Abdourahman Waberi - Transit

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.

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 with 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.