The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
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thought of staying on in Freetown and writing a fake ethnography,” I said.
“The trouble with lying,” Pauline said, “is that you always have to make a mental note of everything you say, so you won’t be caught out in the future. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. You are free to live.”
It was then that I remembered the story of Donald Crowhurst and became aware that for as long as we had been in Freetown, this story had been at the back of my mind, casting its shadow over everything I thought and did.
SEVEN
The Magical Power of Words
FOR SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE GOING TO SIERRA LEONE, Pauline and I had camped in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, awaiting word of a cargo sailing from Le Havre to Freetown. It was an Indian summer, and I should have been grateful for this period of idleness. But our delayed departure only intensified the anxiety that oppressed me whenever I contemplated returning to Africa as an anthropologist. I had glimpsed this future for myself in the Congo, five years before, and it had been in Paris, penurious and disoriented, that I had begun to see that ethnography might be my vocation, my way of entering into another world, and my literary path. But now, standing in the wings, I was seized by stage fright, and I had mislaid my script.
To distract myself I would take long walks to Puteaux and Suresnes, oft en finding myself at the old Fort Mont-Valerien, where I would sit and contemplate the haze-blurred city, only the upper level of the Eiffel Tower visible above the smog. Or I would lie in the grass outside our tent in the Bois reading of Chagall’s first enraptured impressions of Paris: “I knew I could work in this light and that my dreams would take shape in it. I was overwhelmed by it all. When I saw Seurat I was dazzled. When I saw Monet I could have wept.” Yet, even in these luminous recollections, Chagall cautions that it is not art that inspires great art but immersion in the world. “Theory and technique have not enabled me to advance one step. I owe everything to life.”
Our indolent days in Paris ended abruptly when Pauline fell ill. After consulting a gynecologist we were advised to return to England, where she could receive free treatment under the National Health Service. Within twelve hours of flying back to London, Pauline underwent an operation in Middlesex Hospital for the removal of an ovarian cyst, and she was found to be pregnant. While she recuperated in hospital and we rethought our plans, I imposed on the hospitality of our friends Alex and Meg, who only a few weeks before had sent us on our way, not expecting to see us again for at least a year.
One afternoon, I came back from visiting Pauline to find Alex, Meg, and several of their friends sitting in the kitchen with cans of beer and looking as though they had just received bad news. “Come on in,” Alex said. “There’s a problem you might help us solve.”
I was introduced to Matt, Jay, and Jay’s wife and child. They all shared a house in Swiss Cottage with a guy called Andy. Andy had suffered some kind of mental breakdown; they had panicked, not knowing whether to call a doctor or ambulance or simply wait for Andy to come to his senses. In the end they had driven to East Finchley to ask Alex and Meg for advice.
“Where’s Andy now?” I asked.
Matt said that Andy had locked himself in his room.
I urged that we drive back to the house immediately. I was not impressed by any of them. Jay took an aggressive stance, saying they should get Andy to move out. Matt was in a daze. “We just want to make the scene again,” he said. “We want him to be the real Andy again.” Jay said Andy might trash the house or even kill himself. And he was concerned that if the police or paramedics were called they would find evidence of drug use in the house, and everyone would be incriminated.
As we climbed the steps to the front door, I was as nervous as anyone. The others stood behind me as I rang the doorbell. Without any explicit negotiation it had been decided that I was best equipped to handle the situation.
Andy opened the door with an inane grin on his face.
I felt like George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant”—the expectations of Andy’s friends behind me, Andy grinning roguishly in front of me, the burden of what to do falling squarely on my shoulders. I introduced myself and asked Andy if we could talk somewhere in private.
I didn’t know what to expect. As Andy led the way upstairs, the others remained downstairs, talking (so Alex told me later) about the Rolling Stones, how to procure the best weed, anything but Andy’s plight.
Andy sat on the edge of his bed. I took a chair nearby and listened attentively as he told me about this organization he and the other guys had got going. It was called J.A.M.—the initials of Jay, Matt, and Andy. He then explained that my name was compatible with this acronym. MIKE—the M corresponded with the M for Matt, then I, Kay, and Ego. I warily asked who Kay was. Kay was a friend of Brenda’s. Brenda was a Rhodesian girlfriend who had married another guy. B for Britain, where they were lived together and were happy, R for Rhodesia, and the END of A for Andy. As he rambled on, sharing his word salad with me (Wother, for example, was a portmanteau word, combining mother and wife) I tried to get the hang of his impenetrable logic. And Andy did his best to guide me, using such cryptic phrases as “Mental guts hanging out,” and “Skeleton becomes exoskeleton.” I must have listened to Andy for an hour and a half before I felt confident enough to broach with him the possibility of seeking help and to assure him that I would make all the phone calls, ensure that he was treated well, and accompany him to the hospital.
I never saw Andy again. And within ten days of Pauline’s discharge from hospital we were on our way to Sierra Leone, this time by air—on a dilapidated DC8 that had a plaque on one of the bulkheads that read This Philippine Airlines DC8 flew nonstop from Tokyo, Japan, to Miami, Florida, a distance of 8705 statute miles, in 13 hours and 52 minutes, establishing a world distance record, Feb. 22, 1962. It made me think of Andy’s schizophasia, and it brought to mind the way we deploy words magically to echo events, create semblances of order in a sea of chaos, and give the impression that we actually grasp the hidden meaning of the world in which we move, ships that pass each other in the night, or aircraft climbing above the pack ice of cloud into air so cold and rarified that if we were exposed to it we would not survive. Would the language of anthropology prove any different, or would it also be little more than another form of sorcery, restating the obvious in a nebulous language, writing more and more about less and less, losing touch with reality, confusing words and things, an arcane technique for consoling lost souls that the world was indeed within their grasp?
In Sierra Leone, where only a minority of people could read or write, some of the only text you saw outside Freetown was on the cabs of trucks or the washstrakes of canoes, succinct pleas or hopeful signs that off ered the Western visitor glimpses into local preoccupations. God is Great... Justice... Nar God Go Gree [God Willing]... Look For Me... Loose You Face [Cheer Up!]... Judgment Day Is Coming... No Justice for the Poor... Power Vision... Patience Is a Virtue.
I used the last of these slogans in my first essay at ethnographic writing—an exploration of the magical power of words, and of the stoicism and patience so often characteristic of those living in the world’s poorest societies.
It is not unusual for anthropologists entering the field for the first time to wind up in the company of people who have been marginalized in their own communities. So it was for me. Linguistically inept, socially disoriented, anomalous in appearance, and possessed by questions the point of which no one could grasp, it was inevitable that I would end up with Mamina Yegbe.
He was at least seventy—small, spry, and always, it seemed to me, slightly bemused. Though my field assistant warned me that Mamina Yegbe had lost his marbles, and tried to dissuade me from setting too much store by what he told me, I felt at ease in the old man’s company and often sought him out at the town chief’s house near the Kabala market, buying him packets of tobacco in gratitude for his tolerance of my stilted Kuranko.
“The world began in Mande,” Mamina Yegbe said, alluding to the great fourteenth century empire that had dominated the West Sudan. “But yesterday and today are not the same. Whatever sun shines, that is the sun in which you have to dry yourself. We are now in the period of the white man’s