J. Ledgard - Submergence

When you’re looking at me

That I’m looking for love!

The film was paused again near the end, at a scene where the forest was burning and Bambi fell in the flames and was bucked to his feet by his father, the great prince stag. He transcribed:

‘It is man. He is here again. There are many this time. We must go deep into the forest. Hurry, follow me!’

Yusuf stood up in front of a stilled image of rising flames and urged them to identify with Bambi. The Crusaders were man. The forest was the mangrove in which the believers were safe. It did not trouble Yusuf that they were watching an American narrative. To him, it was pure. It had religious worth.

James glanced around the room. The fighters were spellbound. There was something more to it. When he understood, it was obvious. The faces were bathed in Disney colours: the same pinks, blues and greens which dominated in portraits of jihadists; with songbirds fluttering around turbans, an armful of flowers, gun on lap, and always in the background a forest with a cornflower-blue sky and a yellow sun that itself had been lifted from Bambi in the form of Chinese computer wallpaper. It was the art as much as the story that held them. The Crusaders were burning the Islamic state and Bambi was the innocent combatant, as they were represented in the martyrdom videos.

The windows were open. The mosquitoes were just out there in the wind. Music carried from the village. It drove Qasab into a rage. He sent two boys to put a stop to it. One wore a grenade in his belt. There was screaming, wailing. After a few minutes, the two came back with a smashed radio.

There was the braying of a wounded donkey, the shuffling around him, the oiling of guns, then not even that; only the surf booming on the reef.

The men of Chiamboni were trap fishing for yellow tuna under the full moon. They waded and swam out with nets and spears. The women were on the beach collecting cowries, which were sold to Kenyan traders, who in turn employed beach boys to sell the shells to tourists up and down the Kenyan coast.

Somali beaches were the finest in Africa, and this one was very wild, very beautiful, bone white, and backed by the east-facing dunes. The stars were all in their ocean station, the turtles laying eggs, there were large-toothed fish in the shallows and mangroves holding the dry land together. There was surf and in other places the water was unmoving, warm as blood, and full of life. He imagined the dotted scuttle of jade crabs to their burrows. How many crabs was that? How many separate journeys? He saw a heap of shell fragments and bones, a midden that amounted to 10,000 years of human leavings.

*

The south wind blew. It lifted scarves from the floor. It scattered paper and turned pages in an open prayer book. Dust kicked up from the alleys in the village. Sewage dribbled from buildings to beach, not milky any more but green with weed and reactions. It wetted a mahogany boat that was lain on its side.

He remembered something from his childhood, of how the ancient Britons worshipped the south wind and divided the elements into flowers, fire, sky, soil, mist and freshwater, but were confounded by saltwater.

He thought of many other things besides, more personal things. Of course he did.

He was consumed with the desire to escape. He was to be taken the next day to a camp hidden in the mangrove. That was to enter a place of martyrs. He was only Mr Water to them, a curiosity, yet he knew too much. They would watch for him. Bribe? Firefight? He had to try. But there were fighters sleeping on either side of the door, there were guards downstairs, the night was lunar-lit, and he was so weak, standing was difficult for him, he needed medical attention, and, besides, he was tied hand to foot and only by chance had he the Futurist window view.

Two skiffs had appeared on the bay in the morning. He was thrown into one of them. Maize meal and spaghetti were loaded along with dried mangoes and papayas, tinned fish, turtle meat, medicines, mosquito netting, candles, kerosene, fuel, knives, guns, ammunition and explosives: even the smallest jihad needed its provisions. The scene was Somali — the fighters jostling, the scarves, the teeth, fringed by seas and swamps and backed by furnace scrub — yet in the breaking light the skiffs stood in contrast to the darker sky, and it rained, silver, everywhere. It was high tide, and when they sped off the bay and Chiamboni looked like the gunmetal Thames, and London at Michaelmas. Captivity was a humiliation, it was also a loneliness that made you want to see something else in front of you. They steered into a lagoon and the tropical heat buffeted him. They opened the throttle on the Yamaha outboards (bought or stolen from Captain Andy’s Marine Supplies in Mombasa) and chattered over the water like skis on ice; thence into tidal channels, a creek, another, towards the camp hidden in the swamp. It became steadily more tenebrous and overhanging. The outboards were lifted up and the men poled the boats forward. At some points the fighters jumped off and pushed the skiffs over a sandbar into a cut of water. The mangrove roots were underwater at high tide and exposed at low tide. They were tubular, lifelike. They looked like hands of puppets held in horror. Just like in the wadi, there was concern about the Americans. They sought to keep themselves out of sight under the branches. Uncle Sam knew nothing, Uncle Sam saw everything.

Down narrower creeks like capillaries, to a shallow island which had a crossing point for elephants from the mainland. The camp was where the moat stood a little deeper. It had survived the Ethiopian and American strafing and bombing, but had been abandoned and occupied by Boni hunter-gatherers, at the northern edge of their range.

Several Boni men stood before them. James’s first impression was not of a paradisal people, but of children gone feral.

They laughed when Saif interrogated them about the fishing.

‘We don’t fish!’ said one, in Swahili. ‘We are Boni! We hunt!’

They had dug pits in the sandy soil. Animals fell in and the Boni speared them.

‘There is space for you here,’ another said. ‘There are dik-dik. There are pigs.’

‘Pigs!’ Saif shouted. ‘What does he take us for?’

If the ancient hunter-gatherer Boni are known at all it is for the version of Kropotkin’s mutual aid they practise with a bird they call mirsi. They whistle to mirsi and mirsi whistles back. It leads the Boni to the wild honey in the trees in the bush. The Boni shin up the trees and smoke out the hives, taking the honey and honeycombs, being sure to leave the bird a generous share in wax and bee larvae.

The Boni are resistant to bee stings and exhibit little sense of vertigo in the high branches of trees. They are an ancient people, related to the Twa Pygmies of Congo. They go barefoot, their walk is peculiarly solid, from the pelvis, very different from the stride of the Somalis, which comes loosely from the shoulder.

A Boni boy achieves manhood by spearing a buffalo, an elephant, or other big animal. On the night before their first hunt the girls pleasure the boys and smear their heads with coconut oil. If a boy fails the hunting test, he will be denied the right to marry. Brides are expensive and have to be paid for in bush meat, skins, sugar or cash. The kidnapping and the rape of girls by Boni men who cannot afford the marriage portion is common.

She stood at the railings. The air was raw. The Pourquoi Pas? was approaching Jan Mayen Island. She wanted to see it. There was salt on her lips and spray on her Icelandic sweater and tangerine-coloured jeans. She wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and sat on a deckchair and opened the New Scientist . She furled the magazine tight against the wind and read the latest news on nanotechnology. When she was done, she watched a matinee: fog and sea. Gulls wheeled above cold rich swells. There were pieces of ice and icebergs. There were pilot whales riding the bow wave. It was beautiful to watch them. A killer whale cut loops under migrating geese. It went in and out of the water. It sparkled. She could see from its dorsal fin that it was a male, old and tired. It appeared troubled by the thrumming of the ship. It made her think of the changes that had occurred in the Greenland Sea in its lifetime. When it was birthed there were hardly any ships. There were no submarines. There were no engines, klaxons; no man-made noises. There were many seals and fish then, whereas now there was such a competition the killer whale was forced to trail geese in the hope that one might fall from the sky.