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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 [19], (3) Lines: 19 to 4 ——— -3.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [19], (3) tierno monénembo A Fistful of Groundnuts The child without memory will never have solid crap. Peuhl proverb In vain do I crisscross cities, fade into the dark night; the hut is always tracking me, austere and disheveled in its dress of rusty straw, like an old ghost worn down by resentment. . . . That’s good; for the first time in a quarter century, I’m going to open my eyes, look straight at it, and reply, “Yes, it’s really me.” No, I’m not going to try to sidestep the issue or try to run away as in the past. I must lower my guard, learn again how to go toward it, without omitting the misfortune, or repressing anything. Now I know I’m destined for this — in spite of the ravages of time, destined to be ensnared by it again like the ill-favored Idja Bomboli, who ran for seven years to elude her jailers and was caught by the nose as soon as, unwitting, she turned around to look. Behind, over there, the hut! It’s surly, unsettling, domineering, and spectral, and not even as plump as I used to think. Actually more like a strange play of lights and shadows that makes the islands swirl and stuns the memory. I can clearly see the bamboo fence and the low wall of banco1 hurriedly whitewashed with lime, but no matter what I do, they are crowded in between an anthill from the Sahel and a long Arizona 1. Banco: a material made from a type of clay and used to build walls. 19 monénembo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 [20], (4) Lines: 45 ——— 3.0pt P ——— Normal P PgEnds: T [20], (4) canyon. Farther away is the white line of fog that moves forward and dissolves everything: the quetzals and the dreams, the hammadas2 of the Chech3 as well as the ancient screes of the Forez.4 The first true image — perhaps even the last one — the only one in any case that is not affected by the chaos, that defies the giddiness so that it appears to me like a new birth, is of me, handsome and warm. Me, as a young man, having just reached the age of rebellion, the age when we think our legs are two royal scepters. I’m seated on the okoume wood stool. In front of me, Néné Mbo. She is spinning and muttering trivial words, bittersweet words spouted in one breath that characterize grandmothers more accurately than wrinkles do. So there I am seated on the okoume wood stool, but I’m not listening to her. I’m cracking my toes while my eyes are turned toward the jar, the prayer rug, the arabesques of the little earthen bed, the boards of the loft floor smeared with soot. Then, just like that, I tell her, “This time, that’s it, I’m going to see the world.” And she goes on spinning, not answering, maybe because she didn’t hear me. One day after I had forgotten all about it, she spoke as if addressing someone else: “The monkey may try to leap, but he’ll never be rid of the tree.” Confident as any twenty-year-old, with a wave of the hand, I filed this proverb away with the hundreds she had recited to me, in the time it takes to chew a kola nut, just for the flavor of the fruit I thought, or simply to tease her, bitter words being so dear to our clan. Since then, without my noticing it, a lot of water has flowed under bridges while I was scraping my kneecaps on railroad ties. Where was my head? Only now do I understand what the proverb meant, this pedagogical shortcut typical of our part of the country, that was supposed to instruct me on 2. Hammadas: Saharan desert. 3. Chech: region in the Sahara. 4. Forez: region in central France. 20 A Fistful of Groundnuts 1 2 3 4 5 6...

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