hanging from the walls to be used as beds and – the only concession to comfort – a shower connected with iron pipes to a reservoir on the roof that was heated by the sun), in that cabin then, there were no mirrors, no pictures, nothing to remind us of the world we’d lived in up until then. A crucifix that my father had hung on the wall, but with no human representation. That’s where I learned to forget. It seems to me that the erasing of my face, and of all the faces around me, dates back to the moment I entered that cabin in Ogoja.
Also dating back to that moment, or resulting directly from it, if you will, is the emergence of bodies. My body, my mother’s body, my brother’s body, the bodies of the young boys in the village with whom I played, the bodies of African women on the paths around the house or at the market by the river. Their stature, their heavy breasts, the shiny skin on their backs. The boys’ penises, their pink, circumcised glands. Faces, no doubt, but like leather masks, hardened, stitched with scars, with ritual markings. Protuberant bellies, navels that looked as if a flat stone had been sewn under the skin. The smell of bodies too, the touch of them, the skin that was not rough, but warm and light, bristling with thousands of hairs. I recall a feeling of extreme closeness, of many bodies all around me, a feeling I had never known before, a feeling that was both new and familiar, one that ruled out fear.
In Africa, the immodesty of bodies was marvellous. It lent perspective, depth, it multiplied sensations, wove a human web around me. It fit in with the Ibo country, the meanderings of the Aiya River, the village huts, their straw-coloured roofs, their earth-coloured walls. It shone out in those names that worked their way inside of me and meant much more than the names of places: Ogoja, Abakaliki, Enugu, Obudu, Baterik, Ogrude, Obubra. It permeated the great wall of the rain forest that stood around us on all sides.
When you’re a child, you don’t use words (and words don’t get used). Back then I was a very long way from adjectives, from nouns. I was incapable of saying, or even thinking: admirable, immense, power. But I could feel it. How the trees with their straight trunks soared up towards the night sky clamped over me, enveloping – as if in a tunnel – the bloody gash of the laterite road leading from Ogoja to Obudu. How acutely I perceived the naked bodies shining with sweat in the village clearings, the large silhouettes of women with children hanging on their hips, all of those things come together to form a coherent whole, free of lies.
I remember entering Obudu quite well: the road emerges from the shadows of the forest into the bright sunlight and leads straight into the village. My father stops the car, he and my mother have to talk to the officials. I am alone in the middle of the crowd, I’m not afraid. Hands are touching me, running along my arms, over my hair, around the brim of my hat. Among all the people milling around me, there is an old woman – well, I didn’t know she was old. I assume it’s her age that I remarked first because she was different from the naked children and the men and the women of Ogoja, dressed more or less in Western clothing. When my mother comes back (perhaps slightly uneasy about the gathering), I motion towards the woman, “What’s wrong with her? Is she sick?” I remember asking my mother that question. The naked body of that woman, full of folds, of wrinkles, her skin sagging like an empty water pouch, her elongated, flaccid breasts hanging down on her stomach, her dull, cracked, greyish skin, it all seems strange to me, but at the same time true. How could I have ever imagined that woman as my grandmother? And I didn’t feel pity, or horror, but rather love and interest, kindled by having glimpsed a truth, a real-life experience. All I can remember is that question, “Is she sick?” Strangely enough it still burns in my mind today, as if time had stood still. And not the answer – probably reassuring, perhaps a bit embarrassed – my mother gave, “No, she’s not sick, she’s just old.” Old age, probably more shocking for a child to see on a woman’s body, since ordinarily in France, in Europe – land of girdles and petticoats, of brassieres and slips – women are still exempt, as they’ve always been, from the disease of ageing. I can still feel my cheeks burning, it goes hand in hand with the naïve question and my mother’s brutal response, like a slap. All of that remained unanswered inside of me. The question probably wasn’t: Why has that woman become deformed and worn with old age in that way? But rather: Why have I been lied to? Why has that truth been hidden from me?
Africa was more about bodies than faces. It was an explosion of sensations, of appetites, of seasons. The very first memory I have of that continent is my body being covered with little blisters caused by the extreme heat, a benign disorder that affects white people when they enter the equatorial zone, comically known as bourbouille – prickly heat in English. I’m in the cabin of the boat as it sails slowly down the coast past Conakry, Freetown, Monrovia, stretched out naked on the bunkbed, with the porthole hanging open to let in the humid air, my body sprinkled with talcum powder. I feel as if I’m in an invisible sarcophagus, or as if I am a fish trapped in the boat, coated with flour, before being put into the frying pan. Africa was already taking my face away and giving me a painful, feverish body in return, the body that France had hidden from me in the anaemic comfort of my grandmother’s home, devoid of instinct, devoid of freedom.
In that boat bearing me away to another world, I was also being given a memory. The African present was erasing everything that had come before. The war, the confinement in the apartment in Nice (where in two attic rooms five of us lived, and sometimes even six, if you count the housemaid, Maria, whom my grandmother hadn’t been able to resolve to let go), the rationing, or the flight into the mountains where my mother had to hide for fear of being rounded up by the Gestapo – all of that was fading away, disappearing, becoming unreal. From that moment on, there was to be a before and an after Africa for me.
Freedom in Ogoja was the supremacy of the body. Boundless, the view from the cement platform on which the house was built, like the cabin of a raft floating on the ocean of grass. If I search my memory, I can retrace the vague boundaries of our compound. Someone who had kept photographs of it would be surprised at the things a child of eight was able to see there. A garden, probably. Not a pleasure garden – did anything in that country exist for pleasure alone? But a useful one, where my father had planted an orchard: mango, guava, and papaya trees and, to serve as a hedge in front of the veranda, orange and lime trees, most of whose leaves had been stitched up by ants to make their suspended nests filled with a sort of cottony fluff that protected their eggs. Somewhere amid the bushes in back of the house, a coop where guinea fowl and chickens cohabited, the existence of which I was only aware of due to the presence – directly over it in the sky – of vultures that my father would sometimes shoot at with a rifle. All right then, a garden, since one of our servants was called a “garden boy.” At the other end of the lot there must have been the cabins for the servants: the “boy,” the “small boy,” and especially, the cook, whom my mother was fond of, and with whom she concocted recipes, not traditional French food – but peanut soup, roasted potatoes or foufou, the yam paste that was our daily fare. Every once in a while, my mother would launch into experiments with him, guava jam or candied papaya, or even sherbet that she’d crank by hand. In that courtyard there were, most importantly, always lots of children who would come over to play and talk every morning and whom we didn’t take leave of until nightfall.
All this might give one the impression of a very organized, colonial, almost urbane life – or at least a rustic one, in the manner of the English or the Normans before the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, it was absolute freedom of the body and mind. In front of the house, in the opposite direction from the hospital where my father worked, began an endless, slightly rolling, open stretch reaching out as far as the eye could see. To the south, the slope led down to the misty valley of the Aiya, an affluent of the Cross River, and to the villages Ogoja, Ijama, Bawop. To the north and the east, I could see the great wild plain scattered with giant termite mounds – cut off from the streams and the swamps – and the beginning of the forest, the stands of giants – irokos, okoumés – and, stretched over it all, an immense sky, a raw blue dome in which the sun burned down, invaded by storm clouds every afternoon.
I recall the violence of it all. Not the secret, hypocritical, terrifying violence that all children born in the