The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
down at the deceptively peaceful manioc gardens, red roads, and thatched villages, I told myself that he was better off in that place where he had a life, than in any mission or orphanage where I might have taken him. But he followed me just the same—his spectral presence weighing on my mind—because he had offered me my only opportunity for redemption in that dark time, my one chance to make a difference. And every time I thought of him, I experienced my appalling passivity and impotence, like a dead albatross around my neck.
Like Rimbaud, I finally found my second self in Africa, though I remained haunted by the impossibility of ever really losing myself in that so-called dark continent, shucking off my first life like a suit of ill-fitting clothes. Strange, therefore, that one of my first Congo poems should use the same image that appears in Rimbaud’s enigmatic line, “You follow the red road to arrive at the empty inn.”7
The Red Road
The red road led to nowhere I could go
Nowhere was a village I would never know
For days I drove companionless along it
The forest had no horizon
I wore a mask of red dirt
The wheel steered me
My body ached
At night I lay awake in terror at the night
People everywhere
Saw to me with the same indifference
They shared their food
I passed through country
Only on a map
And came back along the same road
Nothing in particular fulfilled
The red road led to nowhere I could go
Nowhere was a village I would never know.
It is oft en overlooked by those who mourn or are mystified by Rimbaud’s contemptuous dismissal of poetry that the man who spent much of the last ten years of his life as a trader in the interior of Abyssinia became as well versed in local custom as any ethnographer—acquiring fluency in local languages, “orientalizing himself,” and becoming respected for his knowledge of the Qu’ran and Islamic philosophy.8
As I would discover in the Congo, the red road did not necessarily go nowhere. But to find those unmapped destinations I would have to abandon the purposes that first drove me down that road, and learn to ask directions from those who lived along it.
THREE
Kindred Spirits
HANK KLOOSTERMAN PICKED ME UP at Léopoldville airport when I first arrived in the Congo, and he dropped me off there ten months later. The same hot wind that gently battered me on that first journey into the city still flowed over the grasslands as if nothing under the sun had changed. But I had changed, or been changed, in ways I could not yet fully understand, though an unexpected encounter in the airport departure lounge on the day I left for France gave me a glimmering of what I now know.
Only a week before, I had been summoned to a conference in Le Royal—the large apartment building that the UN had commandeered as a center of operations. The newly appointed Head of ONUC’s Département des Affaires Sociales was clearly irked by reports he’d heard of my lackadaisical attitude toward the aid and development projects to which I had been assigned. He gave me a choice between “buckling down and justifying my existence” or returning to England. In the preceding months, I had become increasingly disenchanted with the hidden agenda of the UN mission, regarding it as a continuation of colonial policies, but had not had the courage to quit. Gifford’s ultimatum relieved me of the burden of choice. Moreover, I could always blame him for throwing me out, and absolve myself of my indifference to the humanitarian ideals to which my UN colleagues paid lip service.
I was surprised, therefore, to meet Mrs. Gifford at the airport, and learn that she too was on her way back to England. Her children were in a boarding school there, and she was going to visit them.
I had met her briefly at a cocktail party when she and her husband arrived. She appeared to be sympathetic to my desire to live closer to Congolese people and not impose Western values on them, and she seemed to have a genuine, if maternal, interest in my welfare. Now, with a long wait for our Sabena flight to depart, we fell into conversation.
I was curious to know why her husband was not there to see her off, but did not broach the matter. But she was well aware of the circumstances that had led up to my abrupt departure, and apologized for her husband’s insensitive handling of my situation.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“I have no idea. I would like to return to Africa in some different capacity. Not go prying into places where I have no business of being.”1
It was soon evident, as we talked on, that Mrs. Gifford shared my misgivings about the kind of work to which her husband had dedicated himself. My first thought was that Mrs. Gifford was, like me, skeptical about the good that comes of foreign interventions in the affairs of poor nations, or the manner in which Euro-American and Soviet interests had turned Africa into a cold war zone. But her criticism was more personal, and I was taken aback that she should confide to a twenty-four year old stranger her disillusionment.
Before their posting to the Congo, the Giffords had spent several years in Cyprus, also with the United Nations. During this time, their two older children were in an English boarding school. But the two younger children, aged four and six, had been with them in Cyprus.
“We are both Christians,” she said. “In fact we met at a church social. But I am afraid we differ in what our faith requires of us. For my husband, it demands unconditional devotion to the well-being of others, even to the extent of taking refugee children into our own home, regardless of the health risks to our own children. It may be that I have never fully understood Christ’s call or example. But there is a limit, especially for a mother, to what she can give others without compromising her own children. Even sending our two daughters to boarding school was, for me, an act of abandonment. Our sensitive, vulnerable, seven and eight year old girls, packed off to England filled me with such guilt. But my husband was, and remains, adamant. It will do them no harm. He left home at the same age. It toughened him. It prepared him for the work he now does for the greater glory of God. But tell me, Michael, is God’s glory greater than the happiness of a child, or the bond between a mother and her daughters?”
I was too young for this moral burden. The questions were beyond me.
Mrs. Gifford saw my difficulty.
“I am so sorry. What am I doing, offloading my tribulations onto you? You have enough to worry about. How selfish of me.”
We were sitting on an upholstered bench. A dying aspidistra, an unswept parquet floor, and a slow-moving ceiling fan provided a tawdry backdrop. Gathering around us, silent, unobtrusive and shell-shocked, were thirty or more nuns recently rescued by Belgian paratroopers from the rebel-held city of Stanleyville.
Also distracted, Mrs. Gifford looked at the refugees and felt ashamed.
“What they must have been through,” she said.
I envied them. I had only glimpsed the war. And I too felt ashamed that I was leaving the Congo unscathed, that I had avoided my baptism of fire. Et j’étais déjà si mauvais poète/Que je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout.... 2
I told Mrs. Gifford of my journeys to the interior. I cannot remember how she responded, though I think I know why I confided in her. My experiences echoed her own. It was my clumsy, makeshift way of telling her I understood her dilemma—torn between protecting those closest to her and offering succor to strangers with contagious diseases. Had I known, at this time, of Orwell’s essay on Gandhi, I might have cited it.
For the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves. Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend