobilized guys don't have feet, legs, hands an walk on their ass. So-so pitiful for veteran who used to run fast, used to kill fast like Bruce Lee an drill young gazelles. Our demobilized friends, they real mad, normal, right? So, they attacked headquarters with grenades in their pockets. Maximum scandal in Djibouti town. Old president, he got too scared of coup. Motherfucka. The army, it attacked demobilized guys on strike and killed ten an ten just like that, in Balbala and District 7b. Wallahi! Too unfair cause when army can't control territory, it say to mobilized guys: help me help me, and now it kills little demobilized guys asking for their money. Next time, it gonna be our turn. Gotta prepare with morale of ferocious fighter. This time our friends lost KO but next time we can win on points. Now, the city shameless, they calling demobilized guys deserters. Hey, you heard that with your big fat ears, my deserter friends. Disgustation force five, I say. City lost its head or what, or the old president the one off his rocker now. World assy-turvy. Fuck you, deserters yourself. Next time, gonna be our turn. And then, it gonna get hot. I'm gonna put on King Kong voice, deep an fiery. Take it from Binladen who does his five prayers and screws the Americans standing up.

  26

  ALICE

  THE PENCIL OF LIGHT from the Balbala lighthouse will show you the road as soon as you cross the Ambouli wadi. Even if the night is pitch black, all you have to do is follow the intermittent beams from the beacon and, in the intervals, avoid the ruts in the road—no easy business. You'll rush into your concession and there will surely be a lot of people sleeping already, some of them snoring, others wriggling around on narrow mats, trying to find the sleep that eludes them after one hell of a khat party. Others rolled up on themselves like Labradors. Still others squeezed together shoulder to shoulder in rows, praying in a makeshift mosque. Once you're in your shack, you'll stretch out on your bed—“stretch out” is too big a word for a reduced- size bed more like a hammock than a tatami due to its worn- out springs on a base thin as a piece of cigarette paper—and finally you'll collapse. Sleep won't come right away, nor in the first hour, and you'll watch the film of your day in half-hour batches. You'll break down every action, every event. Nothing interesting to get from it, your life being what it is. You'll count sheep; you'll have plenty of time to try and catch the fleeing night. You'll raise your eyes toward the migrating stars. You'll imagine yourself traveling on the rump of a dromedary, arriving in mysterious Timbuktu, unless it's Palmyra and the surrounding desert. It's no good. Soon it will be day outside. The beam of the beacon will end its round. You'll get up, but not quite yet, waiting until your eyes can get rid of the surrounding darkness. Your willpower will sputter out like a candle, your muscles in disarray, your spine turning to jelly. All your efforts will be reduced to neon dust by an invisible force, a force you'll feel hiding there inside yourself, cutting away your efforts, undermining your spurts of energy. You'll feel your legs with your fingers, like someone trying to feel the pain in a phantom limb. Your legs are there, hooked up to your trunk, but they won't obey you. It will feel as if you're trying to size up the height, depth, and volume of your imprisonment. Desire is there, but not motion. You recognize your physical state as one of those déjà-vu feelings typical of sleepless nights. Is that what's called the douboab, the genie that's been let out of the bottle on a day without khat? Who knows. A new day is awaiting you, exactly the same as the day before. And that's not something to be happy about.

  Why are you looking at me with that dumb smile? I'm not good at telling stories, or what? Let me tell you this, my little man. When you tell a story, listen to me my love my rosebud my first picture book, yes, when you release the flow of a story, everything depends on the connection between the parts, the way one sequence fits into another, the sudden eruption of chance and the proper use of the catalogue and the series. The most natural order is rarely apparent immediately. It takes shape through detours, approximations, and the compass of ellipses—in other words through renewed repetitions. The narrative voices push and shove each other, and you have to capture the force that drives them, that's all. Chewing-digesting, cutting-and-pasting will sometimes do the trick. You can't neglect the humble details: isn't it true that Alpine torrents originate from a thin little brooklet and the tumultuous waters of the Nile from a kind of marsh in the depths of Burundi? Nor can you forget that no matter how small we are on this world here below, our heart keeps beating along w
ith the distant stars. We are born star-fishers, and there's nothing to be done about it. Our body, connecting and amalgamating the infinitely far and the immediately near, loses, as it does so, a reserve of energy and strength. Our faith remains indestructible, as if it were made of bricks and silence, far from the encumberment of language and far from those who are still sitting inside what has been forgotten, sunk in silence. In the world of your little mothers (your aunts in the language of this country), they say that the shape of a head often shows what kind of daydreams, fantasies, and plans take place inside it. Is this true, or an illusion? I know all kinds of noggins, and I couldn't be so categorical about it: some people even have a head for two. They're called lunatics, and the flowers of their mind are scattered over many worlds and various skies. There are brains that are smothered and suffer from the overpopulation of gloomy thoughts; others remain forever becalmed (as they say in Brittany of a flat sea), empty and unpopulated. Incongruity, freshness, or accuracy of the image—you decide. There are heads that love the jousting of muscles and curves, the awele of words thrown to the four winds, all the way to the Country of the Celestial Dragon (China in the language of our country, the French of France even for me, half Breton). Heads in fezzes that set out to collect every little event of the sand country. There are seekers of Africas, hunters of quickly gathered evidence. Other guys with hope between their teeth and an empty belly. Stories passed around forever actually save their lives, bring them out of the social coma, pump some vigorous blood into their vegetating body. So they enter into books and stories as into a pyramid. Our men's destiny is not sustained by social muscles or industrial revolutions but by trading in dreams, by the imagination. At night, once they have gone through the gate of tears, they bump into the door of the sun. But far off, very far off is the cape of hope with its heavenly scents, victuals galore, and constant banquets, its salads of fruit, its streams of milk and honey, its bay-leaf soaps, its lotions for all ills, its forest of aphrodisiac bois bandé, its undergrowth of trails, its climbing ivy, virgin vines, generous olive trees, its royal palm trees heavy with dates, its deceptive brambles that welcome the young martyrs who hurled themselves valiantly into death, its Scottish thistles, its South Sea aromas, its rising mountains, its soft, fluid, fragrant fountains of youth, the abracadabra of its pleasures. But I'm getting you all mixed up, I know. I'm sorry.

  27

  ABDO-JULIEN

  PAPA'S FACE HAS SOMETHING troubling and fragile in it, something he owes to his years of famine and anguish, something that comes from way back, from his childhood I imagine; the attraction of nothingness is visible in his eyes, too. Every evening, his account of what was really a rather banal day has sounded strange to our ears recently. The words, first of all: words of a hounded man, of a wounded soul. And then the tone: a tone of elegy. One silently wonders how much oxygen is left in this tall, reserved man. Most people around here respect him a great deal, and he's head and shoulders above those who ignore him. People from all walks of life come to our house: Blacks and Whites, browns like me, the nobodies of the day and the phantoms of the night. Opponents of the regime who slip in stealthily. Reciters of 114 suras of the holy Book. He listens to their complaints and dips into his pocket more often than he should.

  Ancestors also move surreptitiously around our home at sunset. Spirits who live with us: we can sense them crossing the courtyard at set times; a little whirlwind of sand follows them. Sometimes we breathe in their smell hours after they've gone by; we can also hear their clicking, and Papa announces that they, too, are beginning their day of cooking and household chores. No need to be in on the secret; all you have to do is perk up your ears and open wide your eyes. Nor do you need the strength of the cart-pullers you can see on Place Rimbaud to stand up to those spirits: they're quite peaceful and avoid us, because we're the ones who have remained blind, unable to see them coming. It is said that they go to great lengths not to crush us like eggshells. Unless you have the bad luck to surprise them, but then all they do is slap you—which may well send you straightaway into the other world. So many of us are found at dawn with frightened eyes, bewildered minds, and drool at the corner of the lips. A sheikh or a djinn-hunter is called to the rescue. Someone who can do nothing, or just about, most of the time. And the unfortunate victim drags himself around on his bottom every day, or never leaves his bed again. His life will be nothing but misery and survival, between rats and garbage. A stench that almost makes you faint.

  Speaking of rats, they say they graze on you in your sleep; you can feel them walking over you. The boldest ones nibble the rough skin of your feet and breathe on the exact spot they just bit as if to soothe you or keep you asleep. If you sleep without any light—and worse, with no mosquito netting—watch out for your toes; they can bite you bloody. If you're exasperated by the squeaks of these rodents or the whirring of bat wings, don't try to kill them; the ancestors have forbidden it. They have been blood relations for eternities. Outside, only the gleam of braziers or storm-lamps and the sounds of people clearing their throats give life to the alleys. The best you can do is leave the muddy days on the tip of your toes, wait for dawn, and pray to the Ancients. Only children, boys in particular (they are considered a source of wealth comparable to the fat accumulated in a ram's tail), have some small chance of being listened to—and even then. Tomorrow we'll see if the lying, limping hyena has not carried everything away in its path. Tomorrow we'll see if the beggars can do something for the many, the very many, who have not gained favor with the spirits of the dead. Those who the ebb and flow of famine have progressively deposited in the city like alluvium in the hollow of oases. Papa used to tell a story that he got from Grandpa Awaleh, to wit: alms are given to the mystical beggars of Bengal so that the seven lotuses that sleep in each of us may blossom. A story brought back to us by the Yemenites, those Phoenicians of the Red Sea.

  28

  AWALEH

  I, TOO, HAVE RETURNED from far away and from many dangers. I have traveled the length and breadth of the screes, deserts of sand, ergs and regs, the sides of bald mountains, and the dunes round as a dromedary's hump. I have slaked my thirst with the sap of the tamarins and aloes that grow in the beds of the wadis. A mere scrap would satisfy my hunger. Hidden in the silence of the desert, I moved like a chameleon with the slowness of a glacier. I had in my blood the required economy of breath, the uneasiness of the sentinel, and the gaze that abolishes the horizon. My companions and I—the famous Desert Scorpions that a discreet, jovial Italian friend, Hugo Pratt, had put on a saddle in his picture books, so I've been told—instinctively knew how to detect the pulsations of the earth's crust, sound the very guts of the desert, decode the book of the sands, and sense the coming of a storm. Free ourselves of whatever hampers the step, weighs down the walk, and dampens the forward thrust. The most gifted of us had the power to put the deepest song of the earth into words, wary of the small change of everyday words, a song that wells up from its belly, song of the slow crossing, a song unfolding to infinity. An opening onto the familiar world visited, lived in, questioned a thousand times. Since the beginning of time, we—that is, me and all my colleagues working in Guistir, the region of the three borders (Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia) that saw me born—haven't needed official documents to accompany that melody, to catch it at its birth, at the time when the cold desert night is separated from the reseda-yellow light of dawn. No member of our army of border guards, called ANG,1 has an authentic birth certificate; we were all “born circa…” Because nomadic time is not regulated by any calendar or encumbered by any archive, it does not sign the official papers demanded by the goatees of the Third Republic. Everybody was “born circa” in my time, and only the intrusion of the French colonial administration could impose such a delicate intention on us. For our own good, of course. And we accepted it without trying to bargain. That is our strength, our pride, for we were careful not to reveal our raw, intimate thoughts to the Occupier, and as soon as things turned sour, at
a sign or the snap of a finger we would take off: the whiteness, the white-hot iron bar of the sun of insubordination, was ours—the only horizon within our reach. Do not trust appearances, those old men who drag their bones to the shade of the palm tree, the ones you meet by the roadside—they keep up an exhausting pace as soon as they set their body into motion. With their nose to the wind, one foot in front of another, in the thickness of the dunes or the rough surface of the ergs—once they have set off, no one can stop them. And all those seasons with their terrifying faces, we would spend them in the nomadic backcountry. From khamsin to monsoon, we came and went between the coast and the hinterland, with some exceptional periods, like the English blockade under Churchill, which plunged the Territory, governed by the Vichy regime with an iron hand, into the depths of hunger and thirst. During that blockade, the people of this country tasted bitter roots and cat bouillon: the memory of that time is still tattooed on them to this day.