The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
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headlights picked out the mosque and the grove of palms beyond it.
“I’m going back to Barawa on Friday,” I said.
Mamina Yegbe made no response.
“I’ll come and see you before I go.”
In the darkness the town gave forth the sounds of its invisible life: a dog yelping, shouts, a radio badly tuned, an inconsolable child crying, a motor scooter spluttering down a potholed lane, the drubbing of an initiation drum.
I drew up outside the house with the broken verandah where Mamina Yegbe lived.
“Ma sogoma yo,” I said, as the old man got down.
Mamina Yegbe stood on the roadside in the glare of the headlights.
“In the old days people were happy,” he said. Then he turned and drifted into the darkness.
Almost all his life, Mamina Yegbe lived under a colonial regime. He had imagined it to be like chieftaincy—a source of order and benevolent power. If the great chief Belikoro could conjure thunderstorms at will and slay his enemies with lightning bolts, then surely the British Crown or the Presidents of Sierra Leone and Guinea could pay him his due and make good what he was owed. The clerks in the D.O.’s office, who ridiculed him so mercilessly were no less in thrall to wishful thinking. Indeed, it was the maddeningly elusive nature of fortune in the post-colonial world that compelled them to perform their derision of Mamina Yegbe so publicly. But it was Mamina Yegbe’s patience that moved me, his imperturbable faith that justice would be done. He reminded me of the so-called millenarian movements or cargo cults that flourished in Melanesia throughout the twentieth century, in which people oft en ceased gardening and gave themselves up to waiting for airplanes or ships that would magically deliver the material possessions that had been withheld from them, either because of some ancestral error or European chicanery. Many people were convinced that literacy held the secret to the white man’s power. Rather than presume writing to be a substitute for speech, letters were regarded as possessing a sui generis efficacy, “a road to the cargo.”1 The strange thing was that anthropologists would write about these mistaken ideas without ever reflecting on the degree to which they shared similar assumptions. For did we not also believe that the arcane language we deployed and the publications that gave us such satisfaction were our roads to renown and remuneration, yet no more enduring or less illusory than the cargo cultists’ fetishistic attitude toward words? Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’”2 by which he meant that “ultimate and sublime values” had retreated into the intimate spheres of religious, family, and artistic existence. Writing poetry or telling stories would be for Weber, I suppose, among the last refuges of the enchanted. In which case, my kinship with Mamina Yegbe was more profound than I realized at the time I knew him, and my work of words no less a sustained magical attempt to compensate for personal inadequacies and to seek re-enchantment in a world where political economy had come to be the academic measure of most things.
EIGHT
Flights of Fancy
WHEN I TOOK A JOB TEACHING ANTHROPOLOGY at a provincial New Zealand University, some of my Cambridge friends warned that I would starve for want of intellectual stimulation and slowly go to seed. I didn’t need to be reminded; I knew that my future depended on publishing abroad and reaching an audience beyond my native shores.
At the University, I generally avoided the faculty club, preferring to buy a sandwich in the student cafeteria, find a quiet spot on the campus, and eat alone. It was a pattern I’d slipped into during my school days, though now it wasn’t shyness that made me keep my own company but the exigencies of writing. I wrote at home every morning before driving to the campus and needed an hour to myself in the middle of the day to take my mind off Africa. But there was always a time lag when I walked about in a daze, jotting down thoughts and images that related to what I had written that morning or planned to write next day. Often I would be startled to realize that I was staring vacantly into space, with only the haziest notion of where I was. I would snap out of my trance to see students walking along the gravel paths, descending the stone steps in the shadow of the great cedars, griping about boring lecturers and onerous assignments, or exchanging gossip about girlfriends, pop songs, and parties. I realized I was living a shadow life, absorbed in Africa, trying to recapture in words the sound and smell and sight of things I might not experience again for many years.
Sometimes it was my colleagues who brought me to my senses. Like the day I was running late for my two o’clock class on the Comparative Study of Myth, and parked my Citroën in a loading zone outside the main building. A week later I received a letter from a “Parking Committee” made up of faculty members, reprimanding me for persistently parking my vehicle in restricted zones. I was asked what gave me the right to act as though I were a law unto myself.
After that I went to the staff club a few times, to put in an appearance and meet people outside my own department. Mostly people talked about television programs or the best wines you could buy locally or the intrigues of various committees they were on. I felt out of place. I was too close to the laterite roads of northern Sierra Leone or too preoccupied by the lecture I had to give on myth. Besides, I didn’t watch television, have much interest in local wines, or sit on committees.
One day, a lecturer from the English Department noticed that I had borrowed Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things from the library. He snidely invited me to explain what it was about. Not realizing that I was expected to dismiss it as bullshit and thereby relieve him of having to read it, I naïvely summarized the argument—that Renaissance thought was characterized by a compulsive search for similitudes and correspondences, but in the early seventeenth century there was a sudden turn from the quest for synthetic resemblances to analytical methods for establishing identity and difference. I then said that I disagreed with Foucault’s view that the earlier paradigm was fully eclipsed by the rise of Enlightenment rationality. In my experience, the work of the imagination, including writing, is always driven by this search for signs, syntheses, auguries, blazons, analogies, and figures. “Ask anyone you know to recall the most memorable moment in his life and I’ll bet he’ll tell you a story about some fateful coincidence, some uncanny and inexplicable event, something that revealed a hidden connection between his life and the life beyond his immediate horizons.”
I can’t recall whether it was on this occasion or another that the talk got round to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Perhaps someone had seen a documentary on television or broached the subject of French wines. In any event, Peter Alcock, who had disapproved of Foucault, now declared that apart from Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupéry had written nothing that excited real interest. I was struck by that phrase, “excited real interest,” because Peter looked as if nothing had excited him for a very long time.
I said I didn’t think Saint-Exupéry should be dismissed lightly, and that Saint-Exupéry had once been my favorite writer. In my late teens I had read everything by him and about him. I still remembered the revelatory impact of Saint-Exupéry’s view that the visible rests in the invisible and that an author’s task is to reveal unseen connections beneath the surfaces of our familiar world. Then, for some reason I still cannot fathom, I launched into an account of Saint-Exupéry’s last years.1
When war was declared in 1939, Saint-Exupéry received orders to report for duty as a flying instructor at Toulouse-Montaudran. When he demanded to be assigned to active duty, he was reluctantly allowed to fly several reconnaissance missions over Germany, and won the Croix de Guerre for his flight to Arras in Belgium in 1940.
After the fall of France, Saint-Exupéry was demobbed. Knowing he could never live in France while it remained occupied, he made his way to America, where he endured two and a half years of isolation and inactivity. In early 1943, he joined a group of Free French sailing with the Americans to North Africa. At Oujda, the French were attached to the American Third Photo Group of the Seventh Army. The squadron was equipped with new P-38 Lightnings—fast, long-range aircraft adapted for strategic photographic reconnaissance. According to regulations, pilots had to be no more than thirty years of age, but an old friend of Saint-Exupéry’s in the French