Kruse's Keys: Read "James" to Hear Jim's Perspective on the those Hucklberry Finn Adventures

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2024,  2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Percival Everett's novel, "James," is an incredibly imaginative retelling of Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" that boldly centers the narrative on the character of Jim. More than just a new perspective, it's a searing indictment of the institution of slavery and a powerful reminder of the terror of everyday life for enslaved people. Through Jim's narrative, the reader is forced to confront evil in all its iterations.

One of the most striking, and chillingly humorous, aspects of the novel involves Jim's "language lessons." He teaches the children "slave speak" because, as he explains, "white folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don't disappoint them." He reviews the overarching principles with the kids:

• No eye contact

• Never speak first

• Always let whites name the trouble

• Give whites the opportunity to correct you

While much of Jim’s internal dialogue is tongue-in-cheek, it's also a deadly serious survival and coping strategy. These lessons are designed to prevent the slightest external slip of the tongue, which could easily lead to painful death or torture. This ever-present danger brings a profound seriousness to the "adventure" upon which Jim embarks—which, spoiler alert, is more of a harrowing marathon for freedom.

While Jim is the principal character, the novel retains much of Twain's stinging satire. Jim often depends on the young white child (i.e., Tom Sawyer) for his very survival at several junctures, precisely because no one would ever believe a Black man would be out on his own during that period. Yet, it is Jim’s heart—for Tom and, more importantly, for the family he leaves behind—that truly shines. He grapples with the lunacy of the system into which he is born without losing faith in himself or hope for the seemingly impossible.

For an author as prolific as Percival Everett, "James" feels like a magnum opus of sorts—perhaps even a catharsis. If not a total cleansing of the soul, then at least an unburdening of the anger, outrage, and generational injustice that he would argue make up the Black experience in America. His acknowledgments section sums it up best, adapting a well-known Twain quote: "Heaven for the climate; hell for my long-awaited lunch with Mark Twain."

Key Quotes:

Quotes: 

23 'Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient." 

23 'the better [whites] feel, the safer we are.

27 Judge rules he can't indict on a slave burned to death b/c it was a mob that

did it... 

35 "But where does a slave put anger?... the real source of our rage had to go without address"

Kruse's Key: Read "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois" Because It Just May Be The Great American Novel

Acclaimed poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ soaring 800-page debut (!) novel (Kirkus prize for fiction finalist) The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois can also be read as a history of the United States in Georgia.  Over the span of 200 years, she unearths the history of a fictional family beginning with the native American tribe originally living in Chicasetta (The Place-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Tall-Trees at the time).  From there we see the intersections, overlaps and violent collisions with the Europeans–later Americans–all bringing with them African slaves who lived in a constant state of tension, terror, and longing.

The people who lived in The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees knew much about the Seminoles, because the Seminoles had once been a part of the Creek people before they had broken off to form their own nation. And the Seminoles gave sanctuary to Negroes, taking them into their villages. They mated with Negroes, too.

It's to Jeffers’ credit that she peels back the layers of this family’s history to its origins in both Africa and to the indigenous people living in North America.  She lays bare the roots of America’s founding:

For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. 

In graphic, painful detail the reader sees the “sowing” of successive generations in Chicasetta.  The culture of rape, assault, and abuse turns one stomach–I had to put down the book many times in disgust and horror.  While this is fiction, it’s clear that Jeffers  is drawing on the 15 years she spent researching original source archival documents for her 2020 Age of Phillis (longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry).  Using the modern day descendent of these collisions in the person of Ailey Garfield, the author records her life from birth through her pursuit of a doctorate in history.  In the Age of Phillis, Jeffers examined and corrected the record of the life of Phillis Wheatley–an 18th century poet–the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry.  Previous to Jeffers’ book, all that was known of Wheatley’s life came from what a white woman (purported to be a relative of the woman who owned Wheatley) wrote 50 years after her death.  

Much as Jeffers labored in researching Phillis Wheatley’s life, so Ailey labors in uncovering her own family’s history.  Along the way, addiction, sexual abuse, and racism threaten to unmoor her but it is her parents and family that keep her tethered as she holds on to sacrament that is family.  The novel’s strengths rests in the masterful way that Jeffers tells a story not just about one family but also about a piece of land, and also about Africa, and also about America, and also about the African American struggle for freedom, and also about the civil rights movement, and also about what it means to be a black woman in America. 

Ever since 1868 when novelist John William DeForest coined the term the “Great American Novel”--there has been much debate over which novel should bear the moniker.  Critics and scholars argue about esteemed titles from To Kill a Mockingbird to American Psycho to The Great Gatsby to Moby Dick to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Invisible Man to Blood Meridian. There will always be debate about this because even the term “The Great American Novel” is impossible to define because it must not only capture the scope of America on the micro and macro level, it must also be personal but also removed, it must encompass both the greatest things about this country but also its cancers.  One would be hard pressed to deny that The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois does all of these things–it is a novel of but also’s–it refuses to tell only one story–it strives instead to tell every story.  And who better to have written the “The Great American Novel” than a poet?***  

Because what is America but poetry? 

Something sometimes metered

in perfect rhyming syllables,

leaping

other times and 

Frac

TURED

In tortured mispalld guttural gasps

But always sharp as a steeled knife

As able to slip into our ribs 

Sink into our hearts

As it is to shave aways the callouses of 

Of our differences.

Jeffer’s Ailey endures.  She persists–full of self doubt and accumulated blows–imperfect but buoyant–she strives to triumph.  

Ailey rises on the backs 

No–the wings of her ancestors who fought

across gritted striped generations

The matriarch arriving in chains from Africa for whom Jeffers writes:

She was owned, but her memories were not.

***I wrote this last paragraph on Love Songs as The Great American Novel BEFORE reading the Kirkus review on it

Looking for book ideas? Check out our 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 reading lists!

Related Reading:

My review of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi.  

My review of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  

My review of The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  

My review of Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward.

My review of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Ahktar

My review of Seasons of the Shadow by Leonara Miano.  This novel explores slavery’s collision with a village in Cameroon.

My Kindle Highlights for Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

“Violence and the Social Compact” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Atlantic article)

The Lynching of Claude Neal.  PBS article is here.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. 

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to Present

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Key quotes:

Location: 150

For the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained. More white men would come and begin to covet. And they would drag along the Africans they had enslaved. The white men would sow their misery among those who shook their chains. These white men would whip and work and demean these Africans.

Location: 172

The people who lived in The-Place-in-the-Middle-of-the-Tall-Trees knew much about the Seminoles, because the Seminoles had once been a part of the Creek people before they had broken off to form their own nation. And the Seminoles gave sanctuary to Negroes, taking them into their villages. They mated with Negroes, too.

Location: 383

And then the treaties, the agreements between these intruders and the people, all of which would be broken, and the land that would be taken—and taken again. There was the Treaty of Savannah in 1733. The Treaty of Coweta in 1739. The Treaty of Augusta in 1763. Ten years later, a second treaty in that same place. The Treaty of New York in 1790, and the realization that our land would

Location: 396

The Treaty of Washington in 1805, and our land was no longer what the people called it. Now the white men called us “Georgia.”

Location: 987

Yet battle was different when it occurred on paper and in assaults on the mind. The white men—the Americans—wanted everything and did not respect the ways of the people.

Location: 1,987

The light-skinned woman was a signare, a woman of English and African blood who’d been given by her family as a wife to an Englishman for as long as he stayed in Africa. In this small district, this woman was the only one of her kind, but closer to the coast, there was an entire community of signares and their families. In-between women who were neither true wives nor concubines. They spoke two languages, Wolof and English, or sometimes, Mandinka and English, but were infidels who had left aside Allah and clung to the skinny Jesus that hung on a cross. Like their white fathers and husbands, the signares traded in slaves.

Location: 2,136

She was owned, but her memories were not.

Location: 3,523

To paraphrase the great poet Sterling A. Brown: ‘More Negroes have been ruined by Harvard than by bad gin.’ Only he didn’t say ‘Negroes,’ if you catch my drift.”

Location: 4,255

Before he allowed Geoff to take his great-niece on their northbound journey, Uncle Root gave him a copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book, so they could find diners, hotels, and boardinghouses that would serve them, once they traveled out of family territory.

Location: 4,577

Born in the City, her husband wasn’t familiar with the taste of healthy, green food you had picked only hours before. The sight of earth not taken over by concrete. That in darkness, if there was no trouble, the only sounds came from small beings. He didn’t know that you could ache for a place, even when it had hurt you so badly.

Location: 4,699

“Are the folks down home calling themselves something besides Negro?” “Like what, baby?” “Like, Black?” “Why they want to do something like that? That ain’t a nice thing to call nobody.”

Location: 7,336

How to explain what it was like to be Black to this white woman who wasn’t even southern? That a Black child didn’t have a right to hate their Black mama? Hatred was not allowed against your parents, no matter what had happened. You had to forgive your parents for whatever they had done even if they’d never apologized, because everybody had to stay together. So much had been lost already to Black folks.

Location: 8,737

Then there came warriors, such as Tecumseh of the Shawnee, a tribe in the north of the continent. And there were prophets, such as Tecumseh’s brother Tenskwatawa. Together these men were the Shooting Star and the Open Door, and they rode down to our land to unite our people of the south with our people of the north. Tecumseh held a weapon and Tenskwatawa held a dream, and the dreaming brother’s sights led him to tell the Creek, unite against the white man. 

And our people kept fighting each other, and an American murderer was able to win the Red Stick War. His name was Andrew Jackson and he and his soldiers murdered many hundreds of Creeks, so that his name would become a curse among our people. Indian Killer, he would be called, but somehow he would become a hero among white men. In a new century, statues of him would be built, and his face would be printed upon money.

Location: 8,751

And in time, Andrew Jackson the Indian Killer became the president of his white man’s nation. And in 1830, this murderer signed the Indian Removal Act, after which the Creek people’s hope turned to the mud after a heavy rain, for this law decreed that all Creek people were ordered to leave their homes permanently.

Location: 11,631 On post-reconstruction reality for “freed” slaves

They were frightened of being lynched, now that Black bodies no longer were worth valuable currency on the slave market. 

Kruse's Keys: Read "Between the World and Me" to See the Intersection of the American Dream and the Black Body

I first became aware of Ta-Nehisi Coates when someone posted an excerpt from one of his Atlantic articles in which he talks about “guardrails” in marriage. Coates is a secular-atheist so there’s lots I don’t agree with him on but there was some real wisdom in his article:

“I've been with my spouse for almost 15 years. In those years, I’ve never been with anyone but the mother of my son. But that's not because I am an especially good and true person. In fact, I am wholly in possession of an unimaginably filthy and mongrel mind. But I am also a dude who believes in guard-rails, as a buddy of mine once put it. I don't believe in getting "in the moment" and then exercising will-power. I believe in avoiding "the moment." I believe in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not; why I am going to a party, and why I am not. I believe that the battle is lost at Happy Hour, not at the hotel. I am not a "good man." But I am prepared to be an honorable one.”

When I came across his memoir “Between the World and Me” I decided to give it a try. I realize that Coates is a controversial writer (for a lot of white people) and I may not agree with everything he writes but none of us got any wiser by reading only those with whom we agree.

“Between the World and Me” is a love letter from a father to a son written with the urgency of a man who knows he may perish at any moment. Coates writes beautifully as he recalls his youth and experiences as a father. His memoir reflects serious inner self-examination as he seeks to create a blueprint for his son to survive and possibly even thrive in a world that Coates argues is stacked against him from a historical, institutional, and psycho cultural perspective.

As Coates warns his son to keep his guard up, he adds, “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.” This observation reminded me of Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns” which I wrote about it here. That book on the great northward migration of blacks from the Jim Crow south points out that 77 years ago killing blacks was not a crime in ⅓ of the United States. Both observations point to a corporate (but also deeply personal) memory that white people just don’t have and that I never thought about it prior to reading these books. But it puts much of what Coates in perspective and should give the reader pause in considering the author’s hypothesis that the system created by the “dreamers” (all the white people that benefit from an American society designed to make their lives better and easier, exclusively) has always sought the disembodiment of the black body. He adds: “Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.”

While his hypothesis is one which inspires much heated debate--his writing is strongest as he make personal the stories of murdered black youths, in particular, that of his Howard classmate Prince Jones: “Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright — that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.”

Overall, though, Coates' atheist outlook makes much of his advice ring rather bleak.  He talks of hope in such limiting terms--instead valuing "struggle" since there's nothing beyond this life.  That's my personal take as a Christian, of course, and I would add that Coates doesn't belittle those with faith in his writing but in his strident atheist stance one can't help but get the idea that he actually is searching...for something or someone.  

See our 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.
Related Reading:



Key Quotes:

11 “And I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay.” Coates on why he did not console his son’s heartbreak after Michael Browns killers were acquitted.

51 “Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.” Coates on his discovery of poetry as a distiller of one’s beliefs and truths.

61 “But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else--that love can be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.” Coates on love as first discovered at Howard70 “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.” Coates’ observation on black history.

71 “These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.” Coates outlook on life in which he states is not to be confused with despair.

81-2 “Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright — that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.” Coates grappling with the death of Prince Jones. This is a powerful personalized reflection on death that rescues it from being a mere headline.

97 “I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always costs us more.” Coates on his reaction to an older white woman who pushed his son.

113 “You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear a hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.” Admonition from a murdered black boy’s mother to Coates’ son.

114 “Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.” Coates on the persistent threat to the “body” of black men and women.

125 “How much I would have loved to have a past apart from fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you.” Coates’ revelation upon visiting Paris and seeing another reality.

127 “Do you remember how your eyes lit up like candles when we stood out on Saint-Germain-des-Pres? That look was all that I lived for.” Beautiful writing from Coates as he remembers he and his son together in Paris.

131 “Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner?” Coates on the unanswered, unaddressed questions following Michael Brown’s death.

Key Takeaways:

29 Coates speaking of writing as not merely organizing sentences for effect but as a means of investigation.

36 Coates speaks to Malcolm’s appeal. For the white outsider this is a great distillation of his movement and philosophy--”Malcolm never lied…[he] spoke like a man who was free.”

69 The idea of the the black body and Coates’ admonition that his son must guard his body as a sacred object--never giving it away willingly.

90 Any guidance to be “twice as good” really means to accept half as much as steals away ones self-worth.


110 The successful retired black couples are to be lauded but must also be acknowledged as survivors against the backdrop of countless others who didn’t make it.

110 Coates drafts a great takedown of the notion of “black on black crime”. He argues that the term itself is a product of the “dreamers” who are basically people “who believes themselves white” and benefit from the institutional and societal construct of the US. I believe it’s also a critique of the notion of the American dream as understood by most whites.

125 In his time in another country Coates yearns for a “past apart from fear”, that is, memories associated with freedom.

For Further Study

45 “Destruction of Black Civilization” by Chancellor William

106 Thavolia Glymph

A Bend in the River: Loved it Because this is one of those novels that immerses you into the life of a person and place (DRC, 1979)

A Bend in the River (DRC)
 

Loved it Because: This is one of those novels that immerses you into the life of a person and place--in this case an Indian Muslim transplant named Salim who wanders from his 'home' on the east coast (of Africa) to the DRC river town of Kisangani during the colonial independence era. As the week passed and I waded deeper into this tale, I found myself thinking about the characters during idle moments--worried about the fate of Salim and Metty as they rode the ups and downs of Mobuto's rule in the growing town.  It's one of those rare books that spreads its tentacles around you, the reader, and refuses to release you.

I came across this novel through a recommendation from a Foreign Area Officer colleague.  I am on a two-year quest to read a work of English fiction on every country in Africa (preferably by an author native to that country--although the 'native' requirement wasn't met in this case).  Naipaul never identifies the town, country, or 'Big Man' ruler by their names but his detailed narrative makes it blatantly apparent as to their identities.  

I am sure that critics like Africa is a Country were not happy to have another foreigner writing about Africa with such a detailed eye but with an author as gifted as Naipaul you'd hope they'd cut him some slack. Positing that only authors native to a country can write about it effectively comes across as not only arrogant but also as selfish.  Case in point, Adichie's recent short story on the Trump family was one of the best pieces of satire on the American political system that I've read in a long time.  

My favorite part of this book, is when Salim discovers how shallow the writing is of Raymond's, the much revered white africanist-turned-presidential confidant-turned visiting lecturer-turned pariah.  As Salim's pores through the academic's articles he sees that his analysis rests almost entirely on reporting from local newspaper articles.  He's a bit flabbergasted as he observes: 

Raymond seemed to have taken them very seriously. I couldn’t get over that, because from my experience on the coast I knew that newspapers in small colonial places told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were formal. They handled big people—businessmen, high officials, members of our legislative and executive councils—with respect. They left out a lot of important things—often essential things—that local people would know and gossip about.

The merit and accuracy of local newspapers is a notion that rings incredibly true for anyone who has lived overseas.  Really, what Naipaul is getting at is the difference between perceived and actual/true knowledge.  

He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh; he had nothing like Father Huismans’s instinct for the strangeness and wonder of the place. Yet he had made Africa his subject. He had devoted years to those boxes of documents in his study that I had heard about from Indar. Perhaps he had made Africa his subject because he had come to Africa and because he was a scholar, used to working with papers, and had found this place full of new papers.
For any former graduate student this is an especially sweet section as one finds oneself deluged with a shower of reports and studies on tiny segments of people, tribes or times during grad school.  For the reader, this section should be read perhaps as a jab by Naipaul at the academic establishment with which his 'travel writing' no doubt at odds.  Ultimately, the most satisfying part of finishing this story was that it left me with so many questions about the DRC, Mobutu and the ideas of insiders/outsiders within the context of colonization, independence and freedom.  

*One of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.

**See our 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

For further reading:

Paris Review interview with Naipaul

Colonialism in the Congo: Conquest, Conflict and Commerce--Watson Institute

A New King for the Congo

For further research:
- DRC and the Big Man (Mobutu)
- Slavery inside Africa
- The Europeanization of African worth/Colonialization influence on African self-worth (stamp of dhow example)
- Differing notions of the past/history and its importance
- Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi: He approves of the mingling of the people and their bonds of union (motto of Trinidad and Tobago)
- Comparisons with Heart of Darkness
- Treatment of women in Naipaul novels
- Naipaul's other African novels: A Bend in the River, The Masques of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief; In A Free State; Half a Life;  Magic Seeds; 
- Disturbing beating and violence towards Yvette--what's the purpose of this action in the novel?  To make Salim less likable?  Is it emblematic of the author's own attitude toward the fairer sex?

A Bend in the River (Vintage International) by V.S. Naipaul

You have 78 highlighted passages

Last annotated on August 5, 2016

I had treated Zabeth so far as a marchande and a good customer. Now that I knew that in our region she was a person of power, a prophetess, I could never forget it. So the charm worked on me as well.

east coast, and that made the difference. The coast was not truly African. It was an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place, and we who lived there were really people of the Indian Ocean. True

All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans.

Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town.

The slavery of the east coast was not like the slavery of the west coast. No one was shipped off to plantations. Most of the people who left our coast went to Arabian homes as domestic servants. Some became members of the family they had joined; a few became powerful in their own right. To

This was one reason why the trade went on long after it had been outlawed by the European powers; and why, at the time when the Europeans were dealing in one kind of rubber, my grandfather could still occasionally deal in another. This was also the reason why a secret slavery continued on the coast until the other day. The slaves, or the people who might be considered slaves, wanted to remain as they were.

Soon, therefore, the Arabs, or the people who called themselves Arabs, had become indistinguishable from Africans. They barely had an idea of their original civilization. They had the Koran and its laws; they stuck to certain fashions in dress, wore a certain kind of cap, had a special cut of beard; and that was all.

Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them.

Note: interesting observation Edit

But the Europeans could do one thing and say something quite different; and they could act in this way because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilization. It was their great advantage over us. 

To be in Africa you have to be strong. We’re not strong. We don’t even have a flag.”

the Arabian energy that had pushed them into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead.

“Do you know Uganda? A lovely country. Cool, three to four thousand feet up, and people say it’s like Scotland, with the hills.

Rough boards carried the new, roughly lettered names. No one used the new names, because no one particularly cared about them. The wish had only been to get rid of the old, to wipe out the memory of the intruder. It was unnerving, the depth of that African rage, the wish to destroy, regardless of the consequences.

What I had feared would happen on the coast came to pass. There was an uprising; and the Arabs—men almost as African as their servants—had been finally laid low.

father could always claim his child; there were any number of folk sayings that expressed this almost universal African law. 

Yet there was the idea of his importance. It unsettled me—there wasn’t going to be security for anyone in the country—and it unsettled Metty. When you get away from the chiefs and the politicians there is a simple democracy about Africa: everyone is a villager.

But Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away.

that they are malins” He had used the French word, because the English words he might have used—“wicked,” “mischievous,” “bad-minded”—were not right. The people here were malins the way a dog chasing a lizard was malin, or a cat chasing a bird. The people were malins because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey.

He had the “unfinished” face which I have noticed that certain Europeans—but never Arabs or Persians or Indians—have. In these faces there is a baby-like quality about the cut of the lips and the jut of the forehead. It might be that these people were born prematurely; they seem to have passed through some very early disturbance, way back.

An ancient Roman writer had written that out of Africa there was “always something new”—semper aliquid novi. And when it came to masks and carvings, the words were still literally true. 

He explained the second motto of the town for me—the Latin words carved on the ruined monument near the dock gates: Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi. “He approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union”:

At independence the people of our region had gone mad with anger and fear—all the accumulated anger of the colonial period, and every kind of reawakened tribal fear. The people of our region had been much abused, not only by Europeans and Arabs, but also by other Africans; and at independence they had refused to be ruled by the new government in the capital.

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Officials and governments right across the continent were engaged in this ivory trade which they themselves had declared illegal. It made smuggling easy; but I was nervous of getting involved, because a government that breaks its own laws can also easily break you.

The farm didn’t materialize. The Chinese or the Taiwanese didn’t turn up to till the land of the new model African farm; the six tractors that some foreign government had given remained in a neat line in the open and rusted, and the grass grew high about them.

He liked being reminded of this, being remembered from so far back. He said, almost smiling, “I cried a lot? I made a lot of noise?”

was homesick, had been homesick for months. But home was hardly a place I could return to. Home was something in my head. It was something I had lost. 

“It will last as long as your President wants it to last. And no one can tell how long that will be. He’s a strange man. He seems to be doing nothing at all, and then he can act like a surgeon. Cutting away some part he doesn’t like.”

And something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground. That is the way we have to learn to live now. The past is here.” He touched his heart. “It isn’t there.” And he pointed at the dusty road. 

The Domain had been created by the President; for reasons of his own he had called certain foreigners to live there. For us that was enough; it wasn’t for us to question or look too closely.

But now, being with them in the Domain, which in every way was their resort, and being admitted so easily to their life, their world of bungalows and air conditioners and holiday ease, catching in their educated talk the names of famous cities, I swung the other way and began to see how shut in and shabby and stagnant we in the town would have seemed to them. I began to get some sense of the social excitements of life on the Domain, of people associating in a new way, being more open, less concerned with enemies and danger, more ready to be interested and entertained, looking for the human worth of the other man. On the Domain they had their own way of talking about people and events; they were in touch with the world. To be with them was to have a sense of adventure. I thought of my own life and Metty’s;

foreigners and Africans acted and reacted on one another, and everyone became locked in an idea of glory and newness. Everywhere the President’s photograph looked down at us. In the town, in our shops and in government buildings, it was just the photograph of the President, the ruler, something that had to be there. In the Domain the glory of the President brushed off onto all his new Africans.

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but they didn’t ask the really difficult question. Do you know what that is? Whether Africans are peasants. It’s a nonsense question, but big battles are fought about that one.

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There was a ritual I went through whenever I had to clear a difficult consignment through the customs. I filled in the declaration form, folded it over five hundred francs, and handed it to the official in charge. He would—as soon as he had got his subordinates out of the room (and they of course knew why they had been asked to leave the room)—check the notes with his eyes alone. The notes would then be taken; the entries on the form would be studied with exaggerated care; and soon he would say, “C’est bien, Mis’ Salim. Vous êtes en ordre.” Neither he nor I would refer to the bank notes. We would talk only about the details on the declaration form, which, correctly filled, correctly approved, would remain as proof of both our correctness. Yet what had lain at the heart of the transaction would be passed over in silence, and would leave no trace in the records.

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So, in my talks with Indar about Africa—the purpose of his outfit, the Domain, his anxieties about imported doctrines, the danger to Africa of its very newness, first ideas being caught most securely by new minds as sticky as adhesive tape—I felt

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that between us lay some dishonesty, or just an omission, some blank, around which we both had to walk carefully. That omission was our own past, the smashed life of our community. Indar had referred to that at our first meeting that morning in the shop. He said that he had learned to trample on the past. In the beginning it had been like trampling on a garden; later it had become like walking on ground.

The Domain was a hoax. But at the same time it was real, because it was full of serious men (and a few women). Was there a truth outside men? Didn’t men make the truth for themselves? Everything men did or made became real.

Raymond, keeps a low profile, but he runs the whole show here. The President, or the Big Man, as you call him, sent him down here to keep an eye on things. He’s the Big Man’s white man. In all these places there’s someone like that. Raymond’s a historian. They say the President reads everything he writes. That’s the story anyway. Raymond knows more about the country than anyone on earth.”

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said to Indar, “Who is the singer?” He said, “Joan Baez. She’s very famous in the States.” “And a millionaire,” Yvette said.

You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time.

Do you think we will ever get to know the truth about what has happened in Africa in the last hundred or even fifty years? All the wars, all the rebellions, all the leaders, all the defeats?”

“It was long ago,” Raymond said. “In colonial times. I was teaching at a college in the capital. I was doing my historical work. But of course in those days there was no question of publishing.

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What made him unusual—I would even say extraordinary—was the quality of his despair. It wasn’t just a matter of poverty and the lack of opportunity. It went much deeper. And, indeed, to try to look at the world from his point of view was to begin to get a headache yourself.

 ‘I’ve listened to you, and I know that one day the mood of despair will go and you will want to act. What you mustn’t do then is to become involved in politics as they exist. Those clubs and associations are talking shops, debating societies, where Africans posture for Europeans and hope to pass as evolved. They will eat up your passion and destroy your gifts. What I am going to tell you now will sound strange, coming from me. You must join the Defence Force. You won’t rise high, but you will learn a real skill. You will learn about weapons and transport, and you will also learn about men. Once you understand what holds the Defence Force together, you will understand what holds the country together.

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That’s the amazing thing about this man of Africa—this flair, this knowledge of what the people need, and when. 

takes an African to rule Africa—the colonial powers never truly understood that. However much the rest of us study Africa, however deep our sympathy, we will remain outsiders.” The young man, sitting now on a mat with his girl, asked,

said to Indar, “What do you think of what Raymond said?” “Raymond tells a story well. But a lot of what he says is true. What he says about the President and ideas is certainly true. The President uses them all and somehow makes them work together. He is the great African chief, and he is also the man of the people. He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. He’s conservative, revolutionary,

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everything. He’s going back to the old ways, and he’s also the man who’s going ahead, the man who’s going to make the country a world power by the year 2000. I don’t know whether he’s done it accidentally or because someone’s been telling him what to do. But the mish-mash works because he keeps on changing, unlike the other guys. He is the soldier who decided to become an old-fashioned chief, and he’s the chief whose mother was a hotel maid. That makes him everything, and he plays up everything. There isn’t anyone in the country who hasn’t heard of that hotel maid mother.”

They did what they could to make room for me, and that is more than any outsider can say for us. It’s a difference in civilization.

There are times when I feel that Africa will simply have its own way—hungry men are hungry men. And that is when I can get very low.

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Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi. I had long since ceased to reflect on the vainglory of the words. The monument had only become part of the market scene on steamer days. Through that crowd we now began to make our way, accompanied by an old man, feebler than either of us, who had taken possession of Ferdinand’s suitcases.

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In the name of his dead mother, the hotel maid, “the woman of Africa,” as he called her in his speeches, the President had decided to honour as many women as possible; and he had done so by making them government servants, not always with clear duties.

they don’t reply to your letters, it’s because they don’t want to reply. They’re not going to say yes or no. They’re going to say nothing. But

Women make up half the world; and I thought I had reached the stage where there was nothing in a woman’s nakedness to surprise me. But I felt now as if I was experiencing anew, and seeing a woman for the first time. I was amazed that, obsessed with Yvette as I had been, I had taken so much for granted.

The earlier articles, in the foreign magazines, seemed easier. “Riot at a Football Match,” in an American magazine, was about a race riot in the capital in the 1930s that had led to the formation of the first African political club. “Lost Liberties,” in a Belgian magazine, was about the failure of a missionary scheme, in the late nineteenth century, to buy picked slaves from the Arab slave caravans and resettle them in “liberty villages.”

Raymond seemed to have taken them very seriously. I couldn’t get over that, because from my experience on the coast I knew that newspapers in small colonial places told a special kind of truth. They didn’t lie, but they were formal. They handled big people—businessmen, high officials, members of our legislative and executive councils—with respect. They left out a lot of important things—often essential things—that local people would know and gossip about.

History was something dead and gone, part of the world of our grandfathers, and we didn’t pay too much attention to it; even though, among trading families like ours, there were still vague stories—so vague that they didn’t feel real—of European priests buying slaves cheap from the caravans before they got to the depots on the coast. The Africans (and this was the point of the stories) had been scared out of their skins: they thought the missionaries were buying them in order to eat them.

He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh; he had nothing like Father Huismans’s instinct for the strangeness and wonder of the place. Yet he had made Africa his subject. He had devoted years to those boxes of documents in his study that I had heard about from Indar. Perhaps he had made Africa his subject because he had come to Africa and because he was a scholar, used to working with papers, and had found this place full of new papers.

But if women weren’t stupid the world wouldn’t go round.

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Our visitors were becoming increasingly critical. They had a lot to say about the cult of the African madonna. Shrines had been set up—and were being set up—in various places connected with the President’s mother, and pilgrimages to these places had been decreed for certain days. We knew about the cult, but in our region we hadn’t seen too much of

So Maximes failed with us. And it must have been so in other parts of the country as well, because shortly after reporting the great demand for the book, the newspapers dropped the subject.

In events around me—like the publication of the President’s book, and the book march—I looked only to see whether the life I had with Yvette was threatened or was going to go on. And the narrower my world became, the more obsessively I lived in it.

Was I possessed by Yvette? Or was I—like Mahesh with his new idea of what he was—possessed by myself, the man I thought I was with Yvette?

In time it would all go; we would both return to our interrupted lives. That was no tragedy. That certainty of the end—even while the boom slackened and my fifteen dropped to fourteen, and Nazruddin and his uprooted family tried to establish themselves in Canada—was my security.

The African language the President had chosen for his speeches was a mixed and simple language, and he simplified it further, making it the language of the drinking booth and the street brawl, converting himself, while he spoke, this man who kept everybody dangling and imitated the etiquette of royalty and the graces of de Gaulle, into the lowest of the low. And that was the attraction of the African language in the President’s mouth. That regal and musical use of the lowest language and the coarsest expressions was what was holding Metty.

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them.” It was one of his sayings; it meant that stable relationships were not possible here, that there could only be day-to-day contracts between men, that in a crisis peace was something you had to buy afresh every day. His

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She said, “You make me look so good. What will I do without you?” That was a standard courtesy.

Opposites: again this communication by opposites. That woman in the cupboard: that other person outside. That journey out from the Domain: that other journey back. Affection, just before betrayal. And I had been in tears.

said, “Oh, Ali, Ali. Terrible things happened tonight. I spat on her. She made me spit on her.” “People quarrel. After three years a thing doesn’t just end like this.” “Ali, it isn’t that. I couldn’t do anything with her. I didn’t want her, I didn’t want her. That is what I can’t bear. It’s all gone.”

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But it was Europe that gave us the descriptive postage stamps that gave us our ideas of what was picturesque about ourselves. It also gave us a new language. Europe no longer

You would say that he felt that money had made him holy. All rich people are like that, I suppose.

understood now why so many of our later visitors at the Domain found our country, and our awe of the President, comic. What I saw on the road from the airport didn’t seem comic, though. I felt it more as a shriek. I had just come from Europe; I had seen the real competition.

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They take away your shop. They give it to Citizen Théotime. The President made a speech a fortnight back. He said he was radicalizing and taking away everything from everybody. All foreigners.

Radicalization: two days before, in the capital, I had seen the word in a newspaper headline, but I hadn’t paid attention. I had thought of it as just another word; we had so many. Now I understood that radicalization was the big new event.

The revolution had become”—he fumbled for the word—“un pé pourrie. A little rotten. 

This piece of earth—how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this.

It’s bad for everybody. That’s the terrible thing. It’s bad for Prosper, bad for the man they gave your shop to, bad for everybody. Nobody’s going anywhere. We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wants to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they’re losing the place they can run back to. I began to feel the same thing when I was a cadet in the capital. I felt I had been used. I felt I had given myself an education for nothing. I felt I had been fooled. Everything that was given to me was given to me to destroy me. I began to think I wanted to be a child again, to forget books and everything connected with books. The bush runs itself. But there is no place to go to. I’ve been on tour in the villages. It’s a nightmare. All these airfields the man has built, the foreign companies have built—nowhere is safe now.”