The Brooklyn Rail

Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo transmits the authoritarian abuses of Ahmed Sékou Touré in this novel of a female survivor, the eponymous Véronique, living in exile. Her initial entreaty to Madame Corre, that she write her own story, soon gives way to a contextualization of Guinean atrocities in the broader context of a century of devastation and the attempts writers have made to chronicle that destruction. One meditation from this excerpt particularly sticks with me, a notion building from Kundera's line that “Memory doesn't film, it photographs.” The narrator explains that all days contain all others, and fixing on the photographs mistakes the process of history for a dismal moment.  

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Now here’s my question, Madame Corre: why haven’t you considered writing a book? Why do I have to be the one to do it? Lives are like fingerprints, they’re never exactly the same. Your son is still living—should it turn out to be true— and your husband died before your eyes. That’s a kind of favor, an almost lavish gift. Whereas I was twenty-two when I even heard tell of Rama Baldé and Jean-Pierre Bangoura. In some ways, it wasn’t until age twenty-two that I was born. My father was thrown off a cliff, my mother expired under the blade of a filet knife. My family history was summarized in one photo. A photo I received from the murderer of the woman who carried me nine months in her belly. These things have been discussed. Besides Primo Levi, can you count off how many witnesses were present at the Holocaust? And how much did it cost them in blood and sweat? And beyond that, in Siberia, Tomsk, Irkutsk? One Solzhenitsyn and two Zinovievs out of the 18 million mowed down, scrofulous and crawling with worms. No one’s looking for the limelight in these cases. They’re tucked away in the thick woods of anonymity. Here, the only thing expressed is shame. Shame on us all, shame forever. And shame, Madame Corre, isn’t cried out from the rooftops. I assure you, if all those people dared to speak up, there’d be no earthly corner to spit out its disgust, not one library shelf to wedge a book. We talk about our triumphs, our diplomas, our achievements, not our hernias and boils. A cripple doesn’t show off.

You still think it’s time well spent to drone on about your past? Camp B, the Bridge of the Hanged, your husband, your son, my two fathers, my two mothers—why don’t you quit for a second? Nothing’s around us anymore. Not the Panthéon or Les Arènes. Not Prospero, not the street vendor, not even the ghost of Sartre, or the memory of Cohn-Bendit and his cocky bunch of brick throwers. Nothing but the two of us, shut in this foggy, gray-walled cubbyhole, emptying glasses of Sancerre, sobbing about the past. But how do our little hiccups square with the infinite madness of men? Are you familiar with the histories of Blacks and Indians, Jews and Hereros, Soweto and Sharpeville, Sabra and Shatila, of Sobibor and Treblinka?

Do you know how much it costs a writer to scratch his balls? To dig through the latrines of the past? Could you write a book? Admit it, you’d never perform on the public plaza, detailing what happened on that bridge the day you were jostled awake at 5 AM to go give the balafons a listen and watch the niâmou dance. You left your pharynx there and your bile, your myocardium and your spleen. You’re one hell of an egotist, Madame Corre—you’d throw me down and spare yourself to gauge the depth of a well.

Believe me, there will never be enough books and movies to contain men’s bullshit. It’s not memory that will heal us, it’s the hard drug of amnesia, the end of the end, that snug bed of nothingness. As long as there are men, so too will there be bullshit. And bullshit’s not the only thing we know how to do, it’s just what we do best. I wasn’t in school very long, Madame Corre. Nothing besides Raye’s school notebooks and Philippe’s library. But I do on occasion indulge in the snootiness of a citation. Here’s one that’s not the most celebrated, but to me it’s the truest, the most honest, most touching of them all: “We often compare the cruelty of man to that of beasts, which insults the latter.” That was Dostoyevsky, I think, unless it was Socrates, before the hemlock. And hemlock isn’t just used in Athens. Everyone’s forced to drink it—anyone who thinks, loves, or dreams.

Which makes me want to repeat what I often said to Philippe: “Hitler, Stalin, Sékou Touré, Franco, Pinochet, and Pol Pot aren’t dogs or pigs or hyenas or lice or polar bears or spiders. They’re men, they’re our brothers by blood. They’re you and me.” And don’t tell me about context. Climate, skin color, and mores have nothing to do with it. It’s been like that since the beginning. Here, there, wherever.

We’re disarmingly stupid and hateful. And when evil is done, when blood and tears spill over everywhere, we pour out prayers and speeches. There we are, in front of churches and mosques, protest signs brandished: never again! The slogan is firm in our mouths. But our minds aren’t fooled: two, three, four, five years, ten years max, and Camp B will have spawned little ones in Tibet, in the Yucatán, in Bechuanaland. Sobibor, its grandbabies in Peru, Siberia, Botswana. And, again, prayers and speeches. Again, stirred-up sensitive souls and protest signs over the heads of the outraged. And no one will think to lift up a mirror: “Look, open your eyes. What devils? What monsters? It’s only you and me. Leave the devils alone!”

Philippe had a funny idea one day. He wanted to introduce me to Ambar, Nera, Gnoap, and Adhylia. He’d brought Gnoap back from Cambodia, Ambar from Chile, Adhylia from Congo, and Nerea from Argentina. He wanted to know how it would go. If we had anything in common: a tic, a brief memory or—who knows?—some fragment of a gene. It was one of his anthropologist friends’ ideas. Four girls born in tyrants’ prisons had to have some small thing in common. My reaction made him cut ties with his anthropologist friend. And he spent the whole week after offering apologies and foot rubs to ease my anger. “Sweetheart—honey! I’m the dumbest idiot, I know that now. I shouldn’t have listened to that prick. And I know, that’s how the doctors at Treblinka thought, too. Open more laboratories to prove what monsters the Jews were.... No, no, no, you aren’t going to see Adhylia, Nerea, Gnoap, or Ambar. Forgive Philippe’s carelessness. Please, forgive him!”

Would you have granted, Madame Corre, that anyone had a right to ask whether you and I had something in common besides X chromosomes and our condition as earthlings? That something meaningful should come out of that shared experience? It’s one’s environment that determines everything, if we believe the scholars. The victims, even indirect ones, of Sékou Touré should necessarily have something in common, some visible characteristic, like the wings of airborne animals or marine life’s fins. We would have recognized each other, we would have addressed each other with our own signals. No! To each species its own language! Dogs communicate, crabs communicate, but humans don’t understand them. God, more mysterious than magnanimous, raised towers everywhere among beings long before Babel.

And yet it doesn’t show on the nose, those beatings. They never leave a trace: the mark of a true criminal. Once they’re done breaking you, it’s on to the sulfuric acid bath or the mass grave, where they pile the dead dogs and goats, the ones who don’t ask to be remembered. If they do let you go back home, it’s because your scars are internal: broken ribs, mangled spleen, memory in tatters. That’s their little trick: no trace, no witness, no proof, no document. That’s what allows them after a few years of respite to find successors. The old cycle of life that feeds itself and that neither you or I have the means to break. Let’s be real, Madame Corre: I’d have fled if you brought up Camp B first thing. If I’m still there to hear your nonsense about balafons and niâmou, it’s because you trapped me somehow. Yes, you were wily enough not to telegraph the color to me.

I’d have turned my back on you. What bothers me with those recited stories is that memory is almost always one of disgust. This day is remembered, and not that one, because this day was most dismal. Like Kundera said: “Memory doesn’t film. It photographs.” I prefer film. A photograph fixes the moment. And the moment has nothing to do with other moments. A photograph is yesterday. A script is tomorrow. And a film, real footage, is today. The day containing all the others.

On the topic of film, there’s one Philippe loved more than any other, a little Soviet film, Fate of a Man, that was projected when he was still with Young Communists. The memory he had of it was, all in all, somewhat vague, but the emotion he’d felt watching it for the first time never left him. His soul would take merrily off when he thought back to it. He’d give a sigh I couldn’t interpret and rave about everything that stood out from his childhood: Tintin, Les Pieds Nickelés, books by Péguy, Vallès, Saint-Exupéry, tennis courts, Abby Guichard’s homilies, vacations in Saint-Raphaël. “Yes, I’ve been conditioned like everyone before Vian, Lautréamont, the Surrealists, the scoundrels in Le Grand Jeu, Sartre, and others taught me how to take care of myself,” he’d say again and again in those nostalgic episodes. Apart from the anthropologist incident, Fate of a Man was one of our rare bones of contention. I don’t know why this movie I’ve never seen—and will never—opened the floodgates in him to a theory that riles me up so badly: humanism. OK, Madame Corre, poison my life with your stories about balafons and niâmou, but, I beg you, please don’t ever bring up humanism. I’m just not ready for it. In all honesty, I’m not a human being. I’m a little blade of grass. I got none of what’s supposed to feed Man’s offspring: caresses, lullabies, morality, religion. I’m clueless about Islam, Christianity, Marxism, and Buddhism. My parents never said anything about it. I don’t get one thing about humanity. My own humanity consists of Dick the dog, Nantou, Raye, Yâyé Bamby and the hyped-up populace at the Oxygène. Plus I’m for life, not Man. And life encompasses everything, Madame Corre. Man is never more than a laughable segment. Turning on the TV last weekend, I saw the Dalai Lama watch the conversion of some unhinged man. You know what he said, that unhinged man? That on a geologic scale, our lifespan on earth doesn’t even touch five seconds. We’re not the foundation of the world, we’re a teensy fraction of it. If you say God created Man in his image, you have a pretty feeble idea of God. Sure, we invented the bow and arrow, shaped stone into a wheel, created vaccines and the submarine, the atomic bomb and football. We walked on the moon and summited Everest. But I ask you, Madame Corre, are we worth any more than a bee or a lion? Bacteria? Plants? They’re heroes in their way—heroes that don’t need a statue. Be modest, humanoids. We’re not the beginning or the end. Life existed before us. It’ll go on with or without us.

He didn’t like to hear me talk like that, not at all. To get me to shut up, he’d send me off for a glass at the Antidote, and afterward we’d make unhinged love.