Letters from Exile
“What can I do, I will always be, at heart, an emigrant — but what lessons have I drawn from it?”
MAY 29, 2024
Dear Max,
Tonight, I decided to write. No wonder, you’ll tell me, since you’re a writer, too. But tonight I wanted to write to someone, a real letter like before e-mail, and it’s to you, Max, that I’m addressing this letter, just as all those years ago, in high school, girls would boast of writing in secret to their Correspondent. You know, Max, “exile” is an identity you can’t easily shake.
I realize that I’m missing a part of your story. Tell me, how is it you found yourself in Switzerland?
So, I spent the day on my sofa watching a livestream of the war: highways jammed with cars amid the exodus, gridlocked lines of tanks (look, this one’s exploding — nice aim!), the buildings, like our high-rises, only more Soviet, collapsing, the women about to give birth being extricated from a future motherhood under the bombs, and the messieurs who talk endlessly before these images, in exclusive appearances, generals – I had no idea there were so many generals in France — discussing strategy; war, after all, is their business. Not so long ago, it was doctors and epidemiologists discoursing on the virus and its variants, and maybe soon a new round of specialists of who knows what else will be telling us all we need to know about the next disaster… But I digress…
…between two missiles, quick, misfortune doesn’t wait.
What I saw most of all, on my TV screen, were the future emigrants standing in front of the last train, the last bus, with the regulation luggage, twenty kilograms, not too much jostling, dignified, nothing like back home in Africa (yes, I still call Africa my home): a crowd in chaos, people with mattresses and sheet metal from the roofs of huts, their only assets, balanced on their heads, and the children lost among the goats. And me, at seventeen, leaving for exile in a pair of high heels, my most precious possession. I arrived in Burundi with one foot bare and the other in a broken heel.
These soon-to-be-exiles, they’ve been seized by war in the midst of their monotone dailiness, neither happy nor unhappy, just life in its ebbs and flows, continuing on for what seems like always, and now here they are waiting for the last convoy, between two missiles, quick, misfortune doesn’t wait.
I must have dozed off on my sofa. I’m ashamed: is it normal, to fall asleep to the war? As punishment, I had a nightmare. Caen, my own city of Caen in Normandy, surrounded, bombarded, evacuated. They’re saying it on the radio: an enormous bomb is about to be dropped on the city. They’re expecting it to fall on the Abbey of Saint-Etienne, right on the tomb of old William, the one who conquered England. There were already Putins in the year 1000! (I ask my Normand compatriots’ forgiveness for this little joke.) We’re surrounded, they keep repeating: the A13 is shut down, impossible to go take shelter in Paris, in the metro; traffic along the A84 is backed up all the way to Mont-Saint-Michel. Anyway, it might not be a good time to go visit Mont-Saint-Michel, even if it did hold out against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. Could the gilded archangel perched at the top of its spire strike down missiles and drones?
The last ferry is at the quay. Bound for…? England, New York, Iceland, Guadeloupe, Tahiti? No HGVs, no camper vans on board. Nothing but refugees and their survival kits: three days’ worth of provisions, first-aid supplies, diapers, sanitary pads, a few changes of underwear — and a book, perhaps a book? I wonder if they’ve prepared a special kit for the children: a stuffed animal, a coloring book and crayons and cookies, surely some cookies, I can still taste the bisuguti that the Belgian soldiers gave me on our arrival in Nyamata, where the Tutsis were being deported, my own petite madeleine.
But your papers, don’t forget your papers. Wherever the ferry takes us, there will always be, at the end of the crossing, a drove of police officers waiting to ask for your papers.
I follow the instructions. I take stock of my pantry: cassoulet, sardines and tuna in olive oil, haricots verts extra-fins, rillettes, no, clearly none of this will do for an emergency departure, I’m not going on a picnic. I’ll take a bottle of long-life milk, full-fat, of course — weren’t my Tutsi ancestors supposed to have lived on milk alone?
Now, as for clothing: a fleece jacket? A bathing suit? A safari outfit? And my papers, certainly, I have all my papers: national identity card, passport, carte vitale, mutual insurance policy, driver’s license, rent receipts, tax returns, gas, water and electricity bills… But the officer eyes me suspiciously, I’m not the real thing, of course, I’m Black, n-a-t-u-r-a-l-i-z-e-d, French only on paper.
I wake with a start. On the screen a stealth missile flies past, sniffing out heat; the wasplike hum of drones fills the room, the war is still here, far from me, livestreaming…
Dear Max, don’t be sore at me for this letter, and write back if you like. What can I do, I who will always be, at heart, an emigrant — but what lessons have I drawn from it? What should I say to these new migrants?
Scholastique
Scholastique,
You should tell them that it can happen to anyone. But don’t just tell them, that won’t be enough. You’ll have to make them a drawing, a sort of sketch of their destiny, like the sheep the Little Prince asked for — a long way from home, from everything, his head in the clouds.
As for me, when I flip on my “exile” switch, I see only the weak light of the storm lantern that you, too, must know well.
Ah, exile! God only knows what I think of this word. To tell the truth, deep down, it stirs nothing in me. If suddenly you say to me, like that, exile — in my head, nothing. Well, not much. It’s as if you flipped on a switch with the hope, or rather, the confidence, the absolute certainty that a light, a bright light would illuminate the furthest corner of the room. And then, nothing. Or at least, not quite what you’d imagined. Not the light that shines, that blazes everywhere here, along these latitudes, in our new countries, on our new passports: yours, France, and mine, Switzerland. Geneva. No, this word doesn’t shine with anything like the nuclear light that never goes out here.
Now, as I write you, I’m looking out the window and it’s glowing. Just as if God had never separated day from night.
As for me, when I flip on my “exile” switch, I see only the weak light of the storm lantern that you, too, must know well. The feeble glow of a wick saturated with oil. Memories of a gentle childhood; my grandmother, my mother’s mother, she had only one leg. The other one, lost to fighting the French. The sky of my childhood, at nightfall, has nothing in common with the sky here. The sky here, we’ve obscured it from our sight. From the naked eye. The stars are orphans. Perhaps the moon, too. If they even still exist!
You ask me how I managed to find myself in Switzerland? Well, I’m at home in Switzerland, since Cameroon is the 27th Swiss canton. Switzerland is, simply put, a small country made up of 26 much smaller “countries.” Each with its own constitution, its parliament, its government, its police… okay, I’ll stop Swiss-splaining you. Cameroon is the 27th little country that I consider part of Switzerland because our president, over there –he who ruled yesterday, who rules today and will keep on ruling till who knows when — our president spends most of his time right here, in Switzerland. In Geneva.
Okay, seriously though, I arrived in Switzerland in the early 2000s. Bac diploma under my belt at sixteen, plus two years of university in Douala. One evening, my mother calls me into her bedroom. She asks me: how would you like to continue your studies in Switzerland? Tell me, if you’d been in my shoes, how would you have answered?
About two months later, I was in Lugano, in Italophone Switzerland. That’s right, because this country, in addition to being miniscule — I mean, compared with Russia for example — Switzerland speaks a slew of tongues. A real tower of Babel! There are four official languages, not to speak of the unofficial ones. If you search this enclave of mountains and prairies far and wide, if you look beneath all the cows’ tails, you’ll see, believe me, you can find up to 26 languages, or one per canton. What would happen if we added all 275 Cameroonian languages into the mix?
Unlike you, I chose Switzerland for myself.
Our two departures were profoundly different, then. You had to escape to save your life, while I left to study, to seek out a better life. And yet, in both cases, we call it exile. What laziness!
My “exile” switch, when I flip it on, doesn’t show me the fireworks display of images that lights up your letter. The more I read your words, the more images, so many images appear, flitting past my eyes. Especially your one-foot-in-a-high-heel and the other bare. What a strange sensation it must be, to have a difference of twenty centimeters between your two legs. Between two bombs exploding, a flash of high heels.
There aren’t nearly enough high heels running our world. The high heels that I wear often, with joy. There aren’t nearly enough skirts, enough beaded dresses, lipstick, nail polish, all this regalia that I consciously attribute to womankind.
Over there, in my 27th canton, all you can see is the enormous hairdo of the wife of our eternal president. Her hair takes up so much space that many young people are forced to flee the country. And then it’s the pitching of the pirogue, the waves with their powerful jaws. With a little luck, you’ll escape them. Most often, though, you end up in the belly of the sea.
The images you write of in your letter, your description of their incessant, agonizing movement — our small screens are oversaturated — well, I don’t look at those images anymore. I listen to the radio. Often. To the news. Even the reportages on YouTube, I listen to them. I don’t need to be served up clichéd ideas, pre-chewed and spit out by the jackals. I get the impression they feed on this, on the world’s misery alone.
In 2011, the year I turned off my TV and threw it out the window, I was working as a news agent for the European Broadcasting Union. Here in Geneva. I saw so much of all that, the images, always juxtaposed in the most jarring ways. First, the bombings: Syria, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire. Then, in the following segment, the inauguration of a grand Barbie-McDonalds-and co. complex in some Western capital or another. Oh, don’t tell me I’m hypersensitive. I di beg you! I think I’m beginning to understand the way things work, the world, what we’ve taken to calling injustice. As for me, I call it the oscillation of time. It’s like a pendulum, now here, now over there. The rain falls on every roof.
That’s what I want to say to all those people who don’t yet feel like exiles, who aren’t yet migrants, not yet you, not yet me. This is precisely what I want to tell them: the rain can fall on every roof.
Barbie can transform into a kamikaze.
But tell me, what is your springtime like in France? And in Rwanda? Is it nice weather in Burundi? And your dreams — what’s the texture of the rain like in your future dreams?
(I’m switching off the light in my kitchen-office.)
Warmly,
Max
Dear Max,
You ask me what the springtime is like in France, in Rwanda. In the Normandy countryside, the apple trees are in bloom. With masks coming off, we’re rediscovering that there are human faces of all kinds. We spot the first vacationers, mostly Belgian and Dutch, all of them in shorts. A few brazen souls venture into the glacial waters of the Channel. In Ouistreham, the migrants turn their gaze away when they see the ferry leaving. A little further north, near Calais, they pile into an inflatable boat in pursuit of their dreams, risking their lives. Bombs are falling on Ukraine: so it goes, the world, but who can say where it’s going?
In Rwanda, like in Burundi, April and May, but April especially, marks the main rainy season. We wait for the rain, we worry, will it come in time? In the olden days, there were rainmakers, they knew how to speak to the rain. The rain is late in coming, then finally it arrives, it’s here, it’s time to celebrate, see all the children singing and dancing in the rain! The harvest will be plentiful, the rain hasn’t forgotten us: it’s returned to its homeland, to Rwanda.
Of my exiles, I have only memories.
But beware, the rain can be capricious and if it’s overly generous or angry, it will carry off the hills and the banana trees, the enclosures and their inhabitants in its wake. Did the rainmakers of yesterday know how to calm the rain, to soothe its anger? Now, we have to put our faith in the weather forecast.
But today, in Rwanda, April, May and June are the months of remembrance. Kwibuka: souviens-toi. These are the months when we must honor all those who were assassinated during the genocide of the Tutsis, in 1994. April, May, June, a hundred days, a million dead.
To each her memory. I was no longer in Rwanda in 1994. You’re right, Max, exile is not Europe, it isn’t France, it isn’t Switzerland. Exile, for me, begins in Africa, at home, in Rwanda; exile isn’t a question of distance to be crossed.
Of my exiles, I have only memories.
My exiles. Like a few yellowed photographs in an old album whose pages have been tirelessly thumbed through. The snapshots of my nightmares.
November 1959. I’m three years old, I’m on my mother’s back, we are carried along by a tide of panic. A stampeding crowd, cries, children wailing, cows mooing. There’s a big hut in flames: it’s my mother and father’s house, it’s my house. Tonight, I won’t sleep at home.
The Mugambwa mission: the first phase in the long journey of my exiles. All the Tutsis who escaped the massacre took refuge there. We children play in the square in front of the red brick church. Even the older kids, who no longer go to school. We eat something we’d never eaten at home: rice. The milk doesn’t come from cows, it’s a powder in cans. Had I known the word then, I would have said I was on vacation.
One night a few weeks later, in pitch darkness, the trucks arrived; they stopped in the courtyard. They kept their headlights on. Soldiers, white men, herd us into the trucks. I’ve lost my mother, my sisters, my brothers. I’m truly alone, lost forever, I’m crying.
It feels as if those tears of exile are still flowing down my young cheeks.
The trucks drove all night long; I might have fallen asleep. In the early morning, I find myself sitting cross-legged, in the middle of a large courtyard. A cloud of dust blinds me, I don’t know where I am, I’ve been left behind in an unfamiliar world, nothing is real anymore, all that’s left for me to do is disappear. But then I feel a hand on my shoulder, I know whose it is, it’s my mother’s. And since she’s my mother, surely she’ll be able to tell me where I am, why we’re here.
Yes, we’ll find out all too soon who we are: displaced persons, exiles of the interior, inyenzi, cockroaches. We’re in Nyamata.
In 1973, another April, I was chased from the School of Social Work in Butare, along with all the other Tutsi students and functionaries. It happened one afternoon, during a math lesson. I can still hear the door opening and a voice that cries: “Quick, Mukasonga, quick, they’re coming!” There’s an uproar in the hallway, it’s the boys from the neighboring high school, our Hutu classmates called them in for reinforcement. I don’t have time to imagine what they plan to do to us Tutsi girls. I run, I run down the endless halls of the school. It’s fear that guides me, that makes me leap over the barbed-wire fence. Fear has always been my guardian angel. I spend the night in a small eucalyptus wood—was it raining? I no longer remember. In the end, it was a Hutu deputy, married to a Tutsi friend of my older sister, who brought me halfway back to our house.
To become an authentic refugee, all I had to do was cross the nearby border into Burundi. On that night, it was the violent April rain that saved me. The soldiers didn’t care to be out patrolling in the downpour and even the leopards, it seemed, had taken shelter.
It was in Burundi that I became an authentic refugee, certified by the HCR: a political refugee.
Tell me something, Max. I found this quote, I don’t know from whom, in a book by Carlos Pereda, Lessons in Exile.
I am a stranger everywhere / everywhere I am at home.
What do you make of that? Talk about an essay prompt…!
As for the luxuriant mane of your first lady in perpetuity, I would like to draw your attention to the particular problems our hair gives us — we African women, exiles, emigrants. But I’ll save that for another letter.
Let me hear from you soon,
Scholastique
Ah, Scholastique!
“April, May, June, a hundred days, a million dead.” No need for sub-machine guns or tanks or fighter jets — no, not even those sophisticated arms that people are demanding over there, in Kyiv. Here: machetes. Only machetes.
I took the time to go walking in your memory. At one point I had to slow my pace, in the middle of an endless hallway. I even managed to run like a Tutsi girl when she sees the Hutu boys coming. Then, I stopped running. I caught my breath and continued my slow walk through your memory. Because, unlike that Tutsi girl who sees the Hutu boys, unlike you, I have time. I have all the time I need to imagine what they plan to do to her.
You see, I watched them take shape one by one, the images that arise from each of your sentences. Your sentences are lovely braids of words, so natural, and yet, how they positively drip with evil. How is it that men, that man can dig, and dig, and dig until he finds a bottomless supply of evil, then slowly extracts more and more of it to the point where it becomes trivial to him? How is it that such things exist? And yet, Evil, I think you’ll agree with me, is all around us. And always has been!
You’re three years old, and your mother tells you this: “Inyenzi, cockroach, that’s what you are.” How do you grow up with a scar like that, such a burning insult, such shame? The chain of humiliation must be long indeed. I mean, how does it go from the accusing finger to the murderous machete, from taunting to hunting down? Somewhere along the way, a brake must have stopped working.
I’m three years old when an older cousin tells me: “Faggot!” On that day, if my mother hadn’t stepped in to reprimand her niece (“Never say that to my son again!”), if she hadn’t done that, then I never would’ve suspected the evil that can lurk behind this word. And most of all, I would've kept on wearing my mother’s high heels, without feeling the need to hide it from anyone.
I’m three years old — and today I’m confident in my ability to fabricate memories with the lowest margin of error possible, as well as the highest, but really, what difference does it make — like I said, I’m three years old in 1989, when I realize I’ll be an exile all my life. Right. An exile, that is, in the sense of that quote you shared in your last letter. At three, I understand that I’ll probably be a stranger everywhere in this world, that I might be a faggot, that I’m most likely a faggot, but that with a lot of determination, a lot of courage, I’ll also be everywhere at home.
So I worked hard to always be at the head, or at least the neck, the shoulders.
Years later, at twenty-one, I think, I became an authentic faggot when I slept with a man for the first time. It was in Switzerland. Since then, I’ve understood that my presence in Switzerland is tied up with a kind of exile that doesn’t appear like exile at all.
As I was telling you before, here in Switzerland, in Geneva, I’m at home. Also. Of course. Of course! But over there, chez moi, “back home” — is that really still my home? Do I want to be laid to rest there?
School was my saving grace. I quickly realized that all it took was to be at the top of my class to become its captain, the chosen liaison with the administration. So I worked hard to always be at the head, or at least the neck, the shoulders. Never the bottom. That would only have made my situation worse: to be the bottom, on top of being that way… can you imagine? I prayed a lot. It’s stupid, but I pray often, you know. A childhood secret of mine. Prayer. For God to give me the strength to always stay at the head. Humiliation like a second skin, a life of silent, thorn-ridden battles. The scars are deep. Inside. You’re young and already, this great fatigue. Inside.
It’s important to take the time for walks. The other day, walking in the Bois de la Bâtie, not far from where I live, with my friend’s dog Kaya, and the friend herself — a light in the air, suddenly. A beautiful light. Very beautiful. No doubt of the sort God had in mind when He said, “Let there be light.” And we laughed, my friend and I, and Kaya. And right there, I prayed. I prayed to my father. What did I say to him?
Even during that walk, Kaya, the stick, the trees, the light, even then, in beautiful moments like these, I can’t help myself from thinking of all those young people who have to risk their lives, over there, in all the countries where they’re shunned simply for being that way: “faggot!”, my big cousin said. Those images of popular justice. The beasts are out for blood, they want the guy to pay for his faggotry: the car tires surrounding the naked body, the frail bone structure exposed, the rain of gasoline. After the machetes, comes the lit match. While the guilty one cries in agony, all around him men puff out their chests to show that honor has been restored. Zero risk of contamination, see. And the others — the fathers, the mothers, and the little children, like me — they watch, arms crossed over their chests. The empathy of the onlooker. Soon they’ll all return to their respective activities. To nothing important, really. The spectacle of evil in all its banality gradually comes to an end. No one will try to rescue the ashes from the tires.
It’s lovely to see peoples’ faces again. On the banks of the Rhône, the bodies diving, floating along, the bikinis, the boys, so many beautiful boys. For that matter, recently, on the tram I think it was, I found myself looking at a young man, his mouth, the fuzz of a poorly shaven moustache, his thin nose, his eyes — an emptiness in them. Nothing there.
It was as if he didn’t realize I was looking at him. Or else I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn’t notice our eyes had met. No, I don’t think so; that boy had a seriously empty gaze. The same one I often have. I say this because I recognized it, that look I have when I think of my childhood, of my exile.
Forgive my long silence, dear Scholastique. I had to organize a festival, GenevAfrica, in just under five weeks. Prayed a lot, to my father, to the Father. And it worked. I’m smiling. It all went very well. And we’re already planning the second part of the conference, in Abidjan.
You ask: “So the world goes, but who can say where it’s going?” There, I burst out laughing. Like a good Cameroonian, I’d answer you: “But the world’s going where it wants, right? Man no run!” Ah, Cameroon!
Tell me, what are you doing with your summer? I’ll be in Berlin, for a writing residency and a book tour. Working on a novel, revising a collection of poems.
Is it true that from your window, you can see the statue of Liberty?
With love,
Max
Dear Max,
What am I doing with my summer, you ask? I’ve just disembarked the plane that brought me from the Dublin Book Festival to jump on the one that will take me to the Salon du Livre in Rabat, then I’ll stop over a few days by the Mediterranean — finally, a warm seaside — before holing myself up, like a cardinal in a conclave that’s about to elect the pope, to choose, along with my ten fellow jurors, the lucky winner of the Prix Femina. What responsibility: deciding the future of a writer who’s poured all their hopes and dreams into a hundred pages or so, recto-verso. Some three to four hundred books will soon start piling up in my room. Help! I’m lost in the jungle of literature.
But no, dear Max, it wasn’t my mother who called me inyenzi, a cockroach! Stefania was a Mother Courage. She refused to let her children be reduced to the state of insects, virulent pests that would one day have to be eradicated. She preferred to sing stories to us (there’s always a song in our stories), and for me it’s these melodies that still give rhythm to the sentences that, one after another, will become a book.
And yes, Max, it was school that saved us, you and me both. And if I’m still alive today, I owe it to my father’s fierce convictions, and even — let these words be my tribute — to the threat of the paternal stick that coerced the stubborn little girl that I was. It must be said: long before I had any official papers, the French language was my passport.
You surely know it, this dreadful word: GLOTTOPHOBIA.
You and I are both considered Francophone; of course, we didn’t choose this for ourselves. If the fortunes of war had decided otherwise, we might be corresponding in the language of Goethe. Mais bon, since History has willed it, Francophone we’ll be.
In Nyamata (forgive me, Max, for always coming back to Nyamata, a childhood in exile isn’t easy to shake), in Nyamata, the teachers who’d found themselves among the displaced managed to hold classes underneath the big fig trees. The smallest ones like me had scarcely learned to decipher the alphabet when they undertook to teach us French. In the booklet they gave us, there were two facing columns: Kinyarwanda words on one side, French words on the other. In unison, at the top of our lungs and no doubt to a distinctly African rhythm, we repeated the French phrases after our teacher who carefully enunciated each syllable, trying in vain to drive out his cursed African accent.
And then only yesterday, I stumbled over a word. It’s one of those words that savants of all kinds cobble together with Greek and Latin to make an impression on the rest of us poor souls. You surely know it, this dreadful word: GLOTTOPHOBIA, and believe me, it concerns us, all of us so-called Francophones.
So I opened my laptop to visit the all-knowing Wikipedia and that indomitable site gave me the definition of this bizarre word: glottophobia, according to Philippe Blanchet, professor at Université de Rennes and the apparent inventor of this neologism, is “a form of discrimination that consists in considering certain persons as inferior due to their maternal language or their manner of speaking another language (grammar, vocabulary, accent, etc.). The language considered to be without an accent is therefore that of the dominant colonial or social power.”
“Francophones everywhere, unite against glottophobes!”
The most blatant cases are on the phone. There, the faceless glottophobe can really come out of his shell, no longer held back by the reserve sometimes imposed by a face-to-face encounter. You’ve carefully prepared your little introduction, rehearsed it to the point where no one — so you think — could detect the slightest trace of your unpleasant way of pronouncing the French language.
Alas, no sooner has the first sound come out of your mouth than your interlocutor hangs up. Or else, if he does allow you to speak a few words, he quickly cuts in to admonish you: “I don’t understand a word of what you’re trying to say, slow down, articulate clearly, how do you expect anyone to understand you with an accent like that! At least make an effort to speak correctly!”
But even worse are the connoisseurs, those people who’ve spent a few days in Africa on safari or at a resort, or who lived half their lives there as colonists or civil servants. If you have the misfortune of meeting one of them, they will invariably want to show off their knowledge, not least by informing you of your ethnicity, your tribe: “Come, now,” they’ll always say sooner or later, “don’t tell me you’re not Fula…”
I don’t know if a sociologist has already drawn up a chart of the hierarchy of accents — for there are good and bad accents, even if the highest-ranked ones are still met with a little smile. There are the lilting accents of Provence, of Marseille, which we can appreciate for the length of a vacation; the Corsican accent already grates us a bit more; then we have our Québécois friends’ accent, which we admire for its archaic charm but soon grow tired of; and finally, the truly atrocious ones: the Maghrebi accent of the cités that will, if we let it, forever pervert the French language — so beautiful and pure! — and those Francophone African accents, always good for a laugh, well-appreciated by comedians, but that send you, the accented one, right back into the primeval forest where you’ve just now climbed down from a giant old tree.
But fortunately for me, there are moments when no one’s bothered by my accent, during events with my readers, when I go to talk about my books with students, at high schools, at primary schools… there, everyone understands me.
So, have I lost my accent? No, quite the opposite, when I speak these people listen to me even with, and perhaps above all for my accent. I’ve maintained my mother tongue and I’m proud that, thanks to my accent, Kinyarwanda is still present in this French that has become the language of my writing. And so, what some have unquestioningly called my “style,” since they consider me a writer—is that not also my accent?
Oh, my dear Scholastique,
It must have done you good, all that distance between Dublin and Rabat. It must have been good for your young joints! Like a nice long stretch, a yoga session. I’m convinced that now you’re ready to hole yourself up to read, to cast your blessed ballot.
As for me, I’m in Berlin for a writing residency. LCB. Literarisches Colloquium Berlin-Wannsee. A hotspot for literature here in Berlin, at the edge of Lake Wannsee — a calm place, but close enough to the city center to enjoy some leather-clad escapades, as I’m wont to do.
Imagine, my dear Scholastique, if I’d stayed in Africa, in Douala — would I ever have known the pleasures of leather, of the whip? The martinet stings the flesh, but it eases the soul’s suffering. And it feels good, I promise you, especially when you’re there to kill your father’s head that you’ve chopped off yourself, that you’ve butchered with care and hidden at the bottom of a rucksack, my only piece of luggage on arriving here.
That’s right, I arrived in Berlin with my father’s head in my bag. My stated objective: to kill it. And I repeat this to myself, repeat it all day long, especially when I’m going out to one of the fetish clubs here. At the checkroom, I leave this paternal head that I drag around with me everywhere, everywhere I go. I want to be sure he’s watching me. Once, I even considered hanging it up at the entrance to a cruising bar — do you know what that is, a cruising bar? — to make him see in real time what it looks like, the life of this son he didn’t love, this son he didn’t know how to love, this son he was repulsed by.
I’m not repulsed by him, my father.
I take him with me everywhere, here in Berlin—his head, at least. Most importantly, his eyes. I take him around with me and show him that the son he didn’t love, who he didn’t know how to love, voilà, this son likes it rough. He likes how it flows from the whip, when it flows, when the surge of it reaches him and my cries voice my pain in the moment it breaks on my skin. But believe me, dear Scholastique, the suffering he put me through, Papa, that suffering is inexpressible, unspeakable. And yet I’m writing it down for you, here, now, here, because writing, the act of it, is the third path between thinking and speaking, between resentment and agitation. Writing in order to think differently, to speak differently.
I was telling you about the villa where my residency is, in Wannsee. A bird’s-eye view of the lake that radiates with light. How could you not become a writer in Berlin, in June? It’s snowing. I swear to you, here in Berlin, in this month of June 2022, it’s snowing. I look up and watch it fall, the snow, the flakes. The stars are so close they dance on my retinas and the feeling of being alive runs through me.
Oh, and when I read your description of glottophobia, I had to smile. I know very well what you’re talking about.
What luck, I tell myself, to be here living this, me, the little boy from Douala. Who would ever have imagined it? Certainly not any of the people who forced me to bear, throughout my whole childhood, my whole adolescence, you might well say my entire life, the Christian cross that makes flesh disregard pain. All of that is nothing – the insults are nothing, the mocking laughter, nothing, the dirty looks, the feeling that you’re the shame of the family, the shame of a nation, the shame of an entire continent that practices a shameless and brutal gaynocide, the shame of humanity itself — all of that, I promise you, it’s nothing, it’s a puddle of cat pee compared with the suffering a father can cause.
Do you know what Christ’s last words were, before giving up the ghost? “Father, why have you forsaken me?”
I didn’t have the time to ask my father this question, here in Wannsee, since I came with the express purpose of killing his head: with sex, with the pain of the flesh, the pleasures of the flesh, the suffering of a voice that bursts into laughter, crazy, it makes you crazy, crazy, you leap off the ground, this suffering makes me levitate, weightless, and yet my heart is full of love.
Nyamata. I looked it up, between Berlin-Wannsee and Nyamata, there’s more than 10,000 kilometers. I looked at a few photos of Nyamata, south of Kigali, at the border with Burundi, as you wrote in your previous letter: one foot bare and the other in a broken heel.
Nyamata, Douala, Rwanda, Cameroon, Kamerun, Berlin-Wannsee, the edge of Lake Wannsee: it was the stronghold of those who, in the 1940s, planned the final solution. Villa Marlier, das Haus Der Wannsee-Konferenz, 1942, the villa of the Wannsee Conference.
Max’s villa isn’t far from here — I mean Max Liebermann, the German Impressionist painter of the early 20th century — the flowers, the light like in his paintings, it’s luminous, luminous, and I, who was born in Douala, I whose ancestors were bound in chains, whose parents were colonized, whipped, and whipped, and whipped, I who discovered this morning the horror of the migration to Melilla, to Ceuta, the route of exile, the border guards who whip, and whip, and whip — Black lives decidedly do not matter, and I — I walk, I go walking à la Robert Walser whom I adore, the sun, my thoughts melting in the sun, Lake Wannsee, in my head, the bombs fell today in Kyiv, the Russian army is advancing on the Donbas, and I, grandson of Douala, grandson of slaves, of poverty, I walk around the lake, I walk, my dear Scholastique, I walk, Wannsee, a lovely green area, and blue, a place where not so long ago, some years back, I would have been quite simply decapitated, murdered like so many brothers, so many sisters, in Melilla, in Ceuta, and as I walk I tell myself that Black lives must truly count for nothing in their eyes.
Oh, and when I read your description of glottophobia, I had to smile. I know very well what you’re talking about. As for me, I whitificate — talk like white people — that is, when I want to, when I can, when I must…
If you’ll allow me, I’ll come back to this subject later on, in my next letter. It’s one of the defense mechanisms you develop when you’re an exile, yes, but especially when you’re Black.
I’ll stop here. Got to get some sun. So I’m going to tan myself by the lake.
Kisses,
Maxou
Dear Max,
I was very moved by the vehemence of your last letter. But tell me, dear Max, when will you get rid of this trophy that you lug around everywhere with you, at the bottom of your bag? Please, Lake Wannsee isn’t far, you say; throw that old noggin down to the bottom of the lake. Should you always have to live under your father’s gaze? Is his head the prop you need to feel pleasure? Let go of that old thing, which I imagine all shrunken and mummified like an Amazon headhunter’s. Go and tan yourself in the sun, by the lake. No, Max, that’s not a joke — we, too, black as we are, we can tan, and the sun even makes our skin radiant and smooth, so soft to the touch!
Forgive me, Max, I don’t presume to give you advice, even if I’m taking on the solemn tone of the old social worker that I still am. I can’t help it. I’ll never rid myself of this profession and for that matter, I don’t want to rid myself of it — it’s made me who I am. As I’ve often said, I had no other choice.
Your father’s head! My dear Max, you’re reopening a wound that will never heal. And what of my father’s head? His skull, that is, obviously. I looked for it in the ossuary, in the crypt of the church in Nyamata. Skull among skulls, bones among bones. Are his bones forever buried in a mass grave, or were they scattered long ago for the hyenas to feast on? Max, don’t speak to me about my father’s head. I have no need of relics. My father Cosma, my mother Stefania, my sisters, my brothers, all those who died in Nyamata, I have built them a grave, even if it’s only a paper one, and it's thanks to my father that they have this resting place: my books are their grave. I built it thanks to my father.
The whip, the martinet, the stick, the whole paternal arsenal — is it him you’re still looking for? Yes, my father, too, had his stick, but I honor that instrument: it saved my life. As you know, in Africa, girls follow their mother wherever she goes. They learn all there is to know from her. Most importantly, how to work the soil with a hoe. The father is often distant. His activities as “Minister of Affairs Foreign to the Family” were mysterious to my little girl self. I had no desire to leave my mother’s side. It was my father who ordered it: “Mukasonga will go to school. It’s school that will save my children.” He spoke constantly of the diploma I would one day obtain: idiplomi nziza, a beautiful diploma.
This word, diploma, I didn’t really understand what it was, a white people’s paper, of the sort that they liked to collect, but for him it was a magic word that might allow me to enter their world. And since I was a stubborn little girl, he didn’t hesitate to use his stick to convince me of this.
It was in 1968 that I took the fateful exam: the one that allowed admission to secondary school, the national exam. My chances of success were extremely slim: first, because a ten percent quota limited Tutsis’ access to high school, but also because until then, not a single candidate from Nyamata had been named on the list of admitted students. And so, I obstinately refused to show up for the exam, to face yet another humiliation. I claimed to have come down with I don’t know what sudden illness, spoke of a few chores that needed to be done immediately. But before dawn, my father was already chasing me from my mat. “Henuka, henuka, get up!” He’d tied on his white pagne that he wore on special occasions, and, under the threat or the protection of his stick, he dragged me like a goat all the way to the big school in Nyamata.
Yes, I’ll never repeat it enough, it’s thanks to my father’s stick that I was able to learn French, that I went to high school in Kigali, to the School of Social Work in Butare, that I escaped the lynching my classmates did not, that in 1994 I was in exile, beyond the reach of the machetes that were meant for me. I owe it to my father’s stick that I’m alive today, that I’m living in the name of all my loved ones.
Dear Max, is there a fine sandy beach on Lake Wannsee? If not, perhaps you could go to the shores of the Baltic and reread a few pages of Buddenbrooks.
The stream of history keeps on scrolling across my TV screen. Is it true that the war is at our door? I check Google Maps: Caen to Kyiv via the A2, 2567 kilometers, a twenty-eight hour journey. If you drive fast, you can spend a weekend at the war. A consequence of global warming? Storms worthy of the end of the world have been raging all over France. Those who’ve suffered damages are proud to go on TV to show the destruction, the broken windshields and dented bodies of their cars: according to social class, the hailstones are for some the size of pétanque balls, for others, golf balls. The still-expectant heir Prince Charles, in Kigali for the Commonwealth summit at the end of June, gave a speech at the Gisozi Genocide Memorial. Will Rwanda welcome the refugees expulsed from the United Kingdom? Lake Kivu isn’t the Channel, there’s no ferry for Portsmouth. If a few of them do manage to escape by way of the Congo river, they’ll have to be sent to the South Pole.
The stack of books to be read for the Prix Femina is now teetering dangerously close to the ceiling of my room. It makes me think of that play by Ionesco, The New Tenant (I don’t know if it was ever staged), where a man who moves into a new flat disappears beneath the growing mountain of his furniture.
Help, my dear Max, I’m drowning in literature…
Scholastique
Scholastique, my dear,
Before turning a page, you’ve got to read it to the end. Before turning the page, if you’re a curious reader, a reader who isn’t afraid of drowning, of dying in the depths of words, if you’re a reader like you are, Scholastique, then you know I won’t turn this page till I’ve read it all the way to the end.
You ask me for help, hilfe, hilfe, hilfe, I don’t know how to swim.
Look, you just begin — do as I do, let yourself drown, too. Let yourself drown. Wade into your pile of books, die a little there. At the very end, mia cara Scolastica (look how beautiful it is, your hair), you’ll find, in the deepest depths of the words, the book you’re seeking, a pearl saturated with memories. What does nostalgia look like in the land of the dead — do you know?
I’ll tell him about exile as a little kid describes an action movie to his best school buddy.
I was telling you how I’d drowned myself in this reading of my relationship with my father, in talking with him before getting rid of his head, in the lake, as you advised me. And then, earlier this week, I drowned myself in Cioran’s words, A Short History of Decay — that particular texture of ennui that only the exile can feel. Since then, I’ve been trying to put things in perspective.
(I’m going to look for Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. I’ve read only The Magic Mountain.)
I have to leave the LBC. My residency is coming to an end. But I’m staying in Berlin because, you see, it’s still snowing in Berlin, in the middle of July. I want Papa to see the snow, for him to marvel at it like a boy. Before turning this page of ours, we’re first going to talk, he and I, man to man as he would say, father and son. I’ll bring him to a place in Berlin, in Kreuzberg, to a park, or somewhere here in Wedding, where I’ve found myself a small room in order to continue reading our story, his and mine. We’ll need some music, a little flute, violin, beer, beer, and more beer of course — isn’t Papa a brewer? A few laughs, a slap on the shoulder to congratulate his son. Every so often he takes a swig from his bottle, the one I pulled out from my bag, opened with the butt of my lighter, handed to him. He nods his head. Not a word. Our eyes on the water beneath our feet.
Papa’s face is no longer a ghost’s. Gradually, it’s becoming something like the shadow of a memory, tender.
Nostalgia is all the distance that exists between heimat and elsewhere, between house, home, Douala, Nyamata and elsewhere. How much time now separates us from our houses, our hearths. We’ve lost even the taste of home. Even the accent, for some. One morning, the exile discovers that he no longer has a house, no longer has a home, that time has faded even his childhood memories; there’s nothing left but some scraps huddled in a small dark corner of his mind. The exile’s memories end up becoming like those old photos you take out of a dusty drawer, eaten away by insects.
We’ll talk. I’ll talk, I’ll talk to him, and what will I tell him, you ask? About the life I’ve made for myself. Yes.
Are you still ashamed of me, do you know that I’m a faggot, do you think I look like you? I think we look alike now, with the time that’s passed.
I’ll tell him about exile as a little kid describes an action movie to his best school buddy. And he smiles, he calmly shakes his head and tells me: I promise you, son, you haven’t dishonored me in the least. There, is that better?
He’ll speak to me of his childhood just as you, Scholastique, you spoke to me of yours, such lovely images, your words carry the sad tenderness of a widow’s gown. Papa tells me how he met Maman, how they had their first child, my big sister, the eldest of our troupe. To illustrate his words he makes big gestures, but I can’t see them. Even when he adjusts the volume of his low voice, speaking in hushed tones to mark the solemnity, the sincerity of a man who’s taking the risk of telling his story.
He tells me how his own father treated him when he was a child, speaks even of his brothers, his sisters, his blood, and his village where he’d never wanted to bring us. Like the colonizers before them, parents continued to wield the whip. With the same precision, striking the lower back, the bottom, the thighs. In the places where the whip has struck over and over, where the insult has stung the most, the wounds are fresh, streaked with blood. A wide, deep gash.
In your last letter, you write of your father’s whip, the one that saved you—but no, I wasn’t whipped, or only rarely. I was mostly a good boy, pretty like his mother, a light-skinned magpie with coarse, kinky hair and a mischievous, distracted gaze. I worked hard at school precisely so I wouldn’t be beaten, not at school, not at home, or anywhere else.
And now, I like the feel of leather. All because life itself is a whip.
I ask him, Papa, what does nostalgia look like over there, in the land of the dead? Is it black, is it white?
Seated on the slats of the jetty, our feet dangling above the water, the lake, Wannsee. I tell him about my work, about the labor of finding words, finding words because we need words to speak of beauty, we need words to speak of despair, we need words to be able to say everything, every last thing, even forgiveness.
You know, yesterday, I threw Papa’s head into the lake. It floated there for a moment, just like that, like a thing holding on to life. Then it sank. It made some bubbles on the surface and it sank.
To forgive is to turn the page.
Hugs,
Maxou
Dear Max,
I promised you in a previous letter, and so now it’s time to tell you about our hair — ours, African women, exiles, emigrants. No, it’s not a frivolous topic, an article for Amina or some other Black women’s magazine. Nature, evolution, who knows what distracted or perverse god, what evil genie of the bush bestowed us poor Black women not only with too-dark skin and an incurable accent, but – the worst disgrace of all – with kinky hair. We African women are constantly waging a battle with/for/against our locks: braids, straighteners, dyes, beads, weaves, wigs and other talismans. It’s no use; our hair does as it pleases, which, after all, is its right as much as ours. In its honor, I came up with a new proverb in our tradition: “The most headstrong woman is no match for her kinkiest hairs.”
I could tell the story of my life in the form of a capillary novel. It would begin, as you might imagine, in Nyamata. In Rwandan tradition, hair is a marker of what ethnologists call “age classes.” Babies have only a small tuft of hair, a little like the pompom on a French sailor’s beret. It’s supposed to protect the infant’s fontanel, known to be very fragile. After weaning comes the hairstyle known as igisunzu, for both boys and girls, a simple, thin crescent of hair at the front of the head. At puberty, the umuderi cut allows girls a brief interlude of freedom. They can indulge every one of their hairstyling whims, but as soon as a girl turns eighteen, she’s required to wear the amasunzu style, which lets everyone know it’s time for her to find a husband. Her mother, needless to say, will take charge of the search.
Alas, while I was pursuing my beautiful diploma, I missed out on this special initiation into womanhood. At primary school, the head teacher, an “evolved” man and a zealous believer in Western hygiene, required all his students, girls and boys alike, to shave their heads. I had unfortunately been endowed with an abundant mane, and each morning the razor was slow to scrape away the last of that obstinate fuzz. I was often sent home from school for having a few hairs too many. At Lycée Notre-Dame de Citeaux, these excess tufts made me the object of daily persecution. The nuns tolerated only the humblest hairstyle, a tight little mound at the top of our heads. My own exuberant hair would not agree to such modesty. For that matter, my classmates had decided it was Ethiopian, the country where Tutsi “invaders” had come from, according to the myth invented by racist Western ethnologists.
In Bujumbura, my beautiful diploma elevated me to the ranks of “evolved” women: I frequented the belles dames of Burundian high society. Those elegant ladies spent their afternoons on the terrace of their villa, straightening their hair. These were the most exclusive moments of sisterly conviviality, the salon where you had to show up and share the latest local gossip. The instrument of this delicate operation was, however, quite primitive: a long metal wand that ended in a row of close-set teeth. You had to heat it in the fire. Once in France, I spotted the instrument of torture again: it was, someone explained to me, a comb for poodles.
Battle-weary, I’m taking a hair-break.
For a long time, in France, I didn’t know what to do with my unruly hair. In Paris, I wandered from darkened boutiques to sordid back rooms around Rue Saint-Denis and Boulevard Barbès. I nearly lost all my hair and my mind under the chemical sting of “100% Made in America” straightening products. In my distress, I finally went to the stylist from my village in Normandy. She knows that I’m a writer, even if she hasn’t read any of my books… how would she find the time? She’s seen me on TV, though: for her, I belong to that elite category of people “seen on TV.” But the state of my overgrown mop clearly shocked her.
“Oh no, dear, not you! Let me fix it.”
You know, my dear Max, literature is what makes us “normal.” You’re a writer, you wear the color of your writing.
I let her take a photo of my hair as it is. For her, my hair represents a challenge: I sense that, despite the immensity of the task, she’s embarking on a crusade to civilize my mane. The operation takes a long time, but my hairdresser triumphs over every obstacle. Finally satisfied, she takes another photo and shows the two of them to me: before and after.
“See? Now you’re presentable, you can finally go on TV like a real star.”
Battle-weary, I’m taking a hair-break. Just in time, it’s summer, the season for hats. Someone once told me, I don’t know if it was a compliment: “Oh, Scholastique, you’ve got a face for hats!” A pile of hats stands facing my pile of books: evening hats, daytime hats, fancy dress hats worthy of the Queen of England. You write, Max, that “to forgive is to turn the page.” Well, I’m choosing a lovely hat to forget, all summer long, what my hair looks like.
The torrid rays of a sun that’s emigrated from Sudan or Eritrea are beating down on miserable Normandy. The Channel has become the Mediterranean, but the white cliffs of Albion have yet to appear on the horizon for the migrants who watch the stream of British tourists pouring out from the ferry. Are they already dreaming of these vacationers’ return trips, of slipping unnoticed into a camper van even if, across the Channel, they’re threatened with deportation to a host country they surely wouldn’t have chosen — to my country, Rwanda?
The 14th of July, Independence Day! All the news channels are proclaiming that the CAESAR cannon works wonders; France is going to save Ukraine.
Dear Max, we’d better beware, our color might not have changed, but the heatwave will put our skin to the test: and if it’s forgotten the sun of our origins? Our skin, black as it still is — has it become the tender skin of the assimilated? Max, be careful, hurry out and buy yourself an umbrella!
Scholastique
My dear Scholastique,
Forgive me for the long silence. You see, I haven’t even had time to buy an umbrella as you advised me in your last letter. I’ve had to isolate for a solid twenty days. Monkeypox. When the doctor told me over the phone in his thick German accent – and I thought of that word, glottophobia, that we’d discussed in our earlier letters — I said to myself, my poor boy, stay put in your room and wait for the storm to pass.
And what a storm! Believe me, this illness is a torment of the flesh. Even if you’re an amateur of all things leather and submission, there are certain kinds of pain, you’ll agree, that don’t afflict the soul, that might not involve that higher sort of suffering, but that tear at the skin, the flesh, the blood. Imagine if every time you went to the john, it was as if you were unloading a heap of razor blades. That’s what I mean when I say that this illness is a torment of the flesh.
How you’d laugh if I told you that I’ve read and reread your capillary adventures on my sickbed. Scholastique and the Quest to Tame Her Unruly Locks, I thought. Oh, I laughed. I laughed so hard. But laughing when you’re sick, especially with this illness, is a bad idea. It only makes the pain worse.
And every so often, as I lay there in bed, shivering with fever, suddenly my father appears. Yes, yes, my father. He looks just as he always does in my memory. He’s heavyset, dark-skinned, with slightly pigeon-toed feet and, above all, those laughing eyes of his that defy everyone, especially the colonist. I don’t need to tell him about the regret that’s suffocating me. I think my face must be eloquent enough. He takes my left hand, caresses its open palm — is he singing a lullaby? He tells me it’s going to be okay, that I have to regain my strength, to write, to write whatever I want about him, that I should feel free to do as I see fit, because, and he ends with this, you don’t make literature from regrets. Is it really my father who’s speaking to me as I open my eyes wide in the darkness, wondering if this isn’t just a dream, the vapor of a dream? No, my dear Scholastique, it’s really Papa who’s speaking to me, he's here in the flesh, seated to my left, on the chair that happened to be there. He’s wearing a wig. It falls to his shoulders and hides part of his round face. I remain speechless, open-mouthed. Then he tells me something that I can clearly remember him saying often, when he was alive, on the subject of wigs and other artificial hair: “It’s the hair of the dead.” Now that he’s dead, my father can wear wigs.
It's strange, how much I look like him.
I myself wore dreadlocks for many years. Wore them like a real lion’s mane, an untamable lion. Then one day, feeling lower than low — because my life is nothing if not an emotional rollercoaster — I went to an afro salon in Geneva Cornavin, underneath the train station, you can’t miss it, with all their posters, you know, the models sporting the different looks, Congolese rumba in the background, the buzz of electric clippers, the laughter that erupts in the middle of a heated argument about football, the smell of the alcohol used to disinfect after each client, and the mirrors, so many mirrors.
The hairdressers looked shocked when I told them I wanted to cut it all off. One of them even told me: “Eh my brother, how’s this, you want to chop off such fine dreadlocks? You know how many people would love to have yours?” Annoyed, I grabbed a pair of scissors lying nearby and started to cut them myself, one handful of dreadlocks after another, as the group of stunned hairdressers looked on. “Now look,” I said, pointing to my head, “this is what I came here for.” One of them — in fact, the same guy who had tried to thwart me — spun a chair around and invited me to sit. A little while later, when I sent my mother my first bald-headed selfie, she responded with a text: “Praise God!” followed by a big red emoji heart. I had delivered her from the shame of having a son who goes bumming around in dreadlocks. An intellectual!
I bought an e-book version of your novel Un si beau diplôme, which I’ve started reading. But the pain of the illness hasn’t let me get very far. I must say that you are gorgeous in the photo on the book’s cover. What elegance!
Well, my dear Scholastique, we’re coming to the end of this exchange. Let’s hope it continues, in one way or another. Now, as I get ready for bed, I’m listening to the latest news on the radio, and it’s not sounding good… after Ukraine, now it’s Taiwan’s turn; after Russia, now China. In Africa, Russia and China are driving France into a corner, if not off the continent. But you should’ve seen it, the last time Macron was in Cameroon. Did he ever take a dip in that crowd! He was practically drowning in it. The songs, the drums, the balafons and all the ululations you can imagine, just like in the old days, in the era of the grand civilizing mission, all so that Papa Biya, our dear president, could receive his great-grandson Manu. A real eyesore, it was.
I’m feeling much better now, and I’ve got to make up for lost time. I’m preparing for the launch of the German translation of my novel, Confidences, Vertraulichkeiten, about Cameroon’s war of independence and its leader, Ruben Um Nyobè. The edition is very beautiful. The Germans, I’ve found, are excellent readers, and so I pray they’ll give this book as warm a welcome as they did for my first novel translated into their language.
I’ll miss your voice and your accent, your social workerly advice, your memory-stories, words to say the unspeakable, words, words, your words that I feel so at home in, since we have this in common, I believe, the sweet perfume of exile.
A warm hug,
Maxou
These letters were originally published in the Swiss magazine Le Temps. Elements of the text have also been adapted from Scholastique Mukusonga’s A Book of My Own, tr. Emma Ramadan, published by Isolarii.
✺ Published in “Issue 16: Spies” of The Dial
