Authors: Charles Larson

Under African Skies (29 page)

BOOK: Under African Skies

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(BORN 1964) ZIMBABWE

Since the early 1990s, Yvonne Vera has been widely identified as one of southern Africa's major women writers. She began her writing career with the publication of a novel,
Without a Name
(1991), short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Award (Africa Region). That work was followed by a collection of short stories,
Why Don't You Carve Other Animals
(1992), and two novels,
Nehanda
(1993) and
Milk and Moon
(1996). Her fiction has been praised for its haunting portraits of women who must come to grips with the disturbing realities of their pasts.

Vera was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. After attending local schools, she continued her work at the University of York, in Toronto, Canada. In her short story “Crossing Boundaries,” she passionately describes the inner conflict of many internationals today, though the following statement also applies to the peripatetic contemporary writer: “The exiled soul insists on finding a connection between moments and histories, on securing a promise from the future that there shall be compensation. The banished wanderer insists on narrating, and on situating solutions that have been evaded by the past. Caught between memory and dreaming, the hopeful exile weaves a comforting performance out of a tale of agony.”

Yvonne Vera has completed a doctorate at York University.

WHY DON'T YOU CARVE OTHER ANIMALS

He sits outside the gates of the Africans-Only hospital, making models out of wood. The finished products are on old newspapers on the ground around him. A painter sits to his right, his finished work leaning against the hospital fence behind them. In the dense township, cars screech, crowds flow by, voices rise, and ambulances speed into the emergency unit of the hospital, their flashing orange light giving fair warning to oncoming traffic. Through the elephants he carves, and also the giraffes, with oddly slanting necks, the sculptor brings the jungle to the city. His animals walk on the printed newspaper sheets, but he mourns that they have no life in them. Sometimes in a fit of anger he collects his animals and throws them frenziedly into his cardboard box, desiring not to see their lifeless forms against the chaotic movement of traffic which flows through the hospital gates.

“Do you want that crocodile? It's a good crocodile. Do you want it?” A mother coaxes a little boy who has been crying after his hospital visit. A white bandage is wrapped tight around his right arm. The boy holds his arm with his other hand, aware of the mother's attention, which makes him draw attention to his temporary deformity. She kneels beside him and looks into his eyes, pleading.

“He had an injection. You know how the children fear the needle,” the mother informs the man. She buys the crocodile, and hands it to the boy. The man watches one of his animals go, carried between the little boy's tiny fingers. His animals have no life in them, and the man is tempted to put
them back in the box. He wonders if the child will ever see a moving crocodile, surrounded as he is by the barren city, where the only rivers are the tarred roads.

A man in a white coat stands looking at the elephants, and at the man who continues carving. He picks a red elephant, whose tusk is carved along its body, so that it cannot raise it. A red elephant? The stranger is perplexed, and amused, and decides to buy the elephant, though it is poorly carved and cannot lift its tusk. He will place it beside the window in his office, where it can look out at the patients in line. Why are there no eyes carved on the elephant? Perhaps the paint has covered them up.

The carver suddenly curses.

“What is wrong?” the painter asks.

“Look at the neck of this giraffe.”

The painter looks at the giraffe, and the two men explode into uneasy laughter. It is not easy to laugh when one sits so close to the sick.

The carver wonders if he has not carved some image of himself, or of some afflicted person who stopped and looked at his breathless animals. He looks at the cardboard box beside him and decides to place it in the shade, away from view.

“Why don't you carve other animals? Like lions and chimpanzees?” the painter asks. “You are always carving giraffes and your only crocodile has been bought!” The painter has had some influence on the work of the carver, lending him the paints to color his animals. The red elephant was his idea.

“The elephant has ruled the forest for a long time, he is older than the forest, but the giraffe extends his neck and struts above the trees, as though the forest belonged to him. He eats the topmost leaves, while the elephant spends the day rolling in the mud. Do you not find it interesting? This struggle between the elephant and the giraffe, to eat the topmost leaves in the forest?” The ambulances whiz past, into the emergency unit of the Africans-Only hospital.

The painter thinks briefly, while he puts the final touches on an image of the Victoria Falls which he paints from a memory gathered from newspapers and magazines. He has never seen the Falls. The water must be blue, to give emotion to the picture, he thinks. He has been told that when the water is shown on a map, it has to be blue, and that indeed when there is a lot of it, as in the sea, the water looks like the sky. So he is generous in his depiction, and shocking blue waves cascade unnaturally over the rocky precipice.

“The giraffe walks proudly, majestically, because of the beautiful tapestry that he carries on his back. That is what the struggle is about. Otherwise, they are equals. The elephant has his long tusk to reach the leaves and the giraffe has his long neck.”

He inserts two lovers at the corner of the picture, their arms around each other as they stare their love into the blue water. He wants to make the water sing to them. So he paints a bird at the top of the painting, hovering over the falls, its beak open in song. He wishes he had painted a dove, instead of this black bird which looks like a crow.

The carver borrows some paint and puts yellow and black spots on the giraffe with the short neck. He has long accepted that he cannot carve perfect animals, but will not throw them away. Maybe someone, walking out of the Africans-Only hospital, will seek some cheer in his piece. But when he has finished applying the dots, the paint runs down the sides of the animal, and it looks a little like a zebra.

“Why do you never carve a dog or a cat? Something that city people have seen. Even a rat would be good, there are lots of rats in the township!” There is much laughter. The painter realizes that a lot of spray from the falls must be reaching the lovers, so he paints off their heads with a red umbrella. He notices suddenly that something is missing in the picture, so he extends the lovers' free hands, and gives them some yellow ice cream. The picture is now full of life.

“What is the point of carving a dog? Why do you not paint dogs and cats and mice?” The carver has never seen the elephant or the giraffe that he carves so ardently. He picks up a piece of unformed wood.

Will it be a giraffe or an elephant? His carving is also his dreaming.

â1992

VÃ©ronique Tadjo

(BORN 1955) IVORY COAST

In her critical study,
Francophone African Women Writers: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence
(1994), Irene Assiba d'Almeida claims that VÃ©ronique Tadjo's groundbreaking first novel,
Au Vol d'oiseau (As the Crow Flies),
is “one of the , most original pieces of Francophone writing, and one that defies easy classification. It is surely a âtext' in the primary meaning of the word, that is, âsomething woven.' Tadjo's cloth is patterned from ninety-two independent yet related pieces, most accurately described as vignettes, that can stand on their own or be put together to form an immense appliquÃ© representing an African social reality. The vignettes are written mainly in prose, but Tadjo's language is never far from poetry, and here it shows her ability to use very simple words to create a superb poetic prose.”

VÃ©ronique Tadjo was born in Paris in 1955, and she grew up in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, where she attended local schools. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Abidjan, followed by a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris, also in English. In 1983, she attended Howard University, in Washington, D.C., on a Fulbright research scholarship. She taught at the University of Abidjan during the early 1980s, and in 1994 moved to Nairobi with her husband, a journalist.

Tadjo's initial publications were poems, collected in the volume
LatÃ©rite
in 1984. In addition to several children's books, she has had two collections of short fiction published:
La Chanson de la Vie (1989)
and
Le Royaume Aveugle
(1990). “The Magician and the Gir!”âtranslated by the authorâis from
Au Vol d'oiseau
, published in Paris in 1992.

Asked to comment on her writing, Tadjo responded: “I write because I want to understand the world I am living in, and because I want to communicate with others my experience of what it is to be living in Africa today. I use my eyes like a camera, trying to record everything, from the most personal emotions to the major crises like wars, death, and AIDS. When asked what my novels are about, I usually sigh heavily and say, âAbout life,' because I cannot explain it in any other way. I am interested in life in its entirety, and this is why I have an aversion to giving names to my characters. I want the readers to see them as human beings first of all. And these human beings are faced with challenges and struggles they must overcome if they want to retain their humanity in the unfavourable context of an African society in crisis.”

THE MAGICIAN AND THE GIRL

Translated from the French by the author

He was a magician of great power and of renowned beauty. His knowledge of secrets knew no boundaries.

People came from all over the world to meet him. It was said he could do anything he wanted. People believed he had the formula for eternal happiness, and he himself claimed to possess it. “Happiness,” he would explain, “is the absence of happiness. Do you know how to walk with your eyes shut? Can you sleep forever? Do you master silence?”

People were amazed. They could not comprehend the meaning of his words. “Happiness is love, money, or power,” they declared. By coming to him, they expected to acquire one or the other. Unfortunately, they didn't get anything from him.

As a result, a lot of people were disappointed. They went back to their countries and told their friends that the man was a fraud. “Can you imagine?” they said. “We waited for days on end to have the chance to talk to him, and all for absolutely nothing.”

Others, however, decided to stay close to him in the hope of discovering his secrets. They were probably very unhappy because they had nowhere else to go. They depended entirely on him. If he raised his arm, they immediately tried to analyze the meaning of his gesture. They organized conferences and round tables. They worked hard to grasp the deep significance behind all his movements. Whether he scratched his head, coughed, yawned,
or cracked his fingers, the disciples took note of it at once. Some even made drawings of him.

They did so because the man never answered questions.

The girl arrived right in the middle of an evening of debate. The magician had just gone to bed and the disciples were sitting in a circle, discussing the significance of his many yawns:

“The master yawned twenty times.”

“No! Twenty-one, I counted!”

A brouhaha ensued and a new debate exploded.

The girl came from a family of magicians. Her father was a magician and her mother had extraordinary powers. She stayed at the back of the room and listened to each one of them. Then she decided to take a chance.

The following morning, she sat in the middle of the floor, crossed her legs, and summoned all the vital energies into herself. She closed her eyes. When she felt that she was ready, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked. The magician was standing right in front of her, watching. She waited.

He held out his hand. “What do you want?” he asked her. “Why are you here?”

“I don't know. I am very confused.”

“You look happy, though. Your face is radiant and your energy attracts people. If you fail, you will lose what you already have.”

“I want to try. I do not know the nature of my joy. It comes and goes. Nothing seems to stay. Everything changes and I am caught in a whirl. I have lost the difference between dream and reality.”

There was a moment of silence. Then the magician smiled at her and said: “I understand. Follow me, but do not ask any questions.”

They entered a maze. The girl remained at his side. She did not know where they were going, and it was obvious she would never be able to find her way back alone. It frightened her a little.

They arrived in a room lined with thick curtains. She wondered if there were windows behind them. The atmosphere was peaceful. She noticed the bareness of the place. There was no decoration.

The man came close to her, put his arms over her shoulders, and kissed her.

Later on, she ran her fingers over the naked skin of the man who had made love to her as only a wizard could do. She stroked the nape of his
neck, the deep curve of his back, and his thighs. She could feel each cell, each atom pulsating. He was sleeping in silence.

She parted from him, laid her hands on his forehead, and opened his skull. What she saw inside frightened her. It was a desert of sadness and solitude. It looked like a battlefield. There were trenches and shell craters. Corpses covered the ground. She regretted having come and with a heavy heart she started going away, when, in the distance, she spotted a lake and, beyond that, a plain on which the grass seemed green and smiling. The earth there was rich.

She closed his skull and fell asleep.

From that time on, she spent her days devising a means of reaching the valley which spread in the horizon of his mind. She wanted to roll in the grass, smell the strong scent of the wet soil, the warm and reassuring soil. It had become her obsession.

She was with the magician day and night. To avoid his constant yawning, she told him stories that, very often, she invented on the spot. She enjoyed making him burst into long laughter, his head thrown back, his neck bare and vulnerable. But what she feared most were his thick and unfathomable silences which echoed in her head like the stampeding of wild horses.

She decided to get into his skull again. However, before starting the final journey, she had to prepare herself carefully. She had to be cautious. She would have to use all her powers.

So she cracked an egg, washed her face three times, and drew close to the man who was sleeping. She laid her hands on his forehead and opened his skull.

She walked with great care but ripped her dress on thorns and hurt herself when she fell into a trap. Nevertheless, she successfully avoided the shells buried in the ground and managed to hold her breath against the smell of putrefied bodies. In the end, she reached the lake. By then, she was terribly hot and thirsty. She sat on the bank and drank some of the clear water. A light breeze was blowing. On the other side, the valley extended as far as the eye could see.

When she had regained her strength, she took a deep breath and dived.

In the bed, the magician stirred. He tossed about in his sleep and then abruptly opened his eyes. He looked around the room and after a while jumped out of the sheets. The girl had disappeared. He called her name at the entrance to the maze.

The girl was being pulled down to the bottom of the lake by a superior
force. She was aware of sinking deeper and deeper. Water was getting into her mouth, her ears, her nose. She could see the algae dancing. She couldn't call out.

She could only think of the shore.

â1992

BOOK: Under African Skies

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