Alain Mabanckou - Black Bazaar

The Breton paid the bill and said goodbye. Willy who had been half-listening to us came over and whispered to me:

“I think you need to go home now. In all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never heard you rant like this. You made that poor Breton, who looked like a very nice man, feel uncomfortable. He won’t be paying us another visit any time soon …”

A year and a half already …I’m not dead despite Mr Hippocratic being convinced I would be. Quite the opposite, in fact, some good things have been happening in my life.

I’m a different man now, and it makes my friends at Jip’s laugh when they see me wearing my seventies’ style flares.

“So you’ve dropped the Sappe, and you’re turning hippie now?” teased Lazio the security guard.

“Buttologist, you’re heading for the loony-bin,” concluded Yves the just-Ivorian.

* * *

I straighten my hair and pull it back in the style of the films from the thirties and forties that I watch with Sarah. She likes me this way, I’ve got to stand out, to create my own look even if it means going against the tide. It’s time-consuming because I have to track down the right products to a shop in Château d’Eau. Sometimes the shop-keeper is out of stock, and I have to wait for weeks on end with frizzy hair. While I’m waiting for the shopkeeper to get these products in from the United States, I avoid looking at myself in the mirror. When I go out I wear a hat to cover my hair.

A Gabonese man who was hanging around in front of McDonald’s at the Gare de l’Est made it clear how pathetic he thought I was, that if I straightened my hair it was because I was uncomfortable with my own negritude, that I had a serious problem, that I brought shame on the finest race in the world, the one that is the origin of everything on earth. It wasn’t like I had to give him the time of day since I was waiting for Roger the French-Ivorian who was going to let me have Right To Veto , the latest album from Koffi Olomide. But seeing as the Gabonese man wouldn’t stop staring at me, I nodded at him thinking that perhaps he admired my new style of dressing.

He didn’t reply but pulled a horrified face:

“I’m not answering! And you know why!”

So I told him where to go, I tried out a saying on him that I’d read somewhere and which sprang to mind: man is the baker of his own life. So it’s up to me to knead my body, to transform it the way I understand it, end of story. Why was he sticking his nose in? For one thing I don’t whiten my skin, so by rights the Gabonese man should be happy because I know plenty of Blacks who don’t hold back from doing that kind of thing to their faces with products imported by Original Colour’s former Nigerian lady friends.

The Gabonese man added that I was just a poor Black who didn’t like cassava and that I straightened my hair to look like Whites.

“Take a look at yourself, anyone would take you for a monkey! Is this straight-hair business to make you look like a White or something? I see that colonisation continues to wreak havoc on our community!”

I burst out laughing because he was dressed like a bushman with his tie that resembled a penguin’s small intestines. He must have been one of those students who are still enrolled even though their white hairs are making them snowy-headed. Who did he think he was, eh?

I decided not to wait around for Roger the French-Ivorian who is often an hour late, if not more.

I spat on the ground and left …

“That’s it, clear off, you lunatic! After your hair, you’ll still have your skin to whiten, and don’t forget your elbows, your heels and your knees!”

“ For too long Europehas force-fed us with lies and bloated us with pestilence. Do you know which black poet said those courageous things, my African brother? We must be honest in life, and say things to people’s faces. Take me, have I ever hidden anything from you? Don’t I tell you everything? So why did you do it to me, eh? I thought of you as a member of my own family. But you lied to me, you have lied to me ever since the beginning. Now I know that you’re like some of the other people in this neighbourhood, you think I’m just a poor Arab on the corner, that my life is played out behind this counter, that I’m worthless. Well, you’ve got another think coming! What kills me is that today I feel betrayed by a brother from the continent. You’ve always said that your wife and your child were on holiday in the Congo, haven’t you? Well it’s a lie!!! What kind of holidays last for over a year and a half? I know about everything. But if the Caribbean gentleman in your building hadn’t revealed the truth to me, would I have known these things, eh? How would I have guessed that it was your artist cousin who left with your woman and the little girl, eh? And what does that make me look like in this story, given that I used to say how respectful that man was? And another thing, you’ve changed, look at you wearing these hoodlum trousers, when you used to dress like the son of a minister! What are you doing straightening your hair, are you ashamed of yourself? And why don’t you come to my shop any more? I saw you yesterday with a White girl going to buy toilet paper from the Chinese when I’ve got stacks of it here. Is that any way to behave towards an African brother? If the Chinese shopkeepers have become powerful it’s because they’ve got more money than we have, it’s because people like you make them even more powerful by going to buy toilet paper from them when I’ve got stacks of it in my shop. Anyway, that is something I can still close my eyes to, but to hide the truth from me, no, no, no! And who is that White girl who comes in and out of your building with you, is that how we’re going to achieve the African Unity of our Guide Mouamar Gaddafi? When I was talking about R-E-S-P-E-C-T, you weren’t listening to me. Deep down, don’t you think that cousin of yours deserved to live with your woman? As I told you, I found him respectful, he wouldn’t have done what you’ve done to me …”

* * *

The girl our Arab on the corner is talking about is Sarah. She’s Belgian on her father’s side and French on her mother’s. She paints scenes of daily life in bars and cafés, and she says that Château Rouge and Château d’Eau provide plenty of inspiration for her work. At the beginning she made my pals laugh because they didn’t realise you could earn your crust by painting cans of beer and Black characters dozing off in front of their glasses.

The day she walked into Jip’s we all got that it was the first time she’d set foot in there. She came over to us and said she was looking for someone who would pose for her. Preferably someone flamboyant.

“A bit like you,” she added, pointing at me.

My pals all laughed. Paul from the big Congo whispered that the White woman just wanted to get a negro in the sack. Yves the just-Ivorian was eyeing her greedily and drooling:

“Did you see her butt? It’s like the gazelles back home in Abidjan. I bet she’s already had a Negro whipping it and he’s just ditched her, that’s why she’s come looking for another one who’ll take over from him because a White girl can’t have a B-side like that unless a good Negro’s already worked hard on it. And anyway, what about the will of the people, eh? She’s got to be made to pay for the cruel treatment inflicted on us by her ancestors during colonisation. Seeing as she’s French-Belgian, both France and Belgium need to cough up. It’ll be a double indemnity. What you call killing two birds with one stone …”

Willy changed the music because the choral singing he’d brought back from Brazzaville was sending us to sleep and reminding us of those we’d lost. Olivier had already started sobbing.