Alain Mabanckou - Memoirs of a Porcupine

as you see, my disappearance caused a lot of grief, especially among those who liked to listen to my tales about humans while the old man’s back was turned, pretending to enter a state of deep meditation, he’d bid us leave him to his patriarchal contemplations, go up to the top of a tree, close his eyes, stumble through his prayers, it really was like listening to the genuine first cousin of the monkey, the groaning and mutterings of the porcupine are remarkably similar to human utterance, but to this day, I’m proud to say, I’m pretty sure some of my fellows never gave up hope that one day they’d see me again, I was too careful to get myself captured by the kids of Mossaka like some naive booby, they must have remembered I’d warned them a thousand times about the little traps we liked to sneer at, they admired my lucidity, flair, intelligence, speed, cunning, they knew I could outwit them with one flick of the paw, so it could be my fellows had already begun to imagine the day I’d come back, a great day, they’d laugh in the face of the governor, tell him his sermonising was pure eyewash, ask a thousand questions about my disappearance, my incursion into the world of the first cousins of the monkeys, let’s be honest, the first question they asked would have been about the human condition, about how men relate to animals, my fellows had always wondered whether the first cousins of the monkey believed we were capable of thought, of conceiving an idea, pursuing it logically, always wondered if men were conscious of the harm they do to animals, if they realise how arrogant they are, with their self-proclaimed superiority, many of them, in fact, knew nothing of humans beyond the prejudices spouted by the governor, they’d never set paws in a village, they only saw men from a distance, they laughed at the thought of these poor creatures who only used their lower limbs to get from a to b, using only their feet for walking, just to show other species how superior they are, my fellows listened with interest to the caricature presented by our governor, Man he declared, was indefensible, deserved no absolution, was the wickedest of all creatures on earth, attenuating circumstances there were none, and since humans give us animals such a hard time, since they are hostile and deaf to our calls for peaceful co-existence, since they are the ones who come into the bush to hunt us, since they only grasp the need for harmony once they’ve been decimated by a long battle which is indelibly printed on their memory, well then, we should do likewise, and strike out at their children, even the newborn, because ‘the tiger’s young are born with ready claws’, so spoke our governor, and you see, my dear Baobab, that he had no sympathy for humankind

my death quickly became an accepted fact in our little community, I presume it was the governor who decided that the group must relocate without further delay because, dear Baobab, when one of our number died, we’d set off at once, on a two or three day journey, in search of a new homeland, there were two reasons for this painful migration, first it was thought that a change of place was the only way of shaking off our fears and anxieties, which lay largely in our terror of the hereafter, in the fact that we believed that the next world was populated entirely by terrifying creatures, the governor turned this to his advantage by telling us that when a porcupine dies he revisits his former fellows again a few days later in the guise of an evil spirit, but this time giant-sized, with his quills raised, longer and sharper than the hunters’ javelins, and, again, in his version, the quills of such a porcupine scraped against the clouds, darkened the horizon, stopped the day from breaking, so we lived in fear of this phantom coming back from the kingdom of the dead to terrify us, stop us sleeping, pull out our pretty quills, threaten us with its long poisonous spikes, but the second reason for emigrating after the death of one of our number had more to do with survival instinct, we were convinced that a man who had slain an animal in one place would be tempted to return, ‘forewarned is forearmed’, the governor would say, if he felt that the fear of the phantom of an ill-willed porcupine was insufficient to persuade us of the necessity to move on, and if he saw we still weren’t happy with his decision, despite his threatening talk, he would say mysteriously, ‘trust me, I’m like a deaf man running till he’s out of breath’, adding, ‘and if you do see a deaf man running, my dears, don’t ask questions, follow him, because he hasn’t heard the danger, he’s seen it’, and this is possibly why my fellow porcupines had left the place where we’d been living for some time, leaving no clue as to how I might find their new territory, and even if some of them had thought of guiding me towards it by whatever means, by, for example, leaving palm nuts along a path, or quills on the ground, strewing excrement, or spraying urine as they went, marking the trunks of trees with their claws as they passed, it wouldn’t have helped, the governor would have destroyed the signs, he probably posted himself at the rear so as to keep a watch on the migration and above all, to destroy any such clues

and so it was that on the fifth day, when I returned to our territory to rest after my first contact with young Kibandi, I found no one from our group, all was calm, the burrows were deserted, and I realised at last that the governor must have given the order to clear out and I had been declared dead by my own people, faced with this emptiness, I started to sob, the slightest noise in the undergrowth revived my hope that I might find one of my fellows coming to embrace me, rubbing his quills against mine by way of joyful greeting, teasing me, calling me ‘little fawn’, and when at last I did hear something, my quills began to tremble for joy, alas, my enthusiasm was short lived, and I realised that it was only a palm rat venturing forth, his sinister laughter said it all, even now I don’t understand why these lovers of palm nuts hate us so much, obviously I did not respond to his challenge, his silly snickering, I stayed there alone for six days, on the seventh day I noticed a squirrel of a fairly advanced age hanging about, and since at least squirrels are rather friendlier towards us, and we’ve never actually come to blows with them, I asked if he’d seen a bunch of porcupines leaving the region a few days before, he burst out laughing too, and did all the things we most dislike about his species, dashing about wildly for no reason, rolling his eyes, twitching his nose, bobbing his head about in an epileptic fashion, all of which looks quite ridiculous, but having said that, these tics are often what saves them from the humans’ rifle, and I noticed that his tail, which dragged behind him, was damaged, perhaps he had narrowly escaped a human trap, the wound was still gaping, I had no wish to dwell on the origin of his misfortune, then, after sniggering, and performing a series of absurd tics, he scratched his behind and mumbled, ‘I’ve been spying on you, I wondered why you were crying like that, it’s because you’re looking for the others isn’t, it, well I can’t say I’ve seen any porcupines round here for a few days, it’s been rather quiet round here just lately, it’s as if there’s nothing more left to eat, so everyone’s gone, but anyway, if you’ve got nowhere to live, you can come and join us, if you like, I’d be delighted to introduce you to my fellows, particularly since the rainy season’s coming up and it looks like it’s going to be a really tough one, judging by the heavy clouds hanging low as an ass’s belly, come with me, we should help each other out, lend one another a paw, know what I mean’, I couldn’t see myself living with squirrels, putting up with their tics, sharing their nuts, intervening when they fell out over a rotten almond, climbing trees all day, so I shook my head, he tried to persuade me, I didn’t waver, I’d rather die than stoop that low, I said to myself, and he went ‘who d’you think you are, eh, pride won’t find a vagabond shelter when he’s wandering about in the rain’, and I replied, ‘a vagabond’s shelter is his dignity’, and that silenced him, he looked me up and down and then said ‘listen, my spiky friend, I offered you hospitality, you’ve refused it, I’d like to help you find your friends but I’m in a hurry just now, the others have been waiting for me all this time, they sent me out to find some nuts, but I can at least tell you your family went the other way, behind you,’ and he pointed with his snout towards the horizon, where the earth meets the sky, where the mountains merge like a little heap of stones, I knew he was teasing, that it gave him a thrill to see me in such a state, ‘I’m sorry, I have to be off, good luck, be brave, and let’s hope your dignity finds you a home’, he said, and off he went, without turning round, I looked at the horizon, then at the sky, I wiped my tears, I dithered about for a few minutes, emptiness all around, still, as though the silence was looking back at me, watching me, knowing which way my fellows had gone, I could picture them exactly, the governor speaking, praying, muttering orders, I stopped crying there and then, and taking a large gulp of air, my quills at half-mast, I said to myself ‘too bad, now I’ll live on my own’, and after two more days of gnawing loneliness and misery, I set off on the path to the village of my young master