Alain Mabanckou - Memoirs of a Porcupine

this was the most turbulent time of my life, when I had to weigh up the demands of the child and our little family of porcupines, I put up with the governor’s rages, as he became increasingly intransigent, as though he had got wind of the huge changes taking place in my life, as though he’d guessed what was going to happen to me, he held more and more meetings, sneering down at us, raising his voice, with affected gestures, stroking his little beard with his claws, then crossing his front paws, his snout pointed skywards, in imitation of some human being calling on Nzambi Ya Mpunga, no point our saying anything, he always had the last word, for example, he’d tell us such and such a river used to flow round the other way and when we asked the old guy how long it had taken for the water to make this spectacular change in direction, he’d toss his worn out quills, make a show of closing his eyes and thinking, point to the sky, it made me roar with laughter, and then he got angry and began to threaten us, issuing an ultimatum we all knew by heart, ‘if that’s how it is, then that’s the last time I’ll tell you anything about men and their ways, you’re just plain ignorant’, and when we went on laughing he’d add enigmatically, ‘when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger’, but when he saw I was still keen to go check out what the monkeys’ cousins were up to, the aged porcupine flew into a rage, telling his stooges to keep a close paw on me, could he possibly have known I was due to enter upon the scene, now young Kibandi had drunk his initiatory drink, he’d no idea, my dear Baobab, when I left I did it discreetly, sometimes with the connivance of two or three sidekicks, who wanted to hear from me how it really was with humans, because the aged porcupine always tended to exaggerate, and almost seemed to be calling for a war between the animal and human species, I would vanish into the bush for whole days and nights and it got so that that I only felt at ease when I was close to my future master’s village, whenever I got back home I found the governor in a rage, calling me every name under the sun, and to further tarnish my image, he’d tell my sidekicks that too much contact with humans had sent me mad, I was heading straight for the fox’s jaws, soon I’d have forgotten our ways, I would lose touch with what made us the most noble animals in the bush, he swore, our aged philosopher, that one day I’d get caught in one of those traps men leave in the bush, or worse still, even fall into the silly traps set by the kids from Mossaka, who knew how to capture birds with one of their mother’s aluminium bowls, and the other porcupines all laughed themselves silly, because they too considered it better to fall into a trap set by a real hunter than one left by a human being who wasn’t yet weaned from its mother’s breast, you’d always see them at the gates of the village in the North, but I must say, dear Baobab, that only the birds of Mossaka got caught that way, and mostly the sparrows, who are the stupidest birds round here, I wouldn’t like to generalize and say all vertebrates with feathers, beaks and anterior limbs used for flight are that stupid, oh no, I’m sure there are some intelligent species of bird, but the sparrows of Mossaka had such a low IQ that I actually felt sorry for them, sparrows the whole world over must be the same, I can see they must be cut off from the reality of life on earth, constantly flitting here and there, that’s who the children of the North had laid their traps for, the little humans, in the middle of nowhere, had these bowls, propped up with a piece of wood, and round them they tied a long piece of string you could hardly see, and they hid in the undergrowth about a hundred metres off, and, drawn by the seed left round the bowls, the poor things jostled and chirruped up in the tree tops then would suddenly all drop to earth at once, without setting up some lookouts to tell them if something was up, then the kids would tug the string of their silly traps and the sparrows would suddenly find themselves imprisoned under the container, but what was strange, dear Baobab, was that none of them had any sense of the danger, which would have been obvious to any animal, even the ones with no common sense at all, it didn’t occur to the birds for a moment that it was a bit strange to find a container sitting in the middle of nowhere, that seeds lying on the ground, untouched by other birds, might be a bit suspicious, I never got caught out myself, otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking to you now, and so my fellow porcupines, indoctrinated by the governor, were convinced I would get caught in one of these traps, ‘the drum is made from the skin of the fawn that strays from its mother’, our Australopithecus was wont to say, thinking I wouldn’t understand what he meant, and this remark created a great stir within in the group, some of my colleagues repeated it everywhere they went, imitating the patriarch’s gestures, teasing me, even, calling me ‘the fawn’, until one day I got so irritated by their jokes, which did not seem in the least bit funny to me, I explained that the fawn was the young of a wild animal, a deer, a buck or roe, whereas I was in fact a porcupine, and proud of it too

once it becomes the harmful double of a human being, an animal has to leave its natural milieu, its family, so my separation from the members of our group occurred down in Mossaka, but considering that porcupines are reputed to be solitary animals, we were fortunate to live in a community, and every evening the old governor held a meeting, made a few general remarks, I could tell he was covertly talking about me, saying no one was irreplaceable in the forest, that he’d known a few jumped up porcupines in his time, he knew how to put them back in their place, and when I didn’t react, he became more pointed, muttering things about ‘the fish that proudly dallies in the feeder stream one day ends up salted on a slab in the market’, he hastened to remind us that I was an orphan, without him I wouldn’t have been a live porcupine at all, he said my procreators were as stubborn as me, that they left this earth shortly after my arrival, I was scarcely three weeks old, our governor boasted of how he had taken me in, along with his female mate, now deceased, and he went into how I used to defecate the whole day long, I was a lazy good for nothing, scared of baby lizards, and the others all laughed loudly, and it was from him I learned about the ways of my parents, it seemed they liked to mingle with the human race, they’d disappear by night and go wandering among the humans in Mossaka, returning at dawn the following day, tired out, with red eyes, muddy paws, and spend the whole day sleeping like dormice, the governor couldn’t understand it, I had begun to piece their lives together bit by bit, I no longer doubted it, they were harmful doubles, I reached this conclusion the day I felt the call of young Kibandi myself, I accepted the idea that I was descended from a line of porcupines whose destiny was to serve humans beings, not for better, but for worse, for the very worst, and each time I heard the governor talking about the death of my parents it made me angry, he claimed to have tried to spy on them one night, to find to where they went in such a hurry, but they’d given him the slip between two clumps of trees because the old guy already had trouble with his eyes, even back then, a week went by, they heard nothing, then came the dark day, the eighth day since their disappearance, the fateful day when an owl with an injured claw, crushed in a man-made trap, flew over our patch, come, so it seemed, to announce to the governor the sad news already on the lips of most of the animals in our region, he told him that a hunter had killed my parents not far from Mossaka, the whole herd had to move on in a hurry, and find a new patch, a few kilometres away