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- Herausgeber: CASSAVA REPUBLIC
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
'Papa, why do you dance when you walk? When Aden's 8-year-old daughter asks him this one morning in Paris, he is taken aback. The question is innocent, but the answer is not so simple. Unable to resist Béa's inquisitive spirit, he moves silkily between memories of his childhood: from his silent, mysterious mother and the shanty roofs of his neighbourhood to the malicious attack that changed his life forever and the ensuing struggle that made him a man. Anchoring his memories is a Djibouti on the cusp of independence; a land of shifting deserts and immense heat, French-from-France ex-pats, and one lonely and sick boy finding solace in books. Why Do You Dance When You Walk is a poignant and timeless story of the complexity of family, the value of poetry and freedom, and the ripple effect of the traumas that stalk our movement.
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1
WHY DO YOU DANCE WHEN YOU WALK?
Abdourahman A. Waberi
Translated by David and Nicole Ball
3To my mother Safia, my grandmother Jim’aa, my aunt Gayibo and my father Awaleh.
‘What is most personal is most general.’
Carl Rogers
About this Book
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates’ programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org
Contents
Why Do You Dance When You Walk?
It all came back to me.
I am that child, swimming between the past and the present. All I have to do is close my eyes and it all comes back to me. I remember the smell of the wet earth after the first rain and the dust dancing in the rays of light. I remember the first time I got sick. I must have been six at the time. Fever lashed out at me for a whole week. Heat, sweat and shivers. Shivers, sweat and heat. My first torments date from that period.
The small hours of a morning, in Djibouti, at the beginning of the seventies. My memory always takes me back to that starting point. Today, my memories are less foggy, as I was able to make strenuous efforts to go back in time and put some order into the jumble of my childhood.
Day and night, from the tip of my toes to the tip of my hair, fever attacked me. One day it would make me throw up. The next day I was delirious. I misunderstood the words and the care my parents were giving me. I misjudged what they were doing. Blame it on pain and my tender age. Fever played with my body the way the little girls in the neighbourhood played with their only rag doll.
For six whole days and nights, I shook. I poured out all the water in my body, stretched out on my mat during the day, and then on my little mattress set directly on the floor in the evening. My temperature rose at nightfall. I cried even louder. I called Mama to the rescue. I was impatient, boiling with rage. I hated it when she left me all alone. Under the veranda, my eyes staring at the aluminium roof. I would cry to the point of exhaustion. Finally Mama would come. But I no longer found the slightest comfort in the arms of my mother, Zahra. She didn’t know what to do with me. Do something, quick! 6demanded the little voice that took hold of her during those moments of panic.
Then what? Then she would entrust the little bag of bones and pains I was to whomever would appear before her.
Who? Who?
Quick, quick, implored the little voice.
So she threw me like a vulgar package into my grandmother’s arms,
or into the arms of my paternal aunt Dayibo who was my mother’s age.
or into the lap of a passing maid.
Then into the lap of another woman,
an aunt,
a relative,
or a maid,
or even a neighbour, or some matron who had come to say hello to Grandma.
I was passed like this from arm to arm,
from breast to breast.
But I kept on crying,
from pain,
from anger
out of habit, too.
Dawn would arrive, most often without my knowing it. I would be dropping from exhaustion. I’d sleep a little, sniffling and thrashing about in my sleep. I woke up when the first rays of the sun heated up the aluminium roof. Shivering, I would scream with pain and rage. And wake everybody up.
My mother would jump out of bed and blow her nose at length. Maybe she didn’t want me to catch her crying but I could see the flash of panic in her eyes that I had already surprised onto her face.
Outside, the city was already full of life. I could hear the children of Château-d’Eau, my neighbourhood, leaving for school. They sounded joyful, noisy, naughty. Whereas me, I was lying on my mattress. Feverish. I would start sobbing again. 7
I was waving my fleshless arms around, in vain. Mama was sniffling silently, a flash of panic in her eyes again. She found a way out by throwing me into the arms of the first woman who happened to come by.
Grandma’s arms,
or my paternal aunt’s arms,
or the neighbour’s arms.
Then to another one,
then another.
And the circus would begin all over again.
The little sniffle, the panic, for the flash of an instant.
And I would be passed from arm to arm,
like a bundle of sticks.
Why did Mama hate me so much?
I never dared ask myself that question. Only later did it crawl into my thoughts.
It would lodge in my heart. And hollow out a black hole in it.
Every morning, Mama entrusted me to my grandma. I nicknamed her Cochise when I was a teenager, in homage to the famous Indian chief.
So, Grandma.
She was the supreme chief of the family. She ruled with an iron hand, like an Apache warrior over his scattered troops. Nearly blind as she was, Grandma Cochise stood straight and still behind a veil invisible to others. She was a tall, robust woman with delicate features, but shrunken by age. She could hear, taste and smell better than anyone. Her forehead was devastated by wrinkles, her face more creased than the skin of a chameleon. As soon as she heard my thin voice, she would furrow her brow. She had a keen nose like a sheep dog’s and sniffed me out before recognizing me. All she had to do then was stretch out her arms and grab me by the skin of my neck like a cat with her kitten. She would effortlessly pull me back onto her lap. And there was only one thing I could do: settle myself against her and calm down. I had to stay put, without moving, without shedding a single tear. But it was impossible. I was born with moist red eyes. I would quickly break down. And the sanction would fall, implacably, upon my shoulders.
Every sniffle was followed by a dark, threatening look. Every tear by a reprimand. Then strokes of the cane on my skull, my collarbone, my elbows, my toes. She could make me howl in pain with one sharp blow. I would sob and sob until I smothered. The days went by, back then, and they all seemed the same. I would hold my breath. I’d launch out my mind like a lasso and finally collapse from sheer exhaustion in the middle of the morning, asleep at last. Grandma’s eyes would settle on the rare passers-by whose steps she had perceived well before 9they reached us. These men and women never failed to greet the matron, who would nod her head after each greeting.
The passerby: ‘How’s the little boy doing?’
Her: ‘Allah the Most Merciful is watching over him, we have no complaints today.’
The passerby: ‘And what about your old bones?’
Her: ‘If they creak, it’s because they’re alive.’
The passerby: ‘By all the angels in Heaven, you’ll sure bury us all, won’t you?’
Her: ‘I’m counting on it.’
The bowl of millet I hadn’t touched would still lie around for a bit. Fifteen minutes later it made a small neighbourhood boy or girl happy. Grandma, solicited by this one or that one, wasn’t scolding me for once. It must have been close to ten when the bustle of the neighbourhood went up a notch. Mama was returning from the market. She’d take a stool, drag it over to the old lady to give her news of a convalescent relative, deliver a message from the local imam, or complain about the rising price of meat. Grandma would listen. Nothing seemed to faze her.
I didn’t get so much as a glance from my mother. Huddled at the feet of Grandma Cochise, I was shaking with fever. I resented this mother who kept her distance from my little, stunted body on the mat. I tried to calm down to prove that Grandma was right, and to upset Mama more. I’d watch the people idling in the street from a unique vantage point. I had an unobstructed view of a remarkable landscape: the hardened toenails of my grandmother.
I was 45 when you came into my life, Béa. A child of desire, you took your own sweet time before you arrived on earth with fanfare.
I never had a little cuddly animal made of straw or cardboard when I was a child. I was not a healthy, strong, well-nourished baby like you. I was skinny and sickly. To stop my crying, there was often only one solution, which my mother had discovered totally by chance. Great scientific discoveries like aspirin or pasteurization are the daughters of chance, God knows why. One evening, when she was sick of hearing me moaning, my mother plunged me into a white basin filled with cold water, in the shade of the veranda. Today, I replay this scene in my mind with some emotion. I can feel my body shivering again as I tell it to you. Tears are not very far away.
Before I landed in the basin, my throat was so tight I felt like I was suffocating. The scene always ended the same way: I would shiver with cold as the freezing water softened my skin. If my mother was reduced to this radical solution, it’s because she had used up every possible ruse and still couldn’t manage to calm down the frightful cry-baby that I was. At night, before setting me down on my little mat, she’d tell me all kinds of stories. Tales about obedient children, others about docile animals or affectionate plants. The stories came one after the other. While the whole city was sound asleep, we were the only two people stirring.
At your birth, Béa, a detail caught my eye: you had big ears, a little like Barack Obama. Your little face was hidden under your long eyelashes. You kicked around a lot. Trembling, I examined your limbs. You were a healthy baby, thank God.
Churned by pain, still in a daze, your mother finally emerged from her foggy state to ask me what the baby’s sex was. 11
And I, proud as a peacock, announced, ‘It’s a girl!’
And you cried out for the second time.
It had become a habit of yours.
You would yell at the drop of a hat.
You insisted that your mother and I obey you hand and foot. As an explosive mixture, you sure are the all-category champion. To the Swiss-Milanese-Sicilian blood of your mother, you must add my African blood—not lazy at all, for my ancestors were nomads and to this day, they keep beating everyone at running.
At four, you were a smiling little girl, curious and full of energy. You would still shout at the drop of a hat. Margherita watched over you with tender eyes and her expansive, Mediterranean love. With her, you can easily go from laughter to tears, from shouts to songs. You and your mom, you sure make a fine pair! A permanent circus, the two of you together. I try to temper your mother’s impulses and your energy to find a happy medium, calm and smooth like the flow of a Batavian river. I almost never succeed. In those instances, all I can do is sulk. I sulk, but then two voices gang up to pull me out of that state.
When I wasn’t out of town for work or abroad, I was the one who had the privilege of taking you to school. And I was the one to bring you back from school at the end of the afternoon. I loved our time together, just you and me walking for 15 minutes to school and back. From the very start of the morning, you asked so many questions. You, little devil of a girl, you seemed to forget that I’m slow. Especially in the morning. I need time before I can rise to your level of conversation. You were four years old and liked to chatter. The noise of the city didn’t disturb our tête-à-tête. We were alone in the world. I had eyes only for you, Béa. Ears only for our conversation. A conversation you would liven up with songs and laughter, according to your personal weather.
‘Papa, is ‘médecine’ a lady doctor?’
‘Hmmm…’
‘My friend Letitia says that’s what it is, for real…’
We’d cross this little part of the 10th Arrondissement, and three streets further on, we’d reach the 9th. Almost every day, we met the same passers-by in a hurry, the same Chinese shopkeepers washing down the doorstep of their bar-tabac, the same little kids in strollers and the same teenage girls on 13scooters. Anything could become instantly magical to your eyes. The slightest thing captured your attention as soon as you were out of bed. You’d first wave cheerfully and then shout ‘Hi, soldiers!’ to the four men in battle dress on duty, machineguns in their hands, plodding heavily up and down the street leading to the neighbourhood synagogue. The soldiers would return your greetings, and by then we could feel impatience growing behind our backs. Some pedestrians frowned and others got annoyed because we were strolling along our bit of sidewalk instead of walking at their frenzied pace. Why walk faster when we had our entire life ahead of us? Glued to their cell phones, these people would push and shove everybody on the street as they did in the corridors of the Metro. Nonchalant and chatty on some mornings, we were strangely silent on others. Those moments of complicity were the most special moments of the day.
One morning, on the way to school, you asked me a question and you put the maximum attention and affection in the tone of your voice. I did not anticipate its object, but I knew that question must have a lot of importance for you. And no doubt, for me as well.
