Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

Bosco the Embassy Poet was the first to see my little girl. He was standing at the entrance with a glass of red wine in one hand and a copy of Rimbaud in the other. There was a moment’s silence, then he stepped away from the door and stared at us tensely. I nodded to indicate he could hold my child, that I wouldn’t mind.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?”

I couldn’t understand why he’d reacted like this. It turns out that in Chad, in his ethnic group, the men won’t touch a baby until it’s twelve months old.

“Don’t be offended, my friend. I shall write for your daughter a poem in the style of Victor Hugo’s Infantile Influence . And you will see, I promise, that there will be some highly rewarding rhymes from start to finish! The trouble with today’s poets is that they have abandoned rhyme. So anyone can call himself a poet, and there is no way of separating the wheat from the chaff. I find it absolutely staggering when I read what these so-called poets write these days. Where has the elegance of Valéry gone? What has happened to the genius of Hugo? What have they done with the impertinence of Baudelaire? Could you tell me, please? I am the only one to stand up against this dereliction of poetic duty. But be there only one poet left, I shall be that poet. Let us place the order for your baby straightaway, here is my pen and a piece of paper to write it down. Would you prefer alexandrines or six-line stanzas? Or rather do not worry yourself, I shall write two versions, one with alexandrines, and another with six-line stanzas. Just allow time for my inspiration to take hold.”

To this day, I still haven’t received any poem.

As for Vladimir the Cameroonian with the longest cigars in France and Navarre, he joked that two of his cigars end-to-end were longer than my daughter was tall. Not only that but he wanted to know why we had called her Henriette. I told him it was after my grandmother, Henriette Nsoko, a woman who played a very important role in my childhood, and someone I miss a great deal. My mother and I used to go to see her in the village of Louboulou in the south of the Congo, she died when I was barely six years old. The picture I still have of her is of an old woman sitting in front of the door to her hut, her eyes raised to the sky as if she were putting herself in God’s hands for the rest of her days. The goats were her only confidantes, old age had worn away at her memory and she could no longer remember who I was. When I opened her kitchen door, she shrieked that she was being robbed, the villagers would rush over to explain that I was her grandson, the son of her daughter Pauline Kengué, not a goat-rustler. But my grandmother, doubtful and suspicious, would fret:

“Who is Pauline Kengué?”

This wasn’t how Vladimir saw it:

“I understand that Henriette was your grandmother’s name, but there’s no need to go overboard! With all the names that are available in the Whites’ calendar, how dare you condemn the poor little girl to death? Henriette is an old lady’s name! Let me tell you something, these Europeans don’t trifle with first names, they take them very seriously. They’ve got some fine-sounding ones like Georges, Valéry, François and Jacques. If you’d asked for my opinion, I’d have given you some sound advice. Not only did you go and have a baby behind our backs, but you lumber the poor innocent thing with a name from the Jurassic period! Do your really think Henriette is a name for a normal child, eh? You could have called her Jeanne, for example, or Charlotte, or Odette, or Marie or I don’t know what else, these are fresher names, they are more attractive and they will guarantee your child a future … And then there’s another false note, and I’m not going to hide this from you, it looks to me as if your daughter will be even darker than her mother, who is already at the peak of negritude. Anyone would think you made your baby in a Medieval Christian oven and left her in there to burn without keeping an eye on Hell’s fire. Because, as you know, normally when a black child comes into the world he is very pale-skinned like the children belonging to the Whites, it’s only afterwards that he gradually takes on his original colour. But your child is already as black as can be. I am completely taken aback, I’ve never seen such a charred baby, not even in Africa!”

Yves the just-Ivorian was grinding his axe about the colonial debt again:

“You should have had a mixed-race kid! You haven’t understood the first thing about this country and here I am declaring until I’m blue in the face that the most urgent problem facing us lot from the nigger-zone is to seize here and now the compensation for what we were made to suffer under colonisation. We should sing along with the musician Tonton David that we come from a people who suffered a great deal, from a people who want to suffer no more. I’m fed up of sweeping the streets of Gaul when I’ve never seen a White sweeping the streets of my Ivory Coast. Since no one wants to know that we exist in this country, since they pretend not to see us, since we’re hired to empty the bins, let us not make things more complicated than they are, the maths is simple, my friend: the more we go out with French women, the more we’re leaving our mark on this country so we can say to our former colonisers that we’re still here, that they’ve got to come to an arrangement with us, that tomorrow’s world will be packed with negroes at every crossroads, negroes who will be as French as they are, whether they like it or not, that if they don’t repay us double-quick for the damages we’re seeking, well then we’ll go right ahead and bastardise Gaul by all means necessary! You really haven’t understood the first thing, you don’t listen to me, today you’ve just proved that the Congolese are the biggest fools on our continent and that they make a lot of noise instead of cutting straight to the chase. Is it with babies like yours that we’ll be able to advance our cause, eh? This baby doesn’t count in my eyes, it’s setting us back a hundred years. What future will it have in a Gaul that will treat it as an immigrant from dawn to dusk? I don’t mince my words, now if you don’t agree you can do what you like. For me this birth is nothing, it doesn’t count! Zero!”

Roger the French-Ivorian was pacing around the pram. He stuck his nose in as if looking for goodness knows what clues. Everybody watched him carry out his inspection. He wheeled the pram over towards the door for more light.

“What on earth’s that Roger doing?” asked Paul from the big Congo.

“Is he baptising the little one or something?” wondered Willy.

Roger the French-Ivorian took off my daughter’s woollen bonnet to get a better look at her. Then, pulling a face, he stood up again:

“Hold on a minute, Buttologist, this child in question, is it yours?”

“In your opinion, who else would make a child like that here, eh?” Yves the just-Ivorian fired back to his half-compatriot.

The two of them are always feuding, sometimes they go off to fight by the fountain at Les Halles.

Roger the French-Ivorian stood tall, giving a dirty look to his perennial enemy:

“Yves, am I even talking to you? Have you ever shown your child here? I am directing my comments at Buttologist, not you! You do not even exist in my eyes! Go and wait at home for France to pay you compensation for being colonised, as if your own parents hadn’t cooperated and benefited from the system! If I were the Minister for Immigration and National Identity in this country, I’d have taken away your resident’s card!”

Yves retaliated by insulting his half-compatriot as he walked out of Jip’s:

“This White-Negro is starting to get on my nerves! I’m going to have to leave, or things could turn out nastily for him. It’s not with half-castes like him that we’re going to win the case in this country. While we’re busy defending our rights, White-Negroes are auctioning us off the way they did back in the days of slavery. This man will never understand our struggle because he has sold out like all the other half-castes. When the system is anti-Blacks he calls himself White, and when the Whites remind him that a half-caste is just another negro he rejoins the negro crowd! This Roger you see in the bar is French by day and Ivorian by night, never the other way around! I want him to be Ivorian twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and for him to stop playing out his little hypocritical game! Sell-out! Pro-slaver brown-nose!”