Allah is Not Obliged (2 page)

Anyway, even back when I was a cute kid, back in my childhood, there was this ulcer eating into maman’s right leg and rotting it. An ulcer that steered my mother (to ‘steer’ is ‘to guide someone somewhere’). An ulcer that steered my mother and the rest of the family. And, around my mother and her ulcer was the hearth. The hearth that grilled my arm. The hearth always belching smoke or sparks; it spits sparks when you poke the fire to get it going. All round the hearth there were
kanaris
(according to the
Glossary
, a
kanaris
is a handcrafted earthenware jar). There were
kanaris
and more
kanaris
, and every one of them filled with decoctions (that means liquid obtained from the action of boiling plants). The decoctions were used for flushing maman’s ulcer. There were more
kanaris
lined up along the wall at the back of the hut. Between the
kanaris
and the hearth, there was my mother and her ulcer wrapped up in a
pagne
. There was me, and there was the marabout, hunter and healer, Balla. Balla was maman’s healer.

Balla was a great guy and totally extraordinary. He knew all these countries and other stuff. Allah had given him hundreds of incredible destinies, and talents and opportunities. He was a freedman—according to
Larousse
, that’s what they called someone who used to be a slave but is now free. And he was a
donson ba
, that’s the name we give to a master huntsman who has killed black game and at least one malevolent djinn, according to the
Glossary
. Balla was a kaffir—that’s what you call someone who refuses to believe in Islam and keeps his grigris. (According to the
Glossary
, a ‘grigri’ is ‘a protective amulet, often a piece of paper inscribed with magical incantation kept in a small leather purse which is tied above the elbow or around the neck’.) Balla refused to burn his false idols, so he wasn’t a Muslim, he didn’t perform the five daily prayers, or fast for one month every year. The day he dies, no Muslim is allowed to go to his funeral, and they’re not allowed to bury his body in the Muslim cemetery. And strictly speaking, nobody’s allowed to eat the meat of any animal whose throat he slits.

Balla was the only Bambara (‘Bambara’ means ‘one who refuses’), the only kaffir, in the village. Everyone was afraid of him. He had grigris round his neck and all over his arms, in his hair and his pockets. No one in the village was allowed near Balla’s hut, but actually at night everyone went to his hut. Some people even went during the day, because Balla practised sorcery, native medicine, magic and a million other extravagant customs (‘extravagant’ means ‘unrestrained or recklessly wasteful’).

All the stuff I bullshit about (‘bullshit’ means ‘to say stupid
things’), I learned from Balla. A man should always thank the shea tree for the fruits gathered from beneath its branches. I will always be grateful to Balla.
Faforo! Gnamokodé!

There were two doors to maman’s hut: the big door that opened on to the family concession and the little door on to the yard. (According to the
Glossary
, a ‘concession’ is an enclosed piece of land often used for business.) I was crawling around all over the place and getting into everything. Sometimes, I’d fall on to maman’s ulcer and she’d howl with the pain. The ulcer would start bleeding. Maman would howl like a hyena with its paws caught in the teeth of a wolf trap. She would start crying. Maman had too many tears, the corners of her eyes were always full of tears and her throat was always full of sobs suffocating her.

‘Dry your tears and stop your bawling,’ grandmother used to say. ‘Allah created each one of us and decided our fate, the colour of our eyes, our height and our sufferings. You were born with pain from your ulcer. It is He who gave you your time to live out on this earth in a hut, wrapped in a blanket near a hearth. You should pray
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
(Allah is great!) Allah does not mete out suffering without cause. He makes you suffer here on earth to purify you so that one day he can grant you paradise and eternal happiness.’

Mum dried her tears and stopped crying and we’d go back to playing our games and chasing each other round the house. Then there was one morning when she stopped playing with me, howling in pain and choking from her sobs.

‘I don’t know what you’re whining about. You should pray
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
You should give thanks to Allah for his goodness. Here on earth, he has struck you down with a suffering whose days are numbered. Suffering a thousand times less terrible than the fires of hell. The fires of hell that the evil, the damned and the wicked will suffer for all eternity.’

Grandmother said this and asked maman to pray. Maman dried her tears and prayed with grandmother.

The day my arm got grilled, maman cried and cried and her throat and her chest were all swollen with sobs. My grandmother and father showed up and they both lost their temper and yelled at maman.

‘This is simply another ordeal which Allah has sent you (an ‘ordeal’ is ‘a severe or trying experience intended to judge someone’s worth’). If Allah has ordained that you be miserable here on earth, it is because he has reserved some greater happiness for you in paradise.’

My maman dried her eyes, swallowed her sobs and prayed with grandmother. Then maman and I went back to playing chase.

Balla used to say no kid ever leaves his mother’s hut because her farts stink. Maman’s smells never bothered me. The hut was full of all kinds of stink. Farts, shit, piss, the infected ulcer, the bitter smoke, and the smells of Balla the healer. But I didn’t even smell them, so they didn’t make me puke. Maman’s stink and Balla’s stink smelled good to me. I was used to them. It was surrounded by these smells that I ate
and slept best. It’s called a natural habitat and every animal has one; maman’s hut with her smells was my natural habitat.

I think it’s a pity we don’t know how the world was before we get born. Sometimes, I’d spend the morning trying to imagine what maman was like before her circumcision, the way she sang and danced and walked when she was a young virgin before her excision. Grandmother and Balla always said she was pretty as a gazelle, pretty as a
gouro
mask. I only ever got to see her lying down or crawling around on her arse, I never saw her standing, but I knew she must have been charming and beautiful, because even after thirty years of shit and stink, of smoke from the hearth and suffering and tears, there was still something beautiful about the lines on her face. When the lines on her face weren’t brimming with tears, her face shone with a kind of glow. A bit like a lost blemished pearl, (‘blemished’ means ‘marked by imperfections’). Her beauty was decaying like the ulcer on her leg, but the glow just shone right though the smoke and the smells of the hut.
Faforo! Walahé!

When maman was pretty and charming and virginal, people used to call her Bafitini. Even now when her body was all fucked-up and rotting, Balla and grandmother still called her Bafitini. I’d only ever seen her at her worst, in the last stages of her multifarious, multicoloured decay, but I called her
Ma
. Just Ma. African people would say it came from deep in my insides; French people in France would say it came from my heart.

Grandmother says maman was born in Siguiri, one of the
hundreds of shit-holes in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone where miners and rock-breakers dig for gold. Grandfather was a big gold trader. Like all the other filthy rich traffickers, he bought himself lots of women and horses and cows and big starched
bubus
(a
bubu
is a long tunic worn by Black Nigger African Natives). The women had lots of babies and the cows had lots of calves. Grandfather needed somewhere to put all the women and the kids and the cows and the calves and all his gold, so he bought lots of houses and lots of concessions, and when he couldn’t buy more, he built more. Grandfather had concessions in every settlement where there were fortune-hunting gold miners.

Grandmother was my grandfather’s first wife and maman was one of his first children, that’s why he sent grandmother to the town to look after the family business. He didn’t want her hanging around some mining outpost full of bandits and cut-throats and liars and gold dealers.

Besides grandmother had to stay in town so maman didn’t die of her heart stopping dead or the ulcer rotting her completely. Maman used to say she’d drop dead from the pain if grandmother left her to go out to the gold-mining camps where grandfather did his business and where there were cut-throats lying in wait for women.

Grandmother really loved my mother, but she didn’t know what date she was born, or even what the day of the week it was. She was far too busy that night, the night my mother was born. Balla says it doesn’t matter what date you’re born, or what day of the week you’re born, seeing as how everyone has to get born some day or other, somewhere or other, and
everyone has to die some day or other, somewhere or other, so we can all be buried in the same clay and rejoin our ancestors and discover the ultimate judgement of Allah.

On the night maman was born, grandmother was far too busy on account of the bad omens that were happening all over the universe. There were lots and lots of bad omens in heaven and on earth that night—hyenas howling in the mountains, owls crying on the roofs of the huts. The omens signified that maman would have a life that was tremendously and catastrophically catastrophic. A life of shit and suffering and damnation, etc.

Balla said he and grandmother offered up sacrifices but they weren’t enough to undo maman’s terrible fate. Allah doesn’t have to accept sacrifices and neither do the spirits of the ancestors. Allah can do whatever he feels like; he doesn’t have to acquiesce to every prayer from every lowly human being (‘acquiesce’ means ‘agree to’). The spirits of the ancestors can do what they like; they don’t have to acquiesce to all our complicated prayers.

Grandmother loved me. Me, Birahima. She treasured me. She loved me more than her all her other grandchildren. If anyone gave her a lump of sugar or a ripe mango or a papaya or some milk, she would save them for me and no one else. She wouldn’t eat a single bit. She’d hide whatever they gave her in a corner of the hut so she could give it to me when I got home sweating, tired, thirsty, starving like a real street urchin.

When maman was young and a virgin and pretty as a jewel, she used to live in the mining camp where my grandfather
did his gold business. The place was crawling with cut-throats and gold dealers going round raping uncircumcised girls and slitting their throats. That’s why maman didn’t stay there. At the very first harmattan (‘harmattan’ means ‘a season marked by hot dry easterly winds’, according to the
Glossary
), she was sent back to Togobala for the ceremony of excision, where girls are initiated every year when the north wind blows.

No one in Togobala knows where in the savannah the excision will be performed until it happens. At cockcrow, the girls come out of their huts and in single file (‘single file’ means ‘one after the other in a line’), they walk in silence into the forest. They get to the place of excision just as the sun appears. You don’t have to have been to the place of excision to know they cut something out of the girls. They cut something out of my mother, but unfortunately maman’s blood didn’t stop, it kept gushing like a river swollen by a storm. All her friends had stopped bleeding. That meant that maman was the one who was to die at the place of excision. That’s the way of the world, the price that has to be paid. Every year at the ceremony of excision, the djinn of the forest takes one of the girls who has come to be initiated and kills her and keeps her for a sacrifice. The girl is buried there in the forest. The djinn never chooses an ugly girl, it always picks one of the most beautiful, one of the prettiest of the girls to be initiated. Maman was the prettiest girl of her age, that was why the djinn chose her to die in the forest.

The sorceress who was the excisor was one of the Bambara (an ‘excisor’ is a woman who performs female circumcision).
In our country, the Horodougou, there are two peoples, the Bambaras and the Malinkés. People from families like Kourouma, Cissoko, Diarra, Konaté are Malinkés, we’re Dioulas and Muslims. The Malinkés aren’t from here; they came from the valley of the Niger long, long ago. The Malinkés are good people who heed the word of Allah. They perform the five daily prayers, they don’t drink palm wine or eat pork or any game killed by kaffir
obayifos
like Balla (an
obayifo
is a shaman or a grigriman). All the other villages are Bambaras, pagans, kaffirs, unbelievers, animists, savages, shamans. Sometimes the Bambaras are called different things like Lobis or Sénoufos or Kabiès. Before people came to colonise them, they didn’t wear any clothes. They were called the naked peoples. Bambaras are true indigenes, the true ancient owners of the land. The woman who was performing the excision was a Bambara named Moussokoroni. When Moussokoroni saw my mother lying there bleeding and dying, she took pity on her because maman was still really beautiful back then. Lots of kaffirs who know nothing of Allah are completely evil, but some kaffirs are good. Moussokoroni had a good heart and worked her magic and she was able to rescue maman from the clutches of the murderous evil spirit of the forest. The spirit accepted Moussokoroni’s prayers and the sacrifices and maman stopped bleeding. She was saved. My grandfather and my grandmother were happy and so was everyone from the village of Togobala and they wanted to give the sorceress a reward and pay her lots of money; but Moussokoroni refused. She refused to take their reward.

Moussokoroni did not want money or cattle or cola nuts
or millet or palm wine or clothes or cowries (a cowrie is a type of shell that originally comes from the Indian ocean which plays an important role in traditional life, mostly as a kind of money). Moussokoroni thought maman was beautiful, so beautiful that she wanted my mother to be her son’s wife.

Her son was a hunter, a kaffir, a shaman, a pagan animist. A pious Muslim girl who reads the Qur’an like my mother is not allowed to marry a kaffir. The whole village refused.